Christmas Black Tea starts with a Chinese black tea base and gets built up with cinnamon, cloves, almond pieces, and orange peel — the combination that gives it its festive-blend name. The cup comes out spicy and fruity with a malty backbone, so the base tea still shows through under the spice rather than disappearing beneath it. Orange and date-like fruitiness sit alongside the almond and cinnamon, with clove and other warming spices rounding out the finish.
Cinnamon has a long history as a traded spice: Egyptians used it as a perfuming agent in embalming, and it later moved into Europe through Arab traders before becoming a staple worldwide. Cloves carry their own long history in Ayurvedic practice, where they were traditionally used to support digestion and circulation and to ease gas, bloating, and nausea — traditional uses, not established medical claims. The almonds in the blend trace back to a tree species native to Iran and other parts of the Middle East. Tea & Coffee packs the blend by hand to order.
Brew it with fully boiled water at 100°C and give it a full steep, around four minutes, so the spices have time to open up alongside the black tea leaf. It holds up fine to a slightly longer steep given the amount going on in the cup. Serve it plain — the spice and citrus already do the work, and milk or sugar tend to flatten the orange and almond notes rather than complement them. Because of the almond pieces, anyone with a nut allergy should treat this one as an allergen-containing blend rather than a typical spiced black tea.
