A vendor who had sent me Ceylon tea to try in the past, Kaley Tea, recently sent a Christmas tea blend version to try. So nice! Earlier in this blog history I would experiment with making Christmas blends every year; it seemed a good time to make an exception from only drinking plain teas, and to experiment.
This says that it contains tea, cardamom, and cloves, so it's a simplified variation of masala chai. Masala chai is a good start for a Christmas blend; from there people could add fruit, like orange peel, or cacao, or pine needles, but keeping it quite limited could work well too. It might allow the tea to play more of a role, where if you mix enough things in it wouldn't matter what the tea is.
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drying fruit and peels for use in a Christmas blend (covered here) |
It's nice to feel like I'm observing Christmas too. It's a little early for that, since it's around Halloween time, but holiday experiences never match up here anyway. It might not be so hot in another two months but otherwise the weather in Bangkok is generally consistent year-round, beyond when it rains more.
I'm brewing this using their recommendations, sort of. They suggest using a teaspoon to make a cup, brewing that for 3 minutes, with an option to brew it a second time. I brewed more than that, I think, and for longer, so maybe this will be a little strong. Ordinarily I'm opposed to diluting tea, adding water, no matter what happens, but I could always make an exception if I've screwed this up.
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it's definitely less monochromatic in person; I think shading inside the infuser caused that |
Review:
Infusion strength isn't bad, maybe just a touch strong. It wouldn't be unusual for people to add milk and sugar to this, not to cut overwhelming astringency, since this is mild enough, but just to play up the dessert experience feel, or how masala chai is usually made and enjoyed. I could drink some and then adjust it, to review it both ways.
The spice balance is good. Cardamom and clove alone really work, and it seems like this is pretty good tea matching with those. The flavor input of all three is reasonably balanced; it would be easy for spices to overtake the tea range, but they all show through. It's pleasant like this, but the extra infusion strength pushes it a little far, off of being sweet, light, complex, and approachable, as the softest and sweetest black teas are. The tea input seems pretty good but I'll stop short of adding a flavor list here. Malt doesn't show through, so it's not like an Assam, and maybe some of the mineral base that is distinctive in Ceylon is giving this good balance.
The general effect is very clean; there is no negative contribution of any aspect. Not very poetic a description, right, compared to bringing up some childhood image of people around a fireplace, drinking tea and eating gingerbread Christmas cookies, or whatever else? This would go really well with cookies; that's what is missing in the overall balance, a reason for drinking a clean and positive black tea with spice inputs.
I like the tea but it's not what I'm accustomed to, and this really would make a lot more sense in some sort of late fall or winter context. It probably would make a nice iced tea, but it's odd mentally switching channels like that, considering a radically different context. For drinking it plain maybe it would be better with food or those cookies. I'll try it with a little milk and honey and see how that works.
It's good with those added, probably better. I used skim milk, what I'm drinking right now; surely that's not optimum, but it's still nice. As with plain black tea all the flavors fall into a completely different balance when you add milk and sugar (or honey, also what I had most handy). Going even heavier on infusion strength and using more full cream milk than I added would probably be more optimum, to get the full effect of both inputs. I tried a second infusion brewed for longer (with the same leaves), this time using whole milk (my wife couldn't sleep at night knowing there are two cartons open at once), but of course the effect is better from the first round, the intensity.
One nice part about drinking it this way--adjusted--could be that people who don't drink tea might be more likely to like it. These particular spice flavors might appeal most to people with more developed food flavor background (in Thailand or in the West), but to me it's quite approachable and pleasant. For people familiar with this spicing range there would be no need to mess around with this recipe form, and aspects balance, but for others continuing on to add cacao and a fruit input might be good. Using an apple peeler to remove some outer rind off an orange might be a nice addition too, giving a touch of extra fruit edge. I don't see this as working well for coupling with some sort of alcohol input (which can come up as another Christmas theme), but people on that page may take that differently. A little cognac or brandy would definitely completely change this.
It works for evoking a Christmas feel, I think. It needs those cookies though, not just any one kind, whatever theme people tend to connect with their own expectations. My Mom would make a lot of kinds; we had large trays of many types around in the holiday season. This would be perfect with a kind we didn't make then, which we called whoopie pies, two soft chocolate cookies sandwiching a cream filling center. Maybe even better with gingerbread men; that would round out the typical set expectation of ginger being the other main input in a traditional masala chai (as I see it; for others black pepper or other things could be added).
This might be a good year for messing around with your own Christmas blend experience; either go out and buy one, or keep an eye out for spice inputs, like spearmint, cacao, or whatever else. There's still time to work out how adding pine needles to tea works for people in the US, which tree type needle inputs definitely won't poison you, and how drying or chopping the material changes infusion results. Making adjusted masala chai versions takes practice; you might need a couple of trial rounds to prepare something you can serve to others (all of which I've covered in this blog).
Many thanks to Kaley for sharing this, and an early happy holidays for all readers!
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