Tea Information:

Leaf Type:  Fruit/Herbal Tisane

Where to Buy:  Teavivre

Product Description:

Ingredients: Roselle, Black Currant, Blueberries, Grapes

TeaVivre’s Fruit Tea’s make great, low calorie, caffeine-free, refreshing drinks for anytime of the day. Made only from carefully matched flower petals, dried fruit and berries, they all have high levels of vitamins and minerals and – most importantly – taste and smell great! They are all fantastic to drink either hot or iced. All our fruit teas are made without any added sugar, and so naturally have a very slight sour taste. If you’d like a slightly sweeter drink, simply add a small amount of sugar or, better yet, a small amount of honey.

Learn more about this tisane here.

Taster’s Review:

I’m usually a little hesitant to try a “fruit tea” because I worry about too much hibiscus.  But… a quick glance at the ingredients … no hibiscus?  Cool!  But wait!  What’s that … roselle?  After a quick check on Wikipedia, I’ve learned that roselle is a species of hibiscus.

This worried me a bit, because… well, as I’ve mentioned more than once, I don’t really care for hibiscus.

But… this is really quite good.  In fact, I really wasn’t prepared to like this quite as much as I do.  The roselle has some similarities to the hibiscus I’m more accustomed to:  most specifically, I taste a distinct hibiscus-y flavor and it’s trademark tartness.  But what I’m not getting from the roselle is that syrup-y thickness that I would normally experience with hibiscus.  This tastes and feels lighter and cleaner.  It doesn’t feel sticky and thick.  Nice!

In fact, this tisane is remarkably light for a fruit tea.  It is really quite refreshing.

The blueberry tastes sweet and there is some tartness to it that is accented by the tart from the roselle.  I also taste the black currant, and it gives the overall cup a fruit wine-like taste (in fact, I’m thinking that this might be nice brewed with some mulling spices for a mulled wine – but without the wine! – drink.  Yum!)

This is one of the better fruit teas that I’ve tasted in a very long time.  Oh, sure, I’ve enjoyed many of the other fruit teas that I have had.  But this one stands out among the others.  This … is what other fruit teas should aspire to be!