Tea Blends That Didn’t Quite Make It

This is an account of the times when the muse didn’t strike and a morning’s worth of work met with disaster.

Smoked rose tea

Or the day we set fire to rose.

Smoked wood is good. Smoking tea over wood is pretty darn good. And when you choose different woods, it gets even better; teak, sal, pine… so much to play with here. And the results are almost always wonderful. And then one day – I don’t know what we were thinking – there were roses lying around and wood smoking and we said, what if we smoked rose with wood? We imagined a heady woodiness to the tea. Sweet but balanced by the earthiness of the wood. It seemed perfect.

The rose burned, the sweetness of it replaced by a burnt ashiness that made the tea completely unpalatable. But we still dream of a rose-flavored woody tea and hope to crack the recipe someday.

Pumpkin spiced tea

There’s one flavor that kept popping up every time we mentioned flavored tea. And that was pumpkin spice. It sounded like the perfect fall-weather tea.

So of course, one morning we decided to blend it. Since we use all-natural ingredients, we got some fresh pumpkin. Nothing. We tried dried pumpkin. Still nothing. We tried freeze-dried. Still nothing. The flavors of pumpkin are so mild that we just couldn’t amp it up enough. So we comforted ourselves with the thought of a tea that would pair well with pumpkin pie for a cold fall day. Now that we have plenty of.

Saffron vanilla chai

Perhaps none of our experiments has thrown our tummies into a spin as much as the saffron vanilla chai did. It all began as a straightforward blend – CTC chai, vanilla, saffron, spices. And so we brewed it with milk, of course.

Something just wasn’t right. We tried to change the concentrations of the spices, the saffron, the vanilla. Fifteen versions of the chai were made and drunk that day. It was the worst tea we’ve ever made. And for a week after, no one mentioned ‘chai’. It’s still not easy to talk about it. Not yet, at least.

Originally published on Still Steeping, the Teabox blog, on September 24, 2015. Lightly edited for clarity in October 2026. Taste the blends that did make the cut: explore our tea blends and chai.