Vahdam's World Tea Samplers 20

Updated review for Amazon:

I bought this "World Sampler" for £25, along with another Vahdam Black Tea sampler. I didn't know who Vahdam were, but when you call a gift box "World Sampler", it sets a clear expectation right? But instead, what you get is a box full of repetition, poor ingredients, and just felt incredibly low effort for the cost.

First, calling this a "World Sampler" is a real stretch. It's mostly Indian teas. Five black teas were exact duplicates from their other black tea box. Another, the "Assam Exotic," was just a different name for the Golden Assam from the same box. Real global variety was missing.

Then there was the Matcha. Even if you don't know about Matchas, one look at my pics and you can see the problems. The powder inside was a depressing, dull olive green, nothing like the bright colour shown on the packet. That's just misleading advertising, plain and simple. It tasted awful too, bitter and muddy. Putting something this bad in a sampler meant to showcase their range is baffling and unacceptable. There's just no excuses for this.

The lack of real variety continued. There were FIVE different Chai teas. Five! Nearly all used the same cheap, harsh CTC black tea base that just made everything taste bitter and similar. It felt lazy. The green tea base they used for all fo the samplers was also poor quality, just adding bitterness. Even the herbal teas showed repetition; the Turmeric Spiced and Turmeric Ginger felt like slight variations on the same theme. I will say, the Chocolate Vanilla and the Cinnamon Chai were acceptable, if unexciting, compared to the others, but still not great.

Many blends just felt thrown together without much care. Fancy names like "Mint Melody" or "Kashmiri Kahwa" didn't match the reality of the harsh or muddled flavours. The only tea I genuinely enjoyed and felt was unique to this box was the Himalayan White Tea, it was smooth, gentle and naturally sweet, but 1 good tea out of 20 doesn't make up for the rest.

Seriously, this box doesn't represent world teas at all, uses too many low-quality ingredients repeatedly, includes misleading packaging, and feels incredibly lazy for a £25 product. Honestly, it felt less like a curated selection and more like Vahdam just bundled together leftover low-grade stock they couldn't use elsewhere, dressed it up in nice packaging, and hoped nobody would notice the poor quality inside. It offers terrible value and would likely disappoint anyone looking for a genuine tea exploration. I cannot recommend this box at all.

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The rating is placeholder, will update this once we go through all 20!

...Well, except as you can see, we have 5 tag-alongs from the black tea samplers, yeah, that's already annoying, essentially £25 for 15 samplers for me. Still, 15 teas to try, will be fun, a lot of chais though.

The box itself smells strongly of different spices, especially from the turmerics ones. I'll probably do one per day like before, picked at random.