Hello friend! This is me tentatively moving back into the tea review space. I’ve actually had this tea for a while – since early June when my amazing friend helped me buy this tea – but I didn’t dare to open it until I came back to Singapore, and then I procrastinated on drinking it until recently.

This is the Regal Blend created for Queen Elizabeth II’s Jubilee! As you know, I love/am unable to resist limited edition teas, so I’m happy to have gotten my hands on this. Here’s the tea description from Whittard’s website:

“A smooth, rich loose leaf black tea blended with sumptuous Madagascan vanilla and a right royal flourish of red, white and blue petals.”

Since this is a British blend, I decided to try it two ways – straight and with milk.

Straight, the tea liquor is a beautiful medium brown; it almost “glows” red in the picture! It has a gentle, sweet fragrance. The black tea isn’t too strong, so for me, it’s the vanilla flavour that is dominant.

Given that the flavour of the tea isn’t very strong, not much milk was needed. It was a very light milk tea and the addition of creamy notes from milk made me think of the ice-cream matcha from Bird and Blend tea. The other tea that I was reminded of is a vanilla-flavoured rooibos, I think I tried something similar from Karel Capek (though I can’t remember the name).

Overall, this is a pleasant tea! I’m looking forward to drink more, and I’m also excited to use part of it for baking – I think tea-infused shortbread might be nice. My only concern is that the vanilla will blend in too much and I guess the only way to find out is to bake the cookies.