The Good: Good aroma, Good ingredients, Tastes fine
The Bad: Caffeine free, Proportionately expensive, Nothing extraordinary in taste.
The Basics: A good tea, Sweet & Spicy by Good Earth is average, but follows the trend of organic teas being more pricey than most.
As summer comes to an end, I am drinking even more tea than usual. I get sick of just drinking water, so I spice mine up with tea and that keeps me from melting as the heat increases. The last few days, I've been writing and sitting on a review of Good Earth's Sweet & Spicy caffeine free herbal tea.
Sweet & Spicy, by its name, falls into the "adjective tea" category where the name does not actually tell the consumer what to expect. But, in truth, this is a red tea (rooibos-based) which is a cinnamon-flavored tea which ironically does not have cinnamon as an ingredient.
Basics
Sweet & Spicy Tea is an herbal tea from Good Earth, a California-based tea company that seems to be trading on the whole organic movement. As an herbal tea, it is very easy for Sweet & Spicy to be caffeine free, as none of the ingredients naturally have caffeine (though it does make me wonder about the caffeinated version of this tea). Good Earth has its Sweet & Spicy tea available year round and it is one of the brand's staple teas. Good Earth Sweet & Spicy is my first experience with Good Earth tea and I was a little surprised to discover that the brand, which is trading on environmental and health responsibility, was more expensive and did not mimic Celestial Seasonings' environmentally respectful packaging.
Sweet & Spicy comes in Good Earth' standard tea bags, which are individually wax paper wrapped and have a five inch string. The string is attached to a paper tab, but the teabag slides uninhibited out of the foil-lined package when one tears the top open. A box of Sweet & Spicy tea comes with only 18 individual wax paper-wrapped tea bags. This seems remarkably wasteful to have so much waste as far as paper, string and staples, especially for a company that is trying to appeal to environmentalists and organic health food connoisseurs.
Ease Of Preparation
As an herbal tea, Sweet & Spicy is ridiculously easy to prepare. A single tea bag will make the standard 8 oz. coffee mug worth of tea and may be reused and make a second cup of Sweet & Spicy with significant loss of flavor. The second cup often comes out only about 1/2 as strong as the first, provided the first steeping was not over the recommended time. I tend to make my tea using a 32 oz. steeping tea pot and that works well, though in this method, the second brewing is - at best - about 1/2 strength, making it less than ideal for the second brewing.
To prepare Sweet & Spicy tea, bring a pot of water to a boil and pour it over the tea bags. This tea takes only three to four minutes to steep according to the directions. In my experience, it gets no stronger after five minutes and is a fairly mild tea regardless.
Taste
Having had several rooibos-based teas, the first thing that struck me about Sweet & Spicy was that it smells richly of cinnamon. The aroma that wafts out of the tea cup or mug is strong, distinctive and clearly cinnamon, despite the fact that there is no cinnamon in this beverage.
The aroma also prepares the consumer for a taste that is rich, which the drink does not deliver on very well. Instead, this is a surprisingly mild tea. Served hot, it is spiced with a flavor very much like cinnamon, without the usual dry aftertaste of a cinnamon or rooibos tea. However, as the tea cools, it does become dry and develop an aftertaste which leaves the mouth dry. This is not much of a thirst-quenching tea as a result. It is also worth noting that on its own, it is not a particularly sweet drink.
With a teaspoon of sugar, Sweet & Spicy certainly lives up to its name and the best analogy I have is the taste of frosted carrot cake. The flavor of the sugar certainly overwhelms the richness of any of the spiced flavors. The sugar also nicely cuts the dry aftertaste. Discrete amounts of milk make the Sweet & Spicy into a delightful creamy tea beverage, but too much actually overwhelms this mild tea.
Cool or a second brewing results in a far more diluted and bland flavor. This is not an ideal tea for the teabag miser.
Nutrition
The ingredients to this tea are all organic or natural and are highlighted by: Organic red rooibos, organic spice blend (which, one supposes, could include a lot of cinnamon), and organic chicory root. There is nothing in this tea that cannot be pronounced.
In terms of nutrition, this tea is devoid of it. One 8 oz. mug of this tea provides nothing of nutritional value to the drinker. There are no calories (save what one adds from sugar, which I recommend), no fat, sodium, caffeine or protein. Even though I get a lot of caffeine, the lack of caffeine in this is a bit of a detraction for me. This tea is certified Kosher, but there is no notation on whether or not it is gluten-free.
Storage/Clean-up
Sweet & Spicy tea is very easy to clean up after, provided one does not get it on fabric. The tea bags may be disposed in the garbage, or composted if you have a good garden and/or compost pile. If composting, though, one must remove the paper tag, staple and string, which is just a tedious extra step. The tea itself will not stain mugs or the steeping kettle.
Sweet & Spicy is a rather light tea and as a result, it will stain any light fabrics it comes in contact with, but not darker ones. As a result, it is highly recommended that one not let it linger on anything they wish to protect and not have stained. It may be cleaned off if the spill is caught quickly, but if it lingers, it is not at all easy to wash out of clothes, linens or other fabrics.
Overall
Good Earth's Sweet & Spicy Herbal Tea is a more average than extraordinary organic herbal tea and the added expense (18 teabags for the price of most brands' 20 pack) is not entirely justified. My "recommend" comes more from the lack of detractions than a bounty of positive qualities.
For other teas reviewed by me, please check out:
Stash Double Bergamot Earl Grey
Bigelow Sweet Dreams
Celestial Seasonings Candy Cane Lane
5/10
For other drink reviews, please visit my index page!
© 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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