Thank you Jenna for sharing this one with me.

I thought this was impressive, a few steps up in quality from Trader Joe's other teas. The tea bag smells strongly of cinnamon, but it's a very natural, organic-smelling cinnamon, like real cinnamon sticks, not like most flavored teas. The orange and clove is only a hint, I think the clove is a bit more evident and I barely notice the orange at all.

The base tea is bold and also strikes me as high-quality. It has a full body and rich, malty tones. I don't know what kind of tea it is but it tastes a lot like a good Assam. It holds its own against the cinnamon flavoring, which is strong but never overwhelming.

I really enjoyed this one, which was surprising because I'm not normally a big fan of cinnamon-flavored teas. I'm excited about Trader Joe's newer line of teas--for several years now I've lamented how their teas have really lagged behind in quality, relative to the quality of the other products in their store. This is the first tea of theirs that seems to have broken into a new category in terms of quality. I'm excited about it and I'm hopeful that Trader Joe's will continue moving in the direction of high-quality artisan teas.

Hopefully they may even start carrying loose-leaf teas...I think it would be fitting with their advertised commitment to sustainability, and it would also fit within their practices of having products that are low-priced but high in quality, and carrying a lot of bulk products. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

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Comments:

Tchuggin' Okie wrote: on December 28th, 2018

I'm not certain, but their seasonal "Winter Wake Up" could be a flat-bagged version of this. The ingredients appear to be the same, the question being whether or not they use the same base tea and proportions of flavors. I just got some at a Dallas TJs a couple of weeks ago, and will review it shortly. Unlike you, however, I never had "Cinnamon Tempest" to be able to make a valid comparison.

Alex Zorach wrote: on December 31st, 2018

Thanks for the head-up!

This sort of thing is so annoying to me...you'd think companies would want to make it easier to figure out whether or not a particular blend or product was the same. Instead, you get inconsistent branding and naming schemes which just obfuscate the whole thing.

Add to that the fact that Trader Joe's lacks product pages for the majority of the teas they sell...all you get is an occasional, irregular blog post on one particular product or another, but it's spotty, and many of the items stocked in the stories regularly get no such coverage.

Overall, Trader Joe's seems like a well-managed company, but stuff like this really has me scratching my head. It's stuff that would take them minutes to do, i.e. create a page for each product, and would probably result in more people viewing their website and seeing exactly what THEY wanted them to see...instead of coverage on sites like RateTea and various blogs and other third-party sites.

RateTea benefits from it, as when companies don't publish information on their teas, people are more likely to come to our site as a reference, and I appreciate that. But from a business perspective, it's just stupid. I guess they're successful enough that they don't need to worry about it. It kind of blows my mind though, how many companies and brands operate like this...i.e. passing up an obvious opportunity to create a product page for each product that clears up potential questions customers might ask, even in cases where there is quite a lot of regular search traffic online about those products.

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