Bluebird Tea Co. Advent Calendar — Day 6 — Nearly Nirvana



Another long and tiring day and it’s another mint tea bag — today’s tea is Nearly Nirvana.



Ingredients: Chinese white tea, Chinese green tea, jasmine blossoms, spearmint, orange blossom.

They describe it thus:

This luxury white tea with heavenly jasmine and spiritual spearmint will surely help you reach nirvana. Don't just take our word for it . . . Japanese monks say tea embodies the four Buddhist principles and the word on the street is that they also use it to help them stay awake during meditation and to quiet their grumbling tummies during fasts!

I have to be honest that after yet another long and tiring day the last thing I wanted to find in my advent calendar was another mint tea bag. Although I very much enjoyed the Mojitea yesterday I was really hoping for something a bit more Christmassy and comforting today. Instead, I got spearmint and something that, at the risk of sounding like my nine-year-old nephew, looks a bit like a mug of wee.




This is another tea that I already owned as I bought a trial-size pouch back at the beginning of the year as it sounded pretty good. It smells nice enough — better than the Mojitea actually, as I love the fresh smell of spearmint but unfortunately, for me, it doesn’t match up in taste and having tried it again I remember that I wasn’t very keen on it last time round either which is why I hadn’t got round to reviewing it.

It didn’t help that as I was rushing around doing things I left it for longer than the recommended 3 minutes (but only by a minute or so) despite managing to get the temperature right (80 degrees again) and this is clearly one of those teas that turns bitter really quickly. But there’s also something about the mix of spearmint with jasmine and orange blossom that makes it taste a bit odd — almost antiseptic — and I honestly didn’t enjoy it that much.

It’s not undrinkable by any means and is clearly very popular with some customers as it has 5-star reviews and maybe, on a different day I might enjoy it more. It is a light tea so I might find it better during the summer, and with that in mind, I shall make a note to try it once the weather warms up a bit.


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