24 days of tea.

While deciding what kind of an advent calendar we should have for Christmas 2020, I saw a tea advent calendar somewhere online and my boyfriend and I immediately decided we should get one. I checked with my local tea shop and am still trying to convince them to arrange one for next year, but since they didn’t offer the option this year, I went searching online.

What I found was quite promising: I came across Teapigs, a UK company offering a really cute cardboard advent calendar. They also passed my sustainability check with their efforts towards plastic free, recyclable packaging and their apparently responsible ethical schemes (see their sustainability and ethical pages here).

So, we bought ourselves a tea advent calendar and I figured it deserved a review (not sponsored). Each window hid a triangular tea bag or a “tea temple” as the company calls them, and I was glad to notice that the tea inside was proper loose leaf tea with large chunks and clearly identifiable contents. Since I’m a stickler for tea, I’m always annoyed with bad, powdery teas in teabags and I also liked that the teabags were made of corn starch and thus biodegradable.

Now, on to the tea review: I quite liked the variety of the selection and I think it was a good mix of green, black, herbal and fruit teas. However, since I’m not a big fan of mint, I could’ve done with less mint, as there were a total of 3 teas with mint in 24 days. I also would’ve preferred more green tea, but at the same time it was nice to try out teas we otherwise wouldn’t have.

24 days of tea

Each tea came with a symbolic image on the cover of the teabag wrapping and an explanation about the tea on the back, as well as a random fun fact or witticism on the inside of the cardboard calendar window. The whole presentation was really nice and the best part was that having a tea advent calendar forced us to take 10 minutes out of our day and sit down together with a fresh cup of tea no matter how busy we were.

Here are my favourites that I might order from Teapigs again in the future:

• Up beet energy tea: a surprisingly amazing combination of beetroot, ginger, carrot, green tea and hibiscus.
• Sleepy tea with lavender: a super tasty apple, lavender and chamomile tea, which was soothing, but luckily didn’t make me feel sleepy.
• Happy uplifting tea with lemon balm: a beautiful blend of turmeric, apple, lemon balm, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, sweet blackberry leaves, orange and lemon peel, cloves, allspice and marigold flowers.
• Honeybush and rooibos tea.

There were a couple of cold brews as well, which were good, but I don’t really consider them teas. For me a tea is supposed to be a warm, soothing drink and a cold brew just doesn’t feel right in winter. My boyfriend really liked the apple and cucumber one though.

Both of us rather hated the one with liquorice and peppermint, but we drank it anyway, so even that one wasn’t that bad. The popcorn green tea with toasted rice was super interesting, but actually tasted like greasy popcorn water, so that wasn’t the best either.

One surprising thing was that on the last day, the 24th, we didn’t get a Christmas tea as we had expected, but rather an ordinary black tea, but we got 2 teabags instead of one. It was a great black tea though, so I was OK with that. 🙂

How about you? Do you usually have an advent calendar in the days leading up to Christmas?