There was a time during my first job where no one knew about my love of tea. Of course, they eventually found out when I answered a normal “what are you going to do on your day off” with “take the train to Fukuoka to attended the Lupicia marche.” Anyway, I found out about this tea before my co-workers found out about my love of tea, which is a really long-winded way of saying that I almost didn’t find out about this tea.

So one day, I came across a friend holding a cup of tea. It smelt a lot like earl grey and while making small talk, I asked if it was earl grey. She told me that she didn’t know, it was an Alice in Wonderland tea that someone had given her.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND TEA?

I asked around, found out it was sold at Kaldi and rushed to buy it.

About the Tea
I managed to find two Wonderland Teas (不思議の国の紅茶) and they are both Sri Lankan teas. The teas are 100% Rainforest Alliance Certified teas, which means that these teas come from farms that “use methods that protect the health of farmers, their livelihoods, their land and the surrounding waterways.”[1]

Both teas are also processed and packaged within four weeks after they’re harvested and the tea bags are made in an ISO 220000:2005 factory. Which is to say that the tea is fresh and the teabags are of good [2] quality.

These are the tea boxes:

Each box has illustrations from Alice in Wonderland on it!

And if the top of the box is anything to go buy, you should totally have a Mad Tea Party when drinking this.

I also like the “Thank you for Choosing Me” message that appears when you open the box.

Each box comes with 20 bags, each with 2g of tea.

Thoughts on the Tea

First, the Alice Grey Tea, which is basically Earl Grey. Unlike normal Earl Grey blends, this tea blends orange with the bergamot oil. I really like this take on Earl Grey tea. Earl Grey tea is a tricky tea for me to drink because I don’t like it if the oil is too strong. Luckily, the oil here was just right and the taste of orange made it a refreshing drink.

The second tea is the Breakfast Tea, which is just a tea blend and not a flavoured tea (like Alice Grey). I normally drink this straight, and this is the preferred tea in my family, but they also recommend that this be drunk as a milk tea.

Flavour-wise, this tea is decent but unexceptional (if I compare everything to the British Clipper tea and the amazing Breakfast Tea I had in England). It goes well with food and my family tends to reach for it when we want to drink tea with food. When, however, I finally open the teas I bought in England, this may be left at the wayside.

Overall, these are both decent teas that are incredible value for money. Amazon is selling these for about 299 yen (about SGD 3.50) , but I remember buying them for 216 yen (about SGD 2.50) from Kaldi. Since there are 20 packets of tea in each box, this makes it about 10.8 yen (about SGD 0.13) per packet. Throw in the incredibly cute packaging and you’ve got a fantastic deal there [3]!

Notes and References
[1] About Rainforest Alliance certified teas
[2] Being ISO certified basically means that you’ve demonstrated that your processes are consistent, which normally leads to higher standards.
[3] Just to be really clear, I loved these teas. If I hadn’t found even better teas before I wrote this post, the post would have been a lot more complimentary.
Amazon Page (which has a lot more varieties than Kaldi)