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The tea bag smells like other Stash desert teas do, with a twist: it melds that now familiar old yogurt raisin smell with carpet. Clean carpet, but still . . . carpet. What happens when you drop the bag into water? The carpet is wet now. The carpet is wet.
I didn’t really want to finish this. It is not good on the tongue; it tastes like dried out raisins. Sunmaid. But, bafflingly, the caramel aftertaste is pretty true and the smell in the cup is very true. Why it smells weird from further away is a mystery. Why this made it to market is a bigger mystery; it’s gag-worthy.

It’s such a shame this was a limited edition. Visually, it’s very pretty. It has little pink flowers. Dry, it has that sweet vegetal smell green oolongs so often do. In steam, it opens up to something more robust, but still leafy. It is a weird buttercup yellow, but other than that, a nice cup. It tastes like a green to my tongue, specifically gunpowder, due to the lychee sweetening it up. There is only a distinct lychee note after the tea has faded from the tongue; it’s otherwise a pure, honey-like sweetness, in the liquor and in the steam. The ginger is not terribly assertive. It makes the brew slightly spicy, enough to make it less one-note but not enough to really shout ‘ginger.’ I normally am big on ginger but given how delicate the lychee flavor is, I am glad it’s balanced to favor the lychee. The flavor profile would make a ridiculously nice spicy oriental perfume. Its only downside is that it is not particularly grand on the resteep; the lychee does not return.

This smells like faintly spicy lemons. Also, it consists mainly of cubes. I deeply desired to eat a cube. I fished out a small one and bit down. Oh. My. God. It took all of my willpower not to continue eating the cube. Steeping, it smells precisely like a freshly opened bag of Haribo ‘Fruit Salad’ gummies. Let me be clear: this is not tea. It is barely even a tisane. I didn’t try to appreciate it as any of those, but instead as hot citrus candy juice, and in that category, it could have be stunning. But, it isn’t. This stuff smells so good and tastes so good as dried cubes, but brewed, it’s. . . lackluster. I can’t tell if it needs to have bigger deeper citrus notes or more sugar, but as it stands, it’s reminiscent of lemonade left in the sun. It isn’t transcendent. It should have been. I was worried the minute I poured it- it was so pale. Successive cups, the product of longer steeping in less water, were better, suggesting this would benefit from being boiled twenty minutes in a small volume of water. I would try this again if I got my hands on another sample. It’s got probable merit.

The particular bag of this I brewed from spent a not-insignificant amount of time in a hardhat. While that probably didn’t add to the flavor, it sure did add to the feeling. The bag resisted opening like some loving god was doing its best to help me. I fought it, exercising my right to screw up royally, and won. My prize was the definite odor of dentist toothpaste, so strong and true I felt the grit in my mouth and winced. The steam smelled better; had the heat burnt off the dentist toothpaste? I detected a hint of creamy vanilla in the steam, but was hesitant to believe it.
In the end, it left me confused. The leaf smelled horrible and brewed a particularly unappealing hue of yellow. And yet, it only tasted of mint and a non-descript fattiness that I suppose is meant to be vanilla. It reminds me of when you eat an avocado, that smooth not-quite-buttery flavor left in your mouth after you swallow. Butter’s isomer? Unpinpointable. Slightly plasticy, but I wouldn’t notice if I weren’t drinking out of porcelain. Buttermint hurtles towards you like a runaway train and dissolves into mist. It’s kind of nice- after the first few seconds of preparation.

You know those brownies with the sprinkles and tarry fudge on top that everyone remembers as good only because nostalgia clouds their memories? Yeah, this smells exactly like that in the bag. A bad omen. It smells sort of less like late 90s after school playdates as steam. And the color is pretty. This is unfortunately the nicest thing I can say about this teabag.
By the end of brewing, this stuff smelled passably like hot cocoa mix, and I was expecting it to be alright, like I wouldn’t grimace if someone handed me a whole box.
It ain’t alright. There’s a muddy black tea taste at the front of the tongue, which a smear of chalky chocolate rapidly paints over. I don’t know how this is supposed to taste like white chocolate whatsoever; there’s none of that creamy sweetness. There’s a walnut ghost again, which I now think is the cocoa husk’s huskiness. The aftertaste is of coffee.
It is not what I want out of tea, or cocoa, or coffee. It’s a sadder hallway for the walnut ghost to haunt and nothing better at all.

As I dug around a box of tea baggies looking specifically for this, the tea multiple people told me approximates poison, it occurred to me that wasn’t something I should be doing, probably. I read the ingredients list once I found it. This will be bad, I agreed. Went downstairs, ripped open the packet. Initially I recoiled, because it smells at first blast like dentist toothpaste. But then I began huffing it frantically. Because do you know what it smells like? Cheap potpourri, my guilty pleasure. I might be the freak that likes this, I thought. But, I worried, because the steam smelled like nothing but boring old mint. I was right to be concerned; drinking it crushed me.
Who is having such moody Christmas Eves, I wonder? I asked myself. This tastes like going to sleep knowing you’ll be visiting your parents who both have dementia in the home and eating dry turkey with boxed gravy off of a plastic tray in what passes for a ‘festively decorated’ nursing home dining room. The cinnamon is felt more than tasted. The mint exists, but it’s scarcely bringing to mind snow flurries. There is an aftertaste of lemon and grass. I don’t think those are even in there. The lemon might be; I know there’s an orange. It is a liar. The grass was not invited. Can’t say I recommend a tea that made me sad about my grandmother.

A friend gave me this deliberately because it was probably bad. And so, with some trepidation, I opened this bag. The scent that spilled out was the familiar, bitter, woody odor of rooibos, but an undercurrent of something else ran below it, like a snake in the grass. Something unpleasant; my nose wrinkled involuntarily. Upon getting a better whiff of the bag, I placed the scent: that of a yogurt covered raisin, one that has spent a week mummifying between two couch cushions. Upon first pour I peered apprehensively into the cup and discovered the initial release of color produced a shade known only to man as dishwater. Fortunately, swishing it around turned the contents the usual red of rooibos. I sniffed it again. It then smelled like cooked raspberries. I didn’t recall then if there were raspberries in this. Thankfully, there are, and this was supposed to happen.
Penance was the name of the game, so I gave it a full five minute steep.
A long steep deepened the color, and the chocolate came through in the aroma. It smells like cheap Valentine’s day chocolate, the kind that smells like the reality of Valentine’s day, which is to say, capitalism and February. I gave it a minute to cool, and had a sip.
I tasted nothing but a distant walnut. After a moment, this strengthened on the tongue to a much less offensive chocolate than the smell suggested. Despite the strong, cloying raspberry that overwhelms most of the other notes in the steam, it scarcely comes through in the drink, except when it does because somehow separate sips of this tea taste slightly different. This is fine in say, a stir fry, where what lands on your fork may vary. It is not how liquids are supposed to work. It is how this liquid works. Faint walnut, chocolate, maybe berry. Some degree of berry. No guarantees.
It isn’t killing me. Perplexing, but ultimately drinkable and inoffensive. Unless inhaled; at one point I coughed while having a drink and managed to breathe some in, and spent a solid five minutes thereafter sputtering.