Tea Information:

Leaf Type:  Black

Where to Buy: Murchie’s Tea & Coffee

Tea Description:

Murchie’s Coconut Cream Banana Tea combines fine black teas with coconut and bananas. This cup of tea is ripe with the flavour of the islands and is as decadent as banana cream pie!

Learn more about this tea here.

Taster’s Review:

This one comes from a tea friend of mine on Steepster; the store it comes from is located in British Columbia, and not one I’ve had much experience with – just tried different samples in various tea swaps. Their website seems quite nice though, and pretty easy to navigate!

This one definitely has a very banana heavy smell with somewhat of a pudding like quality to it; so I guess that comes from the ‘cream’. I cold brewed this one ‘cause that’s just what I do; it definitely was a lot like I expected it to be but did have a few surprises.

The banana was certainly one of the stronger notes, and very candy like. In addition to having somewhat of a pudding like flavour it reminded me quite a bit of those banana marshmallow candies that you can find in convenience stores for five cents. People tend to have polar opinions on those; you either love or hate them. Personally, I can’t get enough. If you put a big bowl of them in front of me I would lose all self control and eat every last one, and probably get really sick as an added bonus.

The coconut is also very strong, though it tastes a touch off. It has an almost oily or greasy buttery flavour to it, which I find is something I’ve come to associate with shredded coconut that’s just starting to turn bad. Despite not totally meshing, it did sort of work with the tea though; that buttery flavour I dislike tied in a bit with the banana marshmallow vibe to create something that kind felt a little more confectionery instead causing me to feel wary.

I didn’t like the black base a whole lot either; I felt like it was noticeably a lower quality base with a lot of flavourings intended to cover that up – some I kind of observed with another flavoured black from this company, though it wasn’t as noticeable with that blend. And, something about the use of it here reminded me a little bit of ash. Only very lightly; but that’s still not a flavour you necessarily want to be experiencing with a “Banana Cream” tea. As for the all spice, that’s actually one thing about this that I felt pretty neutral about; it was barely present but what I could taste was nice and meshed fairly well with everything else going on. Though, I don’t think an absence of the allspice would have really affected the flavour either.

But I’m honestly probably making this out to seem a lot worse than it was in reality. The truth is I drank the entire 25 oz. cold brew with very little complaint or criticism until after finishing it and it wasn’t all that difficult to just tune into the fun, sweet banana notes. Overall, this probably balances out to be a relatively average tea. Wouldn’t necessarily recommend or serve it, but it’s not like I’d deliberately avoid it either.