This blend has occupied my curiosity for many months, especially given that:
1. I like chai in general;
2. I've tried a couple other "tealess" chais with mixed results, and
3. The reviews on this have been all over the place, to say the least. For the statistically inclined: boost the sample size by a hundred with the same distributions, and the standard deviations here still would be crazy.

All right, enough of being a math geek! Hesitant to pay full price for a whole box (even though it ain't much, on sale), I begged some off a co-worker who loves it and drinks it almost daily. "Bengal Spice" is not quite liquid cinnamon, but that ingredient does dominate all the others resoundingly. I've used the pro-wrestling analogy somewhere before but it applies nicely with this tea. In the battle royale of ingredients, cinnamon is the full-grown bear, grappling mere men. The cardamom and cloves whimper low in separate corners after taking their thrashing, but can be seen and heard. Meanwhile, ginger was nowhere to be found, present but unaccounted for, perhaps lying unconscious in shadows on the ringside floor, while the cinnamon bear stomps the mat and roars skyward amid-ring. This is true for dry-bag and wet-bag aromas, as well as taste. All are consistent in intensity and character, to a degree I've seldom experienced in herbal or blended teas. Fortunately the cinnamon seems to be good-quality, very warming in the mouth and in aftertaste, and has just enough of two other components still detectable to keep it from being boring.

Since I like cinnamon and strong flavor, and this tea becomes somewhat creamy and almost candy-like when sweetened, it gets a good rating—in the "caffeine-free chai" class of herbals, slightly higher than the more complex but weaker-flavored Pukka "Vanilla Chai". Still, I can see why some are turned off by its nearly one-dimensional nature and assign a Jackson or smaller on the RateTea star bar.

Add your own review

Login or Sign Up to comment on this review.