Strawberry Lemonade Herbal Tea

I wanted to try this on the kids tonight, but they fell asleep before it finished steeping. There’s always tomorrow.

I haven’t had this in a while and I worried that perhaps it would have faded some but looking at my prior note it’s exactly how I remembered it. The key to this one is to double the amount of “leaf” (it’s not really leaf so much as fruit chunks) you’d ordinarily use to get a good, strong flavor. It’s a nice, sweet lemon, with just a hint of strawberry, enough to act as natural sweetener.

I’ll be taking mine to bed with me shortly. I hope there’s a new Castle this week.

fiddling sent this to me a while back and i’m still working through all of my swaps from people. I tried this as a cold brew first to see how it fared. I have to say that this isn’t too bad. The flavours aren’t crazy strong but it’s a tasty sort of cold brew that i could easily get behind this summer – something my other half might even enjoy drinking! thanks fiddling!

Sad to be nearing the end of this tea:( It’s a nice sweet tart blend. Much lighter in flavor than I had imagined, but thankfully so. I love the sweet lemon and tart berry in this fruit blend. I needed this as a refreshing cup today after so many caffeinated teas today!

3 steeps (cold brewed) is more than this tisane can handle. It’s pretty much just colored water at this point. Bleh.

(Now to the real reason for the update)
Yates is out of surgery, though it was rough on him, so he’s still in the oxygen tent (and hating it, according to the ICU tech). The really bad news is that we still don’t know what’s wrong with him. We just now have a ton of biopsy samples to send to the lab.

Thanks for all of the well wishes!

Merry Christmas evening Steepster!

This is the 2nd year I’ve gotten Teavana tea gifts from by brother. It isn’t my favorite place to buy tea, but I will not look a gift horse or a gift tea in the mouth. :-P

This is one I haven’t had before and thought I’d brew some up tonight after a long day filled with food & presents. I am tasting mostly lemon in this with a little bit of strawberry and apple. It’s pretty tart but probably very full of vitamin C. My gift also included a bag of the rock sugar so I threw a few of the little pieces into my cup and that made this more palatable. I actually liked this better than I thought I would but I’m not sure I will need anymore once this supply runs out. I bet it would be good mixed with green tea so I might need to try that.

My gift to myself included a subscription to the BBC History magazine on the Kindle so I might have to curl up later with that and some more tea. :)

Dear Makers of the Fridge,
Celebrities and beautiful actors all over the world endorse appliances that tout glass doors, double doors, water and ice dispensors, humidity controls, wireless operation, and magic.
But why do fridges never fit a 1 litre drink pitcher, specifically one filled with tea. It only ever fits in that one spot on the inside of the door but only if there is nothing else in the fridge. WTF. Every other shelf if like 3 mm too short. Just because I want to have a pitcher in the fridge, doesn’t mean I don’t have anything else in the fridge, like milk and eggs, a few bottles of water for company, pickles and various pickled objects. Please make a decent tea accommodating fridge, magic not needed but willingly accepted.
Sincerely,
Everyone

Anyway, I couldn’t fit this container into the fridge so I counter top brewed it for about 12 hours. Didn’t turn out as good as icing or as cold brewing. It was very, very weak, quite disappointing. I could taste a bit of the lemon but it was not good lemon, very artificial, only slightly sweet, but not sweet enough to give it much taste.

I need a new fridge.

Thank you so much to VariaTEA for this awesome sample.

i love this tea….. it reminds me exactly of the strawberry lemonade you can get at red robins =0). and VariaTEA totally spoiled me and sent me a ton of it! thank you so much!

i will be sipping this tonight in order to sleep early for my shifted exam (it was supposed to be tonight) tomorrow morning. very weird though…. she sent it to me because i love it so much, which i do, and yet my review is gone? hmph.

one more exam and i can study tea for 3 weeks…. and work repainting my noise cancelling headphones from hot pink to something (anything) but hot pink. i have nothing against pink…. i’m just not one of the guys that wears it, especially not with screaming red hair.

thank you VariaTEA!!!

There’s a Teavana in the mall that one of my classes is in (I know, a legit university in a mall… so weird!), so I popped in the other day to pick some of this up for work. It’s perfect because I don’t need to stock any additives, it’s sweet but not ridiculous, and I can just leave the bits in my mug until I’ve finished drinking it.

I really like the flavour of this one, and I think it’s the lack of hibiscus that really makes this tea taste better to me than David’s Strawberry Ginger.

(The ingredients on the Teavana website are different than those on the tea page. Apple pieces, rosehip peels, apple slices, strawberry slices, strawberry pieces, marigold petals, citric acid, flavoring (strawberry, lemon, lime). Maybe they also use a different strawberry flavour… who knows.)

When I was in junior high my friends and I would head straight to the local deli after school for one thing—Bubbilicious gum. There were a million different flavors but my favorite was always strawberry lemonade (and later, raspberry lemonade). I’m not sure why, but that stuff was like mana from heaven for a group of gossipy 13-year-olds. Chewy, overly sweet and utterly delicious.

This is one of the blends I got during the Heavenly sale, and upon opening the bag I was instantly transported back to that time. Hot summer days spent sitting on walls blowing bubbles, watching small town life pass us by. Idle chatter about who was dating who, as if at 13 you really could date something. As much as I disliked junior high and high school there were some shining happy moments thrown in, many of them revolving around Bubbilicious gum. And this tisane smells JUST like my favorite, strawberry lemonade! Like identical.

Of course that means it’s sugary-sweet, even without sugar. It’s got a strong lemon and strawberry flavor though without the tartness you’d associate with lemonade. It’s smooth and rather one-note, without the depth you’d expect from an actual tea blend. Granted, perhaps this isn’t anything special, but sipping it right now I’m brought right back to those shimmering summer days even though it’s snowing rather heavily outside. A+ for nostalgia, B- for flavor, but I’m still really enjoying it! I imagine this would be best in the summer, more like cooling juice than tea really, though I’m finding that is true of many of Teavana’s herbal blends.

I think(?) that I had some of this tea up at the cottage as well, and it was also pretty delicious! Very tart, but a good sort of tart; absolutely delicious. Another blend I’d love to try again!

I also had a blueberry black (that I thought was from H&S, but am not certain about as they also had Teavana’s Blueberry Bliss up there), and a tea that was iced one day, but I don’t recall what it was. Mmmmm, tea….