Northern Lights - Plum Spice Black Tea

If you're dreaming cozying up by a festive cracking fire with a cup of tea, this one is it! Full of warming winter spices that settle into the blend perfectly and immediately transport you to holiday markets and twinkling lights. Spice forward but without over powering. This is also a quite fruity tea and I find myself having to scoop deeper part the bigger fruit chunks to make sure I get a balance of tea leaves. I also found that I have to steep this one longer to let the tea and spice mellow the fruit before it becomes over sweet or astringent. But once you get your steep right you'll fall in love and never look back!

Northern Lights feels like stepping outside on a crisp autumn night, wrapped in your favorite blanket with something warm between your hands. The plum is deep and velvety—dark, juicy, and softly sweet—while the clove drifts through with a warm, fragrant spice that makes the whole cup feel almost enchanted.

I loved it even more with a longer steep, when the fruit became richer and the clove a little more pronounced. A few drops of sweetness and a splash of cream transformed it into something wonderfully lush and comforting, like spiced stewed plums by a glowing fire.

It’s dreamy, warming, a little mysterious, and exactly the sort of tea I want when the air turns cold and the evenings grow dark.

It's Christmas 1993 and you just walked into the local homegoods store with your mom. She purchases a potpourri bag with cinnamon sticks, red berries, and glittery pinecones that gets placed in a longaberger basket on your coffee table at home. That potpourri smelled so good that you wanted to eat it.

That's it. That's what this tea tastes like. Nostalgia. They somehow figured out what that scent/flavor profile was and put it in tea. I love it.

Some of my favorite August teas are their black teas that pair a bright fruit with something sweet—Cabaret, Razzmatazz, Gold Rush… Northern Lights fits nicely into that family with a cozy, spiced winter twist. The leaves smell rich, fruity, and spiced. I’m giving four stars because I did wish that the flavors once brewed were a little bolder; every listed ingredient is present but subtle. That being said, with such strong flavors, bolder might become overwhelming. This will definitely be in my winter rotation when I’m looking for fruity and sweet with a cozy kick.

Even though it's 105 degrees here, I do feel the stirrings of Autumn with this wonderful new plum-y tea. I always like to test a new tea out before I look at the ingredients and this one mixes all of the ingredients in a lovely blend. I will be adding this one to my list of August faves!