Magic Potions Sampler — Adagio Teas
Yesterday afternoon I was binge drinking the rather lovely Draught of Peace, which is a specialist blend made by Robert Pirlot for Adagio in their ‘Fandom’ blends range called Magic Potions.
I couldn’t really talk about this tea without mentioning the other blends in the set at the same time so this is a review of the Magic Potions sampler, with separate reviews attached for each of the teas. Doing this has given me a chance to revisit the other teas in the set as well – which I can honestly say has been a real pleasure.
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| Adagio UK's banner for Magic Potions |
I originally came across Adagio when I was searching for Harry Potter merchandise. You really can buy anything under the sun to do with the boy wizard these days, and tea is no exception.
On the US site, which I discovered first (which is absolutely amazing but the shipping costs are prohibitively expensive alas, otherwise I would be the owner of great quantities of Chestnut tea amongst other things) it seems everyone and their cat can create their own blend of tea under the ‘Fandom’ banner, and it’s worth checking out the site just to be amazed at people’s creativeness.
Apparently, there are currently 102,727 different blends available on this part of the site alone — of which, 70 of them are Harry Potter related — that’s $350 (almost £270) alone on 5 cup sampler tins without shipping costs!
Sadly, or maybe not considering the cost, most of these teas aren’t available on the UK site. They only sell the same 6 teas which make up the Magic Potions sampler as well as the sampler box itself, which is a shame because I’d like to try the 6 in the collection that aren’t included — surely that would make more sense — or even make up a second sampler of the other teas so we could try them all!
They do have tea collections relating to Doctor Who, Firefly, Game of Thrones, Sherlock, Teen Wolf and Welcome to Night Vale if any of those take your fancy, so I live in hope that one day they might expand the range further and give me more Harry Potter tea.
One of the things I really like about the US site which isn’t done on the UK one is that they indicate whether a tea is high in caffeine or not, which is really useful information if, like me, you suffer from insomnia and don’t want to have a blast of caffeine stopping you from sleeping. I generally tend to keep away from all black teas in the evening for this reason, but it is good to see at a glance whether it’s one you can drink or have to avoid.
All the teas in the Magic Potions sampler, with the exception of Felix Felicis which is decaffeinated, are high in caffeine. Most of the other 6 teas available in the collection (Amortentia, Elixir of Life, Grudyroot (not a potion or correctly spelt), Mandrake Restorative Draught, Skele-gro and Treacle Tart (definitely not a potion!)) are either low or moderate caffeine, which would be better for me, but I’ll never know what they are like as they aren’t available in Europe despite several of them having a higher rating than the ‘popular’ ones which are in the sampler.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I originally ordered the Magic Potions sampler (actually misnamed as it includes HP world drinks, food and ingredients as well as potions, but I’m being pedantic) with a view to adding it to my collection rather than drinking it.
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| Cute, aren't they? |
Those tiny tins with their magical blends sat in my tea cupboard in their cute little box for ages before I finally caved in and decided to try each of them.
There are 6 teas in the sampler (and on the European site):
The first time I tried the teas I don’t remember being overly impressed with most of them although to be fair I probably didn’t sample them properly, wanting only to use a little of the tea (they’re such small tins and I don’t believe there are really 5 good cups in there).
This meant that the only one I ended up buying a full-size packet of was Pumpkin Potion because I was already desperately in love with pumpkin tea and at the time you couldn’t get their Pumpkin Spice tea in the UK except as part of a set with other teas that I wasn’t particularly keen on.
The box went back into the cupboard and I forgot all about them again until a couple of months ago, when I decided that having used the set there was no point in keeping it as memorabilia and so I had another try.
This time, and probably because I used a decent measure of the tea rather than a little bit to try it and because I was in full on tea mode, I found myself enjoying all the teas and several of them in particular (the eagle-eyed amongst you will have already noticed that Veritaserum is currently at number 4 in my Top 10 tea list, which is pretty high.)
Unfortunately, I was unable to buy full-size packets of all of them as some of them were sold out (not indefinitely, I hope) but I did manage to procure Butterbeer, Draught of Peace and Veritaserum, which are all completely different types of tea.
Having tried all 6 of them with different brewing times (due to forgetting they were there, mainly) I would suggest that with the black teas you definitely need to stick to the recommended brewing time otherwise they start to get bitter, although a drop of milk will always counteract some of that bitterness. The rooibos based tea could probably do with a little extra brewing time to bring out the flavour.
In conclusion, the Magic Potions sampler is full of nice teas that are definitely worth a try, but I really want to try the others in the collection because some of them sound even better. Please, Adagio teas give us another sampler set or at least the option to buy them in the UK and Europe, and while you’re about it can we have the House teas, too – or at least the Slytherin ones. I’m not really fussed about the others.
Reviews for each of the teas in the Magic Potions sampler box can be found at the links below.
*Having discovered the tea blends for Polyjuice I was tempted to try to blend it myself as I have a whole load of chai samplers from Adagio but discovered to my disappointment that I had finished the chocolate chai (I really did like that one). As this blend seems to be forever out of stock I may get some more and have a go at blending Polyjuice myself — it also gives me an excellent excuse to review the chocolate chai.
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