For a few years, Tazo and Bigelow, in particular, have gone on a bender of producing explicitly dessert-flavored blends, which doesn't bother me, even as it might annoy some tea purists. Hey, who doesn't like some yummy sweet treats after a good dinner? However, Bigelow may have overplayed its hand here and missed the mark with regard to advertised flavor experience. It's only because I liked the tea anyway (even if it didn't taste much like the name) that I didn't rate it below the big five-oh.

Let's start with the ingredients. This is an unusual roster, to say the least: black tea, rose hips, green tea, chamomile, chicory root, natural coconut and almond flavors, "other natural flavors", and licorice root. That's a lot of things nominally flavoring the black tea, but because green tea is also an ingredient, it's a "miscellaneous blend" under RateTea's rules, which are very clear about this. In case you were wondering...

So what does this unique assembly of components do? Smell and taste like chamomile-flavored black tea, for the most part. I suppose the coconut and maybe almond are detectable with effort, especially in aftertaste. Still, chamomile so dominates the other secondary ingredients, and almost overpowers what must be a fairly mild, unassuming black tea with only enough bitterness to say, "Hey, I do exist here." Rose hips and green tea are the second and third ingredients, and I'm just not detecting them. I don't necessarily expect to taste the last ingredient in a big blend—licorice, in this case—and indeed, I don't.

The wet-bag aroma was the only place I picked up on a floral/fruity element implied by the rose hips, but the more dominant wet scent puzzled me for a short bit until I figured it out: any of those freshly printed, large college textbooks with glossy paper, opened for the first time. That's a rather pleasant aroma to me, but not something I expected in a wet tea bag. At least the taste or in-cup smell isn't anything like this; most folks don't want to drink their mechanical-engineering problems.

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