The Good: Some delightful flavors that taste exactly like what they are supposed to,Nothing bad in them!
The Bad: Almost all are sour or bland cold, No caffeine! Wasteful packaging
The Basics: With five flavor options, most of them good (all made better with sugar and served piping hot) the Herbal Sampler is a fair tea collection for lovers of weaker teas.
"Simple Repack Theatre" is a term I tend to use on my gaming card reviews when I am reviewing a grouping of older materials that have been repackaged with something new to try to sell the old stock off. I see no reason not to apply the same standard to my food reviews. Sure, samplers are slightly different, but they are essentially the same thing: the "Greatest Hits" of the food world.
Having previously reviewed the Celestial Seasonings Fruit Sampler under this aegis, as I sped through many other tea reviews, I thought it might be good to pick up a package of Celestial Seasonings's Herb Sampler. Like the Fruit Sampler, this is a review of the body of its own as a collection of five individual teas. They say variety is the spice of life and with five different - or slightly different as two are essentially chamomile teas - herbal teas, the Herbal Sampler provides a decent selection of Celestial Seasonings herbal and fruit teas.
Basics
The Herb Tea Sampler is a collection of five teas from Celestial Seasonings: Wild Berry Zinger, Lemon Zinger, Chamomile, Peppermint and Sleepytime. They are herb teas that have no caffeine because all of the all natural herbs in them are naturally devoid of caffeine. The Herb Tea Sampler separates the flavors by wax/plastic coated packages that have four each of the Celestial Seasoning's standard stringless tea bags. They are individual tea bags in these packs, not the standard pairs. When I make pots of tea, I tend to use two bags, which means the Herb Tea Sampler gives me only two pots of each. The Herb Tea Sampler has twenty tea bags total; four of each of the five flavors.
The teas are all herbal teas, though the Zingers are fruit teas, though they are made of herbs.
Ease Of Preparation
All five teas in the Herb Tea Sampler are teas, which means preparation ridiculously easy. There is little science to the preparation of teas like this and anyone intimidated by making tea ought to be very worried; you don't get much easier tasks in the kitchen than making a pot of tea! A single tea bag will make the standard 8 oz. coffee mug worth of tea, though reusing the tea bags yields a rather weak brew. All five flavors yielded a tea that is at best 1/2 strong when the tea bags are reused. The Herb Tea Sampler teas are not ideal for reusing a second time! I tend to make my tea using a 32 oz. steeping tea pot and that works well, though it is difficult to get a satisfying second pot out of the bags.
To prepare these teas, simply boil some water, and pour it over the tea bags in a cup, mug or steeping pot. Each tea is recommended to take four to six minutes to steep and after a couple cups and pots, I've found that with truly boiling water, the teas generally take all six minutes and letting it steep longer strangely does not change the results. Letting the tea steep more than six minutes does not net any additional flavor, nor does it denature the flavor of the tea.
When visiting the Celestial Seasonings plant in Boulder, Colorado and taking the free tour there, I remember distinctly the tour guide warning us all that with the Zinger teas milk cannot be added. If you add milk to a Zinger tea, the tea curdles the milk, I'm fairly sure it was because of the citric acid in the tea. The problem is, I'm not positive that's the reason (I am sure of the warning and the result of adding milk to Zinger teas), but I seem to recall that citric acid was to blame. As a result of a good faith belief that the people who produce this product know what they are talking about, none of my sampling of the Herb Tea Sampler teas with Zinger in the title involved adding milk to them.
Taste
Sleepytime smells like ricewater and it tastes like it, too. From the moment one pours boiling water on the tea bags, the scent of rice will diffuse through the kitchen/dining space. The Sleepytime tea has a surprisingly strong aroma given how weak the tea is. The tea tastes like rice but with a little bit of something else in it. Sleepytime is rice water with a twist of lemon. There's no better way to describe it. If you like rice and lemon and like tea, Sleepytime is for you! It's not a strong flavor, it's not something delicious beyond all compare, but it is all right. To give one an idea on the lack of flavor, adding anything to Sleepytime tea overwhelms it. Adding sugar takes any bite out of the lemon flavor and sweetens the tea. Sugar tends to overwhelm the flavor of the rice and lemon. The same thing with honey. Even milk overwhelms the chamomile flavor of the tea.
Wild Berry Zinger is only vaguely fruity with much of the tart qualities to the blueberries, cherries, raspberries and strawberries that seem to make it up. Instead of tasting fruity and intriguing, it is mostly just sour and without sugar, this is not the most pleasant tea. Indeed, several Celestial Seasonings fruit teas taste like what they claim to be and/or more like fruit juice than tea. This is not the case with Wild Berry Zinger. It does not taste like juice, despite the undefined fruity quality to it. Instead, it tastes like tea and something sour in the most dismal way. Unfortunately, hot it is sour with a side of unspecified fruit, but this comes in no way close to being some hot fruit punch.
Chamomile, like the Sleepytime, smells and tastes like ricewater. This is liquid rice. There's no better way to describe it. If you like rice and like tea, Chamomile is for you! It's not a strong flavor, it's not something delicious beyond all compare, but it is all right. To give one an idea on the lack of flavor, adding anything to Chamomile tea overwhelms it.
Lemon Zinger impressed me with the first sip. While the aroma is faintly citrusy, it does not adequately prepare the tea drinker for the lemon flavor. What aroma there was was vaguely fruity, not even smelling much like tea. I was concerned that this meant it would taste weak, but with my first sip, I was pleasantly surprised. Lemon Zinger tastes like lemons warmed in the sun with a little sprinkle of sugar on them. Even without sugar, the Lemon Zinger is tangy, but not so tart as to be unpleasant. Instead, the dominant flavor truly is that of lemons, without the sour and nastiness usually associated with lemons. Actually, the precise flavor of Lemon Zinger is that of a Lemonhead candies after the initial sour has dissipated. It is exactly that precise, almost manufactured lemon flavor that one might expect from a product as opposed to an actual lemon.
Peppermint tastes like peppermint, which is a plus. Hot and without sugar, Peppermint has a subtle, light minty flavor that brings that special numbness to the tongue that mint is known to do. It also has a slight dull aftertaste of herbs and a standard tea flavor. With a single teaspoon of sugar in the mug, this tastes like the aftertaste of, well, a peppermint candy. It's like Candy Cane Lane embodies the candy cane, the peppermint candy and Peppermint represents the aftertaste, the memory seconds later of a peppermint on the tongue. Even more accurately, Peppermint tastes like tea that has been stirred up with a candy cane and imbued with a minty taste as a result.
All of these teas are enhanced by the addition of even a little sugar. Any sourness - especially with the Lemon Zinger and Wild Berry Zinger - is seriously cut with even a little sugar.
Nutrition
These teas are primarily made of varying proportions of Chamomile or peppermint or hibiscus, rosehips, and chicory. Ironically, most of the primary fruits for the fruit flavors that the teas are named for tend to fall near the bottom of the ingredients lists. All of the Herb Tea Sampler teas are naturally caffeine-free.
Were it not for the sugar I add whenever I make pots of teas from the Herb Tea Sampler, these teas would be devoid of any nutritional value. They contains no calories, fat, sodium, carbohydrates or protein. Fortunately they have some taste, even if they lack caffeine!
Storage/Clean-up
The Herb Tea Sampler teas are easy to clean up after - the tea bags may be disposed in the garbage, or composted if you have a good garden and/or compost pile. The teas are generally fairly light, though they will stain, if one left them on fabric, but mugs that hold the tea rinse clean. Spills ought to be cleaned up quickly to prevent these tea from staining fabrics, though that's a pretty good general rule not just limited to the Herb Tea Sampler teas.
Because of the inner packaging of the Herb Tea Sampler teas, less care is needed before the package is opened to keep the box in a cool dry place, but once the individual pouches holding each flavor are opened, it is very important to keep them sealed away from moisture as there is no easy to close the inconvenient little packs.
Overall
Celestial Seasonings knows how to make teas and the Herb Tea Sampler teas are basically hot herbal beverages. They are generally good, but all of them require sugar to reach their full potential and flavor. Those who do not like adding sweetener to their teas might have a problem with that. I, for one, do not. So, I'm pretty happy to sweeten and enjoy the variety of herbal teas, despite some of them being fairly weak. This pack is ideal for those stocking a house for company when they don't know what kind of herbal teas their guests might enjoy.
For other Celestial Seasonings tea reviews, please visit my reviews of:
Raspberry Gardens
Fruit Sampler
Victorian Earl Grey
6/10
For other food and drink reviews, please visit my index page on the subject by clicking here!
© 2011, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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