Imperial Acai Blueberry White Tea

Cold brewed this one half and half with Berry Basil Blast for about 12 hours. Initially it smelled of delicious gummy candies. Strongly blueberry or Swedish berry. The taste initially was good. Strong blueberry, candy like. But after it sat for a day, the basil began to take over and the taste was not good. The basil kept getting stronger and stronger and it was making the sweet fruity taste astringent and bitter.

Thank you, tperez!

A blueberry white was the second of my two first loose leaf teas but I never repurchased it for some reason. This one has always intrigued me so yay. I could take or leave the acai but I’m pretty sure acai just tastes like blueberries anyway in 99% of American acai stuff. Anyway.

I made iced tea with this because it’s too warm today. It’s definitely on the light side. It also just completely smells like a cocktail so I covered the leaves in vodka but I don’t think it’s really going to do much, it’s been almost a day now since that.

This does seem like a difficult tea, I would guess you need more than the 1.5 tsp suggested to really get a decent flavor. It’s not a bad blueberry flavor but it tastes like a waste of white tea.

Another new tea. I hoped to like this one as much as I liked White Blueberry by Adagio, but something about this doesn’t thrill me. It is good, tasty, and fruity, but it also just tastes slightly… off. I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Even though the taste wasn’t mind-blowing, the color of the tea was! It was by far the most beautiful tea I have seen to date. Check it out:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/47736372@N04/4389642159/

I’m amazed to find a white Teavana blend that actually has recognizable white tea in it. All the other “white” teas from them I’ve tried have little bits of leaves that are broken and don’t add any flavor. Here, though, full leaves!

I read that this one is hard to steep—either it’s too bitter or there’s not enough flavor. So I decided to cold steep it, since 1) that eliminates the bitter element and 2) I like my blueberry teas iced. I was worried about the hibiscus but thankfully this is not a tart cup, in fact it’s pretty yummy. Mostly blueberry, I’m not getting much acai but I kind of feel like they slapped that on there because of its “health properties.” I’m sure it’s good for you and all (and Teavana is all about “health”), but it actually has a nice kind of currant-y flavor that I was looking forward to.

But just blueberry is good too, and this is a nice blueberry white though I’m not sure if it’s any better than DAVIDsTEA’s White Tiger or Adagio’s Blueberry White. They all kind of blend together for me! But hey, I got this as a gift and I will certainly have no problem drinking it up.

Another I received from Artp

I looove looove looove blueberries & anything acai flavour has tasted like blueberries.
I guess I over steeped this because it was a bit bitter, it did have a nice light blueberry flavour & I was getting some white tea flavour. I’ll have to try this again & steep it properly.

Tea #11 Great Canadian Traveling Tea Box

Hmmmmmm, what to say. Finicky is the word I want to use. Oversteep and it’s bitter, understeep and it doesn’t taste like anything. I haven’t found the perfect time yet. I’m not really a fan of teas that are this particular. There has to be some room for user error.
I get acai, blueberry, and white as promised – this could be really good if it would just steep properly. Will try again another day, but for right now – I don’t like it.

I received a very generous sample of this from Allie in a Mystery Swap. Thank you!

This one was tricky. I liked the flavor. I was able to pick up on the calming white tea base. It was also nicely flavored with blueberry and acai. These two flavors added a nice sweet/tart taste to the tea.. Unfortunately even though I treated this tea with care it still brewed up very bitter for me. I tried not to steep it too long and was very careful with the water temperature but still it came out bitter.

Man, I always manage to oversteep this, so it always has this bitter aftertaste. Otherwise, the flavor is very mild, sort of a light neutral fruity flavor.
It’s a good blending tea, I think, if you want to try to punch up another drink with some antioxidant goodness, but it’s too fussy and easy to screw up when brewing, and even if you manage preparation times properly you end up with a rather weak tea.

I really don’t do much in the way of brewing Teavana tea normally anymore. They either seem really light on flavor, or get bitter way too quickly. So if/when I buy Teavana, I usually entertain the thought of ‘would this be good iced?’.

So, here we are with my last bits of this tea, drinking a cold steep. I probably threw in 3.5-4 tsp for 20oz to get the flavor where I wanted. But all said and done, it has a nice, natural blueberry flavor. I complete miss the acai, and blissfully don’t get the tartness from the hibiscus either. But all’s said and done, it’s a solid iced blueberry white tea. Nothing more, nothing less.

First brew of this one, straight, it was a bland, light, slightly blueberry white tea. So okay, next time I decide to do a pot and brew it with a little blueberry flavoured agave to bring out the blueberry flavour a bit.

Instead I got a pot of agave flavoured water. You’d think I had used half the bottle instead of the equivalent of enough to sweeten one cup. It just buried all tea flavour and left . . . something gross.

I won’t be re-buying this one.