Chai Tea is Gross, Unless Bobby Makes It.

My small town just recently opened a Bulk Barn. Being from Ontario, this is a pretty exciting store for me to see once again. I remember going to the Bulk Barn back in my Ontario days to stock up on bags full of cheap candy before movies. Now that I am an adult, along with the candy, I was also excited about cheap spices and a larger variety of just....stuff... that my small town doesn't offer.

On one of my first ventures there I decided to try out some small amounts of a number of different things, just to see if I would like their product better than my tried and true grocery-store products. I picked up some pancake mix, some noodles, some spices, and then I saw it: chai tea mix.

I love a good chai. I love Starbucks Chai Tea the best, but don't usually care to shell out $4 for a small tea. I was excited about this potential purchase of awesomeness. I bought enough for a few cups of chai tea and happily went home.

Every Christmas my friend Bobby blesses me with this amazing chai tea mix that she makes from scratch. She won't share her recipe, but it is amazing. A few weeks ago I was craving a chai tea and I thought I would try out my Bulk Barn brand of chai tea. I boiled my tea, threw a few scoop-fulls in, and stirred the lumpy mass.

It stayed lumpy.
And didn't smell particularly appetizing.
And tasted like paste. Like old-school 'we ran out of glue so I made home made glue out of flour' paste.

I immediately threw it out, threw out the rest of the generic Bulk Barn brand mix, made some delicious "Bobby-Chai" and texted her about how wonderful her mix is and how Bulk Barn kinda sucks sometimes.

Two days ago, my sister-in-law and I were spring cleaning my house and she came across all my little bags of random Bulk Barn purchases. Each in their own plastic bag, unlabelled, unknown. As we picked through them we had to identify which spices were which. We came across a bag that smelled an awful lot like chai tea. I racked my brain knowing that I had been so disgusted by it that I had thrown it out. I looked through the pile remembering that I had wanted to try their version of pancake mix. It was nowhere to be found.

Then it dawned on me. I had not made chai tea that time weeks before, I had made pancake-tea. That's why it had tasted like flour, because it WAS mostly flour.