Very Big Hill Dew

I super love mountain dew. Almost as much as I love root beer. So I had to jump on this one. In saying that, I did leave it sitting in my cupboard for quite a while because I am trying to finish the teas that are open first before opening everything else.

The smell of this dry tea is dead on mountain dew. Delicious. I almost wanted to crack open a can of the real stuff.

I brewed this 1.5 tsp, 10 oz, and about a 1/4 tsp of rock sugar. I normally don’t add sugar right off the bat, but I figured since it was based on the soda, I would add some sugar. The smell of the brewed tea is what I would guess hot mountain dew smelled like.

The taste is a bit different. My immediate reaction was jelly beans. Like a red fruit flavoured jelly belly. Towards the end of the sip there is a mountain dew flavour. I would like to try this one without the sugar, but also as an iced tea/cold brew. I think the sugar may be giving it more of that jelly bean flavour.

Also a very important note, this is a 52 teas honeybush blend and I am getting NO pepper, this is historic for me!

Edit: Made another cup, same specifications, but this time with no sugar. The smell of the brewed tea is still the same but the taste is quite different and not as good. There is a vegetal astringency. I can definitely tell it is missing something, specifically the sweetener. I feel like there is a lot of mint in this blend, but it is too much, giving it a bit of a spice. Not sure what the ingredients in this blend are, but this is what I am tasting. I definitely prefer with sugar.

I’m kinda snickering to myself, though for perhaps a stupid reason. I went to search up this tea to write my tasting note, and I got as far as “Very Big Hill” and noticed that DAVIDsTEA’s Alpine Punch was still one of the options in the drop down menu. For whatever reason, that really cracked me up.

Urghh… Three hours left. Time is going by VERY slowly and I’m running out of things to do to keep occupied. I know I could eat up time by browsing various tea websites, but I don’t want to stoop to that since my wallet is strapped enough as is. I’m trying to come up with a reasonable list of baking to make for Christmas. Right now my list is looking like:

- Pistachio Pudding Sugar Cookies
- Banana Pudding Sugar Cookies
- Carrot Cake muffins w. Cream Cheese icing
- Peanut Butter Marshmallow Cluster drop cookies

And I’m thinking one more thing would sort of round everything out. Maybe brownies? I like brownies…

Because I can’t cook to save my life, and Tre will be at work (so I can’t guilt him into cooking Christmas dinner for me) we’ll be ordering in pizza – which I think is a perfectly acceptable Christmas type dinner. I’m also gonna prepare a couple cold brewed teas, but am not sure which ones yet. So, still have that to figure out. Hmm, maybe I can use my Christmas planning as something to do to pass time by.

Anyway, back to the tea at hand (or rather, in hand). When I saw this one on the 52Teas site I knew I had to try it out, and wouldn’t you know I seem to be the first tasting note on it! No pressure, right?

After getting really into loose leaf a few months ago I basically cut all pop out of my diet with the exception of the occasional “cheat” drink (I let myself have one pop once per paycheck; so every two weeks). The three I’m having a hard time letting go of, however, are Root Beer (and now I have a tea alternative), Dr. Pepper, and Mountain Dew. So, the prospect of a replacement Mountain Dew tea has me super excited!

I actually gave the first cup away, which was hard for me to do. My favourite cashier Shelby from Tea Desire had expressed an interest in this blend so I brought it in the day it arrived in the mail (fingers crossed that she’d even be working that day) and gave her the honors of opening the packet and having the first cup. Sadly, I had to catch the bus before I got to hear her thoughts on it!

Dry, the leaf smells amazing and is basically bang on for Mountain Dew. I need to figure out how to make air freshener or something similar out of tea leaf, because I keep going back to the packet just to take the chance to smell it. Mmm!

Today when I was making it I decided I finally had to have it and couldn’t put off trying it any longer. I’ve never had a honeybush/rooibos blend from 52Teas before so I wasn’t totally sure if there was a generally “accepted” method to making them – so I went with 1 1/2 tsp. for my timolino steeped 6 minutes in boiling water. Essentially what I’d do with many of my other rooibos teas.

(Side note, I just had someone knock an entire shelf of box calendars down, kinda shiftily look side to side and scamper away without even the slightest effort to clean them up. On top of that, are debit/credit pad isn’t working at all today, and when I called about getting someone in to come repair it the response was “It’s too cold to come today, and we don’t work Sunday – so we’ll be there to fix it sometime on Monday”. Urgh! I was cold today too coming to work, but I fucking did it because THAT. IS. MY. JOB!)

The smell was kinda sugary lemon, with some lemon zest/rind type – faintly like Mountain Dew, but there was something missing as well, that I just can’t place my finger on. And, this time it’s not the absence of carbonation (though I really wanna try this as tea soda) or the fact I’m drinking it hot. It’s something else.

Taste wise – the first thing I get is a distinct taste of honeybush – straight honeybush. And then, oddly enough, I get notes of both lemon rind and graham crackers. I’ve seen Lala describe honeybush/rooibos as tasting ‘peppery’, and this is actually the first time I’m finding that too. Huh. Odd. In the body of the sip I’m not particularly impressed – but the aftertaste does come awfully close to tasting like Mountain Dew, so there’s still that. I’m wondering if I just messed up in how I brewed it or if there’s contamination in my timolino from the last time I used it (which would be for DAVIDsTEA’s Read My Lips) – although I did try to thoroughly clean it out.

I definitely need to try again at home, maybe with different proportions and in a nice, fresh, clean mug. But my thoughts right now are that this is one of those teas that sounds like a good idea and has an amazing smell dry, but just doesn’t translate the same in the actual steeped tea. Kind of disappointed, honestly.

Full disclosure: I’ve had Mountain Dew only a handful of times ever. That said, from what I can remember of the taste this is like 1/3 Mountain Dew, 1/3 Sprite, and 1/3 rooibos. I was surprised by how much I liked it—I ended up drinking a whole pot! I’m not sure yet whether I want to get more or not but it’s a solid citrus/rooibos blend.

This was never a favorite of mine, I think in part because of the lemongrass. I’m not a fan of lemongrass as the primary flavor. My husband really likes this one though, says it tastes just like Mountain Dew, so I steeped up the rest as a cold brew. As predicted, I didn’t really like it so he drank pretty much the whole pot.

I kept reading the name of this tea over and over. I just couldn’t get it, then DUH! Very Big Hill = Mountain! When i went to review this, there it was… Mountain Dew flavored tea. Hahaha! I’ve never really been a Mountain Dew fan so I’m not sure what to expect.

The dry leaf has a lime scent, but not overwhelming. On the first sip I didn’t taste the lime/Mountain Dew flavor until the end of the sip. It’s not a great tea but more of a fun idea.

The more I drink it, the less I like it. It is beginning to taste/smell like some kind of cleaning fluid. Okay really … I haven’t been drinking Pine-sol cleaner so I don’t know how that would taste but that is the aroma in the back of my mouth.

Thank you Ost for sharing.

Okay, let me preface this review with something. I quit smoking five years ago with minimal trouble. I’d been smoking for about 10 years, and I just stopped one day. I was evil for two weeks and to this day have dreams of smoking when I’m stressed.

When I say trying to give up pop is harder then that EVER was, I’m in no way exaggerating. I’ve tried probably 10 times and I always go back, so I’ve settled into ‘minimal pop’ like one or two a week instead. My drug of choice is, and always will be Mountain Dew.

This tea is either going to help those cravings, or make them 100000x worse. We’ll see as time progresses which way it goes. At any rate, the smell even has the scent of carbonation, which is awesome and weird all at once. Frank did an epic job with this one. Iced its super refreshing, but I don’t know if I’d enjoy it hot.

2021 Sipdown 21/365!

I have been quite lazy with the sipdowns. However, I have a small backlog of 1-cup iced teas to sipdown that I’d collected about a year ago, yet never actually made it through. However, single-serve iced tea is currently appealing for some reason, so maybe I’ll get through a few! This is the first from the batch (which mostly includes honeybush/some rooibos from Frank-era 52teas and Della Terra), and one I’ve been putting off for a while.

This is from a swap? Or stash sale? Probably mentioned in a previous note. One I’d missed getting when it came out. And it’s still so tasty – it really tasted like a lemony “pop”, especially when coldbrewed or iced. Wouldn’t mind if this flavour made a comeback!

Backlog:

I found the name of this tisane to be very funny. My husband didn’t agree with me. We sometimes have very different sense of humors.

Anyway … this is pretty good. Instead of the usual “nutty” flavor that I usually get from honeybush, I taste more of an earthiness that really works well with the lemony and lime-y flavors. I taste the effervescent taste of soda here too. I don’t drink a lot of soda, but, I do like the way Frank manages to capture soda in his soda inspired teas.

It’s a pretty tasty tisane.