I’m in another fruity mood and dug deep into my cupboard to find something appealing when I remembered my Simpli-Special order a few months ago. Cherry is another one of my top favourite flavours and I am digging black tea at the moment so with this being fruity and black based it makes it perfect for my current needs.
The raw mixture looks like your standard loose leaf black tea but the smell is like those sour cherry penny sweets cut into lip shapes. Very nice.
Once steeped the tea soup forms a reddy brown liquid that smells of fresh maraschino cherries (cocktail cherries) and strongly so.
Taken without milk or sugar though the website states the cherries can be uplifted by a little sugar. I like trying things without sugar wherever possible.
The taste is not as strong as the smell but the cherry flavour is certainly prominent. I cannot really taste the black tea much at all, just sweet and sour cherries that still remind me of gummy sweets…well what I can remember of them. They don’t make vegetarian cherry gummy sweets here :(
The more I sip the more black tea I can taste but it’s a nice strength and balance, no bitterness or astringency and not so much cherry that you think your drinking juice. Another tea I bet would taste amazing iced.
That blows that your can’t find vegetarian gummy sweets! I’m sure you could order the supplies to make them though! Where I am, they are almost never made with gelatin. Vegetarian gummy sweets are made with agar agar usually, just double check the ingredients, so long as it doesn’t say gelatin its normally vegetarian. I’m sure you could find agar agar and cherry extract and make treats as yummy as from your childhood!