Here's another in Celestial's fairly recent run of new black-tea blends. For a mass-marketed brand commonly available in retail stores, this rendition holds its own, but better quality can be had.

The dry aroma (especially when opening the sack or pouch in which the bags are packaged) may be the best part. This is evenly balanced between the base tea (of unstated origin), bergamot and vanilla. However, the brewed cup curiously lacks much aroma, and is far fainter than the dry-bag scent. The wet-bag aroma smells more like highly diluted Lysol floor cleaner. So across the olfactory timeline, one goes from excellent to very poor. Fortunately the last step holds little weight in the ratings, since people generally don't buy tea to sniff the wet bag.

Taste-wise, however, it's a pretty good tea, more of a vanilla black tea with a hint of bergamot...smooth and naturally a little sweet. This makes the sweetened version very much so, which I like, but the overall flavor could use a couple more notches on the intensity meter. Another oddity I encountered here is that the flavor was strongest in the aftertaste, with a little more of the bergamot coming through. Overall, this is a relatively inexpensive way to get a decent-quality EGC on short notice, when in the store. Just don't breathe through the wet bag. ;-)

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