Bird and Blend Tea Advent calendar review: The perfect festive gift for tea-lovers

From Candlelit Library to Snowball, the Bird and Blend tea Advent calendar offers a diverse range of flavours to try

Advent calendars used to be a thin piece of card with small doors that had different pictures behind them. They've evolved since then, and now the market is awash with a whole range of choices, including chocolate Advent calendars beauty Advent calendars and, my personal favourite, tea Advent calendars.

The Bird and Blend tea Advent calendar contains 24 boxes, each with two teabags of the same flavour. From rooibos to chai, this calendar offers a wide range of types and flavours of tea so anyone can enjoy it, and I was really excited to test it.

Bird and Blend Tea Advent calendar: What's inside

This advent calendar is delivered in a strong, sturdy cardboard box, so you can be sure it won’t get damaged during transit. This box has lots of branding and Christmas touches, which adds some excitement to receiving the calendar. The actual calendar is also very sturdy. It opens up like a book with a front cover and then there's the main section containing the tea.

Each calendar day is stored in a little box, which you can rearrange should you prefer the days in numerical order, or leave it in its random pattern. The boxes have a nice festive image behind them, such as a candy cane or robin, which gives it the traditional picture calendar feel. The boxes for each day have the name and type of flavour on the side, as well as the optimal brewing time, as each day is different.

The tea bags, as well as the whole calendar, are 100% plastic-free which makes for a great product quality. On the inside of the cover, there is space to write down your top 5 flavours, a brewing guide, and a QR code, which can be visited each day of Advent for extra festive content and a free Christmas gift!

Each day, there are two bags of tea, which means it would be perfect for sharing with a partner or anyone else, or you could have them all for yourself! Personally, I prefer to use one and then save the other, but you could also have one in the morning and one in the evening. Overall, the idea of having two bags of tea is really good, and I think it makes the calendar very much worth the price.

Flavours of tea in the Bird and Blend tea Advent calendar

The range of flavours on offer from the Bird and Blend tea Advent calendar is huge:

The taste test

There are seven different types of tea, such as herbal tea or oolong, which adds to the variety of the calendar. The flavours range from typical ones like Gingerbread Chai and Mulled Cider to more abstract ones like ‘Campfires & Vampires’ and ‘Deckchair Dreaming’.

I think that these flavours which have titles rather than exact flavours really add to the childlike excitement and mystery of opening an advent calendar. Due to the flavours all being so different, it was very intriguing to try all these types of tea that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to try. The calendar contains seven limited edition teas, and one new flavour labelled ‘TOP SECRET BLEND’. One of the limited-edition teas is the ‘Candlelit Library’, which was made in collaboration with study-tuber Ruby Granger.

As previously mentioned, each tea has a different guide for making them. For example, the boxes all have brewing time, whether it should have milk in or not, and also caffeine level, which is a nice touch should you want to save it for another time - if you are planning on opening it later in the day but don’t want to consume the caffeine.

Additionally, the boxes are all labelled with the flavour, type of tea, ingredients list (which can also be found online), and expiration date, which for most is still for a few years. Another thing I liked about the packaging is that you can see the blend and ingredients in the teabag, which is a nice touch if you find this interesting.

All the teas are easy to make as they are like any other tea in this way. Where the teas can be drunk with or without milk added, I prefer to use a tiny bit of milk, but they would taste nice either way, which is also good if you normally use plant-based milk, as you can drink the teas without wondering how the different taste of the milk will affect the tea. Since everything is plastic-free, this means the bags are biodegradable, so you will have no issue disposing of them in your food waste once you have made the tea.

All the teas have nice tastes, and I didn’t find one I wouldn’t have drank again, which is great as I can try them again thanks to the two bags per flavour. Personally, I enjoyed the ‘Candlelit Library’ flavour as it tasted like a classic English breakfast tea but with extra hints of other flavours, such as Sri Lankan tea and Japanese tea.

I also enjoyed the  ‘mint choc rooibos’, which I was initially sceptical of as I had never tried a rooibos tea, let alone a chocolate one. What I liked about this was that the mint wasn’t too overbearing, but it was still the main element. The flavour list was very extensive, which I enjoyed, but I would’ve liked to see an apple-based flavour for an extra festive feel.

Final thoughts

Overall, this is a wonderful calendar for anyone who loves tea or for someone who likes trying something different. It is great to have it by yourself, or you can share it easily with someone else, which could be really nice for that festive family feel of Advent. I would definitely buy it as an early Christmas gift for family or friends.