Ever look at your teas and have a total blank in your mind where information about how you ended up with it should be? That’s this tea. I thought it might be a tea of the month acquisition, but I had two 2 oz packets of it and the tea of the month club I belonged to only sent 2 oz per flavor. Big mystery here.
In any case, this containing both white and green tea, I steeped it at a low temperature for a short time and I intentionally overleafed because it’s Teavana, and it has big hunks of stuff in among the leaves. Coconut, dried pineapple, red peppercorns are very visible as is the lemon grass with its attractive geometry. It smells a lot like cinnamon in the tin.
After steeping it smells a little like cinnamon, a little like clove and cardamom, and a lot of that weird lotion-y note that I so disliked in the Teavana Tulsi Dosha Chai. Which makes me think that I perhaps unfairly pinned that note on the tulsi rather than on some oddness inherent in Teavana non-black tea chai. The liquor is a lemon yellow color and rather cloudy.
Rather unfortunately, the taste is a sort of generic, watery, cinnamon-y, pepper-y spice, with the weird lotion-y note in the aftertaste. I don’t taste any of the fruit, and I taste very little of the tea. I will try overleafing more severely next time and perhaps bump up the steep time and temp a bit, but I fear overdoing those and ending up with a bitter mess. It’s not as bad as I remember the tulsi being in terms of aftertaste so I’m giving it a few more points there, but this is going into the sipdown immediately category. I may even try cold brewing it to get it over with faster.
And of course, this is among the flavors Teavana still offers. Why do I always like the ones they discontinue and with a few exceptions dislike the ones they continue? Another mystery…
