Summer Romance Tea Blend from ArtfulTea

Tea Information:

Leaf Type:  Black & Green Teas

Where to Buy:  ArtfulTea orArtfulTea on Etsy

Tea Description:

Let this magical blend carry you away like a summer of love. Sweet papaya and strawberries intertwine with black and green teas for an intoxicating, exotic flavor. Refreshing hot or iced.

Learn more about this tea here.

Taster’s Review:

Mmm … this Summer Romance Tea Blend is TASTY!  I often have my misgivings about a tea blend such as this, where two totally different tea types are used – in this case, it’s black tea and green tea – because it’s difficult to determine just the right steeping parameters to use.  Black teas usually do best with boiling water (or at the very least, near boiling) and the green tea leaves may end up scorched if I were to use boiling water to brew them.  So with blends like this, I usually cater to the more delicate tea, and so I brewed this with 180°F water, and then I steeped it a little longer than I normally would a green tea:  3 minutes.

These parameters produced a very flavorful, tasty cup of tea.

Of the two types of tea leaves, the black tea offers the strongest flavor.  I taste a rich flavor from the black tea, although I’m sure that it would be far more robust if I had chosen to steep this at a higher temperature.  The green tea is not quite as discernible, but, I do notice some light, buttery notes from the green tea.  The overall cup is a bit lighter and that has to do not only with the lower steep temperature but the presence of the green tea.  And despite my “misgivings” about black/green tea blends, I do like that these two teas were utilized as the base for this tea because it’s a very unique sort of taste and I like the way the flavor of the base plays with the notes of strawberry and papaya.

The rosehips don’t give off a lot of flavor to the cup, but I do notice a slight bitterness from them which acts more as a slight “brightness” to the sweet fruit notes rather than make the cup taste “bitter.”  The same is true of the sunflower petals.  They add a subtle sharpness to the cup, accentuating the sweet flavors of papaya and strawberry.

This tea blend is aptly named, for it does taste a bit like summer in a teacup.  At the moment, we’re experiencing a rainy summer day.  These are the kinds of days that I look forward to in the summer, because it cools things off for a while.  We had some pretty obnoxiously hot days over the past couple of weeks, and I was ready for the rain to come and bring the heat to a halt.  But the tea that’s in my teacup reminds me of just how lovely summer can be.