The Good: Wonderful taste, Nothing detrimental in the nutrition department, Caffeinated
The Bad: A LOT of superfluous papers and strings.
The Basics: Twinings has a winner on its hands with Pumpkin Spice Chai, which may be a new favorite autumn tea for anyone!
My wife recently gifted me with several new (to me) flavors of tea and I have, honestly, been enjoying the opportunity to taste all sorts of new teas and review them. Twinings has not always enjoyed the content of my reviews and that is understandable. Compared to Celestial Seasonings, many of the Twinings teas are dominated by the black tea leaves in the tea as opposed to the flavors they attempt to embody. But that is not one of the weaknesses of Twinings Pumpkin Spice Chai tea. This tea lives up!
One of the immediate side notes I must make is this. Twinings Pumpkin Spice Chai tea is exactly what its name states: pumpkin spice. This tea is designed to embody the flavor of pumpkin spices, not pumpkin itself. In that way, the Twinings Pumpkin Spice Chai tea lives up for consumers.
Basics
Pumpkin Spice Chai Tea is a black tea from Twinings of London. Black tea is made from mature tea leaves that are dried on the tea plant. Twinings recently released its Pumpkin Spice Chai tea and it is still finding its way to the marketplace (I know some of my local stores do not yet carry it).
Pumpkin Spice Chai comes in Twinings' standard tea bags, which are individually paper wrapped and have a five inch string. The string is attached to a paper tab that is independent of the wax paper wrapper. The string attaches to the tea bag through a knot, so there is no chance of metallic taste from a staple with this flavor! A box of Pumpkin Spice Chai tea comes with 20 individual paper-wrapped tea bags. After years of drinking only Celestial Seasonings' tea, this seems remarkably wasteful now to have so much waste as far as paper and strings.
Ease Of Preparation
As a black tea, Pumpkin Spice Chai is ridiculously easy to prepare. A single tea bag will make the standard 8 oz. coffee mug worth of tea and could be reused and make a second cup of Pumpkin Spice Chai at about half strength. 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 about 1/2 strength.
To prepare Pumpkin Spice Chai tea, bring a pot of water to a boil and pour it over the tea bags. For Pumpkin Spice Chai, roaring boil is just fine! This tea takes four to six minutes to steep according to the directions. In my experience, it gets no stronger after six minutes, but because it is such a rich tea, most consumers will likely to be happy with it at the four minute mark.
Taste
Twinings Pumpkin Spice Chai Tea smells richly of ginger. The aroma is inviting and opens the nose up and gets the mouth watering. The scent of this tea is distinctive for autumn in the Northeast and I found that especially comforting.
Tasting the tea, consumers are likely to be very well pleased. The black tea taste that one might expect from a Twinings tea is almost instantly overrun on the tongue by the dry, full taste of cloves and ginger. The dry spiced flavor is replaced after about three seconds by the flavors of cinnamon and nutmeg. The tea is rich and flavorful and, while hot, has the tastes of the spices far more than a bland, black tea taste.
With sugar, the flavor of the cinnamon comes out faster. As the tea cools, it becomes unfortunately dry. Only as the tea cools do the spiced flavors become sublimated to the basic tea flavor. That only encourages you to drink the tea while it is piping hot!
Nutrition
The ingredients in this tea are more complex than most Twinings teas. It is primarily made up of : Black Tea, Natural Chai and Cinnamon & Ginger Flavours with other natural flavours. There are actual spices, but the flavors of real spices are added before the spices themselves. There is nothing that cannot be pronounced in this tea.
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, or protein. There is caffeine, but how it relates to other beverages remains a mystery; Twinings does not put a scale on their boxes of tea. This tea is rather caffeinated, though and it will wake the drinker up.
Storage/Clean-up
Pumpkin Spice Chai 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 and string, which is just a tedious extra step. The tea itself will stain a mug a faint brown if it is left there for days on end, but otherwise may be cleaned up easily by rinsing out the vessel.
Pumpkin Spice Chai is a medium dark tea and as a result, it will stain any light fabrics it comes in contact with. 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
Twinings Premium Pumpkin Spice Chai Tea is a flavorful tea that embodies well the promised flavor. This should be a new autumn favorite for anyone who loves tea!
For other Twinings teas reviewed by me, please check out:
Pure Mint Premium Black Tea
Earl Grey
Irish Breakfast
8/10
For other tea reviews, please visit my index page for a complete list!
© 2011 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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