Starting to think that I can’t actually give a fair review to any tea I haven’t made at home. I got curious about the white tea I chuckled at earlier, so I took a bag of this home with me last night and had it with breakfast this morning.
And…it was…pretty good, actually.
I steeped it fairly cautiously the first time, at 75 degrees and only for two minutes, and took it with honey. I wasn’t expecting much, but this one surprised me by being the most enjoyable Tazo I’ve tried so far.
It smells like artificial fruit in the bag, and it’s definitely got a strange, artificial-seeming aftertaste that is quite tart. I guess I’m supposed to assume that’s the “natural cranberry flavouring.” I don’t know. And I’m not very familiar with white teas yet, so I have no mental comparison and cannot comment on the tea, although I suspect it wouldn’t be nearly as nice without flavour.
Still, this one does, indeed, taste a lot like drinking blueberry muffin. I cannot taste cranberry at all, but I certainly don’t want to. Not bad for breakfast! I decided to go for a second infusion and see what I got out of it. So, in a “give no f-cks” manner, I steeped the bag a second time for about 4 minutes, at a hotter temperature (not sure what, maybe 80 degrees) and took it with white sugar (I hate wasting good sugar!). It was a bit weaker, but still not bad! So then I figured at school I will just go back to SBUX after the first cup and ask for a hot water refill and get two cups for the price of one out of them.
Which is what I did at school today…and the tea just wasn’t as good. I cannot figure out why it seems so difficult to get decent tea at school. Even stuff I bring to school just doesn’t taste quite right. I keep thinking it’s the water, but maybe it’s just the drinking it from a cardboard cup that’s ruining things. Gah!
I will, hopefully in the relatively near future, be trying some straight whites, and then I will come back to this and see if it still seems decent enough.
