I’ve been to my littlest cousin’s 7th birthday today. I have been fed a lot of food as well as some hot cocoa, which was nice, and some coffee, which was terribly awfully acidic. Don’t know what brand that was, but definitely not one to my taste. Tea wasn’t offered, and I don’t like making a nuisance of myself about when I am actually fully capable of drinking coffee and there are other beverages available. On the way home I had to switch trains and had a fifteen minute wait for the next train, so I went into the kiosk and got me a bottle of this stuff.
Let’s start with the beginning, the description of the… the… tea, for lack of better word. “A touch of apricot.” A touch? A touch?!!! You’re joking, right? If this is a touch of apricot, then they’ve touched this stuff to a mighty large apricot. I like apricots a lot, though, so I can deal with that.
It also contains not tea, but tea extract, which if you ask my snobby self, although they are both made of tea is no more the same as tea, as raisins are the same as wine in spite of both being made of grapes. (Gosh, what an awkward sentence! You know what I mean, right?)
Let’s not mention the synthetic smell and go straight to the flavour. I can find some tea in it, mostly in the dry astringency, but very little actual tea flavour. Mostly it’s just like a sort of apricotty cordial, though. Sweet, but not too much so, and refreshing too. And definitely not as boring as the wide selection of carbonated soft drinks. Sometimes you just don’t want bubbles, you know?
I’m debating with myself how to rate this, and I have decided that I should rate it primarily on how much I like it on its own terms, because I do think it’s an excellent alternative to fizzy drinks.
If I had rated it on how much I like it in terms of how much I think it had to do with tea, it would have been about a 25.
