Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
Where to Buy: 52Teas
Tea Description:
Organic ingredients: green tea, freeze-dried blueberries, nutmeg and natural flavors
Learn more about other green teas here.
Taster’s Review:
Ever have a day where you needed your tea to lift you up? That is my day today. Everything just seems to be blah around here so I wanted something that had a bit of a pep in its step to bring some sunshine into my day. So I grabbed this one.
To start, I just love the base for green teas that 52Teas uses. It is light but still has a nice fullness to it to provide a stellar buttery flavor that I adore. Really great base and then you add on blueberries. ..You have one delicious and refreshing tea that brings a smile to your face.
In the package the tea has similar notes to a baked good or a pastry, due to the nutmeg. Smells heavenly! Brewed up with water prepped from per the package instructions and allowed to brew for about 3 minutes (oversteeped a tad there), I poured this in my to go cup and away I went. I allowed the tea to cool for about 10 minutes and took my first sip.
You are greeted with an amazing bright and vibrant blueberry and green tea flavor that makes you want to keep drinking the tea. I didn’t really get the scone part of the description for this tea blend but I’m ok with it. The taste you get is really lovely. Sure it would have been able to taste more of the nutmeg but what I have here is fabulous. Maybe if I shake up the pouch more, I’ll get more of that nutmeg flavor.
Another wonderful tea from 52Teas! You really can’t go wrong with them!
Sangria White from A Quarter to Tea
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: White
Where to Buy: A Quarter to Tea
Tea Description:
Hold on to your summer year round, with this cuppa. Combines the flavors of cherry, apple and blueberries with a hint of rum and wine to make the perfect sangria year round.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
This is my second sample from A Quarter to Tea! I chose it for a couple reasons; the big one was that the other two samples I picked out were oolongs and I wanted to get to taste at least one of Lauren’s other tea types. However, I was also interested by the fairly unique ingredients. I’ve never seen Sangria with blueberry, for starters. Finally, I wanted to find a Sangria tea that was an improvement on the other two I’ve tried. DAVIDsTEA had a seasonal Sangria blend which I didn’t mind but didn’t love, and Red Leaf Tea has a Sangria flavour of matcha I currently own but don’t particularly like. And the idea of Sangria with a white base sounds awesome, too!
It was hard to form much of an impression of the tea dry: I could see several chunks of the dry ingredients in the blend, but there wasn’t a distinct aroma. Part of that, I feel, is that in the package Lauren mailed to me the Cherry Chocolate Latte was really a dominant flavour and I think possibly may have contaminated the other teas it was packaged with or, at least, “cancelled out” their aromas – which weren’t as potent/strong. Since Lauren suggests on her Etsy page to ice this and since Sangria really is a drink best consumed cold I decided to go with a cold method of preparation. However, instead of icing I went with cold brewing because that style of preparation is a favourite of mine.
I do find this tea to be very mildly/delicately flavoured overall, with softer and less prominent notes of apple and blueberry and a jammy stonefruit quality which I suppose is the cherry. I want to point out that mild and subtle isn’t actually a bad thing, however Sangria doesn’t have a ‘delicate’ flavour to begin with so it’s not reading as the most accurate flavour profile. Plus it’s a little odd for me to neither taste “orange”/citrus which is such a common Sangria flavour or the wine/rum. As such, while I really like the flavour that I do taste, I find it very hard to drink this and think of it as ‘Sangria’ flavoured. The name just doesn’t seem to match, you know?
I’d be interested to see this tea rebranded as another flavour, maybe even some kind of ‘punch’? This is a refreshing, light, fruity cuppa but in my ‘quest’ for the perfect Sangria tea my expectations just haven’t been met.
Revel Berry Yerba Mate from Guayaki
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Yerba Mate
Where to Buy: Guayaki
Tea Description:
Revel Berry has a delicious raspberry and blackberry flavor. It’s easy drinking and clean tasting, and not too sweet.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
For those who don’t know, I work in a grocery store. It’s not uncommon for us to start carrying different, less common drinks but it is uncommon for them to be tea-related so when we picked up some of this brand’s flavors of iced/canned Yerba Mate I got really excited! I knew I’d seen at least one of this brand’s products reviewed on Steepster so I took the plunge and a bought a can of each flavor to try out.
I don’t know what I expected when I tried this one, maybe a little more yerba mate flavour? But this threw me off a little bit; it definitely tastes distinctly of raspberry and even has a tinge of sharper tartness however I can’t taste anything specifically blackberry flavoured. If anything, I almost want to say there’s more of a blueberry flavor present. Regardless, this does seem pretty watered down and I’m missing any distinctly earthy notes from the yerba mate – which is kind of the best part of mate other than the caffeine. I absolutely appreciate that this is not overly sweet though!
I don’t know if I’d personally buy this one again because I know I enjoy a stronger Yerba Mate flavour but I do look forward to trying the other two flavours I picked up and I’m all for the idea of this if it gets a more “mainstream” consumer experiencing Yerba Mate – which I know it’s been doing at work since some my coworkers have taken to drinking this during break instead of other popular and more “conventional” energy drinks. Plus, the convenience of it being canned it always a plus.
Blueberry Cream Tisane from Tea Desire
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Fruit Tisane
Where to Buy: Tea Desire
Tea Description:
Ingredients: base fine cut, beetroot, blueberries, cornflowers, barberry, flavour.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
Grabbed this one in store iced; the sales associate actually kind of warned me against it saying it’s probably the worst fruit blend the store caries and her least favourite and, well, for me that’s basically like issuing a challenge. I just had to try it and really see for myself.
Admittedly, the dry leaf really doesn’t seem promising; it’s very intensely tart and sour and I’m struggling to see how the blueberry or cream are going to be playing into this. I actually couldn’t believe there isn’t hibiscus in this; the smell seems so hibiscus-like!
The taste is actually better than I was led to believe it would be though it’s not really ideal either; it’s like sour blueberry candies. For me that’s a negative; I’m not into blueberry unless it tastes very natural, and to make that claim about this flavor would be a stretch. It’s got such a sharp, tart taste, as well as some rather apple-y notes. I still don’t get how there can’t be hibiscus in this blend – the taste is there! The colour is even indicative of hibiscus; it’s got that bright redish pink hue. To be fair, it is pretty obvious that’s from the beetroot though.
There’s something else that’s off about this blend; for a blend which has ‘cream’ in the name that flavor is very absent. Even looking at the ingredients list, there isn’t really a single ingredient that could be construed as creamy. I also think it should probably be a rule that when you’re trying to make a creamy tea you DON’T include beetroot. Unless, of course, it’s a ‘beetroot and cream’ tea, in which case the beetroot is probably pretty essential to accurately capturing the flavour.
The name of this blend is simply, and painfully, inaccurate. The taste itself could be worse; but there’s lots of room for improvement, and alongside a bad name it’s just a bit of a flop.
Le Grand Bleu Black Tea from Christine Dattner Paris
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Black
Where to Buy: Christine Dattner Paris
Tea Description:
An ocean of Flavors. black Tea of china flavored with blackberry blueberry blackcurrant and strewed with blackberries blue dolphins sugar and flowers of cornflowers.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
Le Grand Bleu, or the Grand Blue from Christine Dattner Paris is a French tea available one more than one place online. I actually got this tea from a company that sells Christine Dattner’s teas, Flaavor . They sell a few different French company’s teas repackaged under their name. They have a great selection of small scale French tea companies. But if you are looking for a specific tea, I would suggest looking for the direct website.
This tea looks And smells live blueberry heaven. I the main attraction, Dolphin Sprinkles. I mean that really could be the whole article. But! Cutesy sprinkles in tea does not make for a standout tea. Luckily, the tea lives up to it’s sprinkles.
There are other flotsam and jetsam in the loose leaf, and to me, they all look good. Blueberries, blackberries, and little corn flowers for the hell of it. The scent of blueberries is strong and rich. I brewed this tea up western style, 5g of leaf to 16oz. The aroma itself was pretty amazing. The fresh blueberry complimented the raisin and malt notes of the black base tea like cheese on potatoes. The black tea is robust and in your face, but still comforting, like hot chocolate in front of a campfire. The little blue dolphins in this tea dissolve slowly, dissipating into the deep dark brown sea of tea.
I tend to shy away from berry and other fruit flavors in black tea, the combinations are either boring to too contrasting to the nuances of the base black tea. But this tea proved me wrong. I liked the combination so much that it may have changed the way I look at fruity blacks forever. And the dolphin sprinkles certainly don’t hurt.
