Tea-Friends.de

Lexitus was in Germany recently and brought this stuff home for me. I asked for something fruity, and fruity was exactly what I got. This stuff is nothing, really, but dried fruit. Apples, strawberries, pineapple, papaya and carrot pieces, along with a couple of things I had to look up, namely elderberries and beetroot.

Beet.

Root.

My german is rudimentary at absolutely best, but I was pretty sure that I had that one right. I was just kind of hoping that I was wrong.

It doesn’t have hibiscus in it. It doesn’t say so in the ingredients and I can’t spot any in the actual… can’t really say leaves…. mix either.

But it does have a very very very bright red colour. Like hibiscus-red. It smells mainly like a hot mix of apple and strawberry juice.

It doesn’t, thankfully, have any hibiscus flavour, so now I know they didn’t try to hide some in there. I can usually pick up that metallic flavour of blood hibiscus even in small amounts, so I’m feeling much safer now. I’m not surprised beetroot would produce such a colour (if you are peeling both potatoes and beetroot, do the potatoes first and the beetroots after, unless you want funny coloured potatoes. Just saying)

Not a lot of flavour as such actually, which surprises me because the dry mix has a very LARGE aroma. The pineapple especially is really tearing at the nostrils.

I can find the apple, mostly. The strawberry needs a little searching for, but it’s also there. A dash of pineapple is there too with the elderberries. The papaya and the carrot doesn’t seem to have much of a presence and I suspect the beetroot is mainly there for the colour.

On the whole it’s a wee bit on the tart side, which for me is a bit odd, because I generally prefer the more sour apple sorts. I’m sure I’ll finish off the bag that the englishman bought for me easily enough, but I’m not going to be heartbroken when it’s gone.

I might try mixing it in with some of the black tea my Turkish colleague gave me. I never seem to get around to doing that turkish tea brewing and I didn’t really find them over the top wonderful in a western style brewing. A small amount of this stuff mixed in should be able to give almost anything a bit of a lift.

All in all, not bad.

CHAPTER 2 (Lexitus said I should call it that, the mocking … thing!)

I’m on steep 1½ now. My first cup was only about half the contents of the little pot I made, so I still had the other half left. I dumped a spoonful of the turkish leaves into the pot and topped it off with boiling water.

The result is a darker red and with the addition of some real tea, it’s actually quite nice. There’s a very sweet sugary note suddenly that wasn’t there before. It tastes like the strawberry is really brought to the front of the flavour this way.

It’s possible that I didn’t steep it long enough the first time around, but for me it just seemed a bit flighty and lacking without the solid base of tea underneath it. It’s got some support now and becomes more of what I had initially expected of it.

I’ll give it a nudge upwards from 64 points, and will likely be having it this way in the future.