Une Autre Idée?

last tea of the day and a sample sipdown of that, from the lovely cteresa. Pretty sure i’d be willing to add this into my cupboard, even in a 100g quantity not because it’s the most amazing blow your socks out of the water rooibos, but because it’s lovely and pleasant and when i’ve been drinking it, i keep drinking it down without realising it. Quite pleasant on the whole, so thank you for sharing this one with me cteresa!

(on a cupboard note…added my yezi teas in today and i’m still officially under 150! – 140 to be exact… go me! Note that it’ll last long but hey, the longer the better haha)

I have been madly and deeply in love with rooibos lately. Since the first time I tried rooibos, its delightful, natural sweetness has been lingering in my mind. And this cup of Une Autre Idée was a perfect answer to my persistent craving! The comforting taste of rooibos and the flavours of ripe tropical fruits (most notably pineapple and peach) made me think I was having vacation on some small Mediterranean island… I could almost see palm trees and the blue sea! I absolutely enjoyed this tea. It is now on my shopping list! :)

For the first time since last Sunday when the haze started to hit on us, I managed late today to open my windows and breath almost fresh air. Since my living-room used to stink increasingly like a smoking bar the morning after, when all ashtrays are overflown, I was in a very good mood to have the stench removed by a nice and not too smelly breeze.
That was definitely an opportunity for a celebration. What could be better than opening a new and promising tea bag? I chose this one so that the exotic fruit flavors remind me of some great pleasures I enjoy living in Singapore.
I’m really glad I did that, as drinking this tea definitely made me happier. The flavors of tropical fruits are rather blended, but gave me the feeling that only the tropical fruits I prefer had managed to reach the bag. Isn’t that fantastic! I recognized quite early my favorite passion-fruit, some pineapple is also there and some fruit that taste both sweet and very tangy at the same time and that have a creamy texture, a bit like mangosteen but not exactly this fruit. I then decided to look over what was the mysterious guanabana and I realized it was the French corossol and the English soursop – then it was clear it was this last fruit that brought out this tangy sweet slightly sour but overall very interesting and multi-dimensional.
To be drunk hot or warm – it seems not as interesting once it cools down.
I made a second tea-pot, right after finishing the first. I’m quite sure the bag will empty itself very quickly and I’ll certainly restock this one after.

An other idea?

Another tea bag from Dustin, thank you so much! Unfortunately last from those being caffeine-free.

Steeped as suggested; 85°C water (rather closer to 90°C); steeping for 4-5 minutes.

Tastes nice, tropical and mellowed with vanilla, though I have hoped the latter would be more prominent in taste. It’s not creamy vanilla. It’s the sweet vanilla taste. Along with coconut. From tropical fruits there is a load of pineapple, but again… somehow weaker than I have been expecting, like overpowered by the rooibos base?

It’s quite complex, but somehow not my cup of tea. Quite sad; because it sounds so good in ingredients list. What a shame. Especially for that price tag!

Advent day 6. It’s a rooibos, so I get that woodsy soapy taste. On top of that taste is a pleasant red fruit flavor, which is nice. It reminds me of many red fruit green teas that I’ve had, but I can’t put a name on the exact fruit. I’m sure if I had this flavor on another type of tea base I’d like it, but rooibos is a no go for me.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B5wx4N_A4aC/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

This came as a “sachet mystere” (or mystery sachet) in my Theodor order which arrived fresh from France just this morning. Yes, despite having just been in Paris again a little over a week ago, I didn’t bring any back and therefore shelled out the exorbitant shipping prices for here in the EU. In any case, they were generous with the samples they included and Une Autre Idee was the first one I’ve made this morning.

In the mug, it’s a gorgeous red-tinged rooibos with a pleasant, sweet smell of tropical fruits that are rather natural instead of cloying/too artificial. The smell alone is delicious, but the taste delivers as well. The pineapple and coconut are at the forefront but not so overpowering that they seem too perfumey. The floral flavor, which I can only attribute to the marigold, comes in softly after, giving it an herbaciousness that really suits it. This is another one I can imagine being lovely iced, but hot is just as pleasant and I may include a larger serving in my next order!

This is a sample that I took from the EU TTB almost three whole years ago and then stored very poorly, so I really didn’t expect much from it. The scent when I poured the water over was bursting with mouthwatering tropical fruit goodness, which kind of took me aback and kindled some hope, and then when I took my first sip I was blown away with how much flavour this still has, and just how tasty it is. I agree with some reviews that the flavours aren’t really all that distinct, and more a mesh of ‘tropical’, but I can definitely pick out the passionfruit, and something which might be pineapple or might be the guanabana, which if I remember correctly from my Ten blend has a sort of pineapple/strawberry/banana flavour. The rooibos is very much a background note, and the flavours are the real stars of this tea. I added a little under half a sugar, and they pop even more, with a lovely contrast between sweetness and mouthwatering tang. This is one which is definitely better off hot, because my cup is starting to cool now and the flavours are becoming less bold and the rooibos slightly more noticeable. That being said, it’s still a really tasty cup of tea, and if I had tried it while I still had the box, it would most likely have been one I kept!

Sipdown 76/393

This tea was taken from the EU TTB round 2.

I just had to Google guanabana as I’ve never heard of it before, Wiki has it listed as Soursop which I have heard of but I don’t believe I’ve tried it before. That makes comparing this tea impossible so I will just have to go by my own sense of taste.

It smells sweet and berry like though impossible for me to clarify which berry. At any length it does smell very exotic and rather juicy, a nice and interesting start.

Once steeped it has the same fruity scent that is somewhat berry like. It’s a little sour but also does have some sweetness present.

Flavour is mild, no Rooibos flavour as such which is a positive sign but the fruit flavours are just very light and they disappear as quickly as they come. It’s lightly fruity and again berry like but also somewhat perfumed which leaves a slight dry after taste.

This tea just isn’t for me, it’s a pleasant enough tea but just not for my taste buds. Happy to have tried it though :)

I wish I knew what the trick is to rooibos. What makes a good and a not-so-good flavoured rooibos so completely different? When I first had delicate, French-style rooibos I could barely believe it was the same thing as the cardboardy German stuff. Do they water the bushes with gold? Sing to them? It can’t all be in the flavouring. No flavour profile, no matter how adeptly put together, could ever mask that much cardboard.

Anyway – what I wanted to get to was that this reminded me a whole lot of a horrible Teavana tea experience I had with a blend called Rooibos Tropica. It smelled tasty from a distance, but then as you came closer, the citrus turned all chemical and brewed up it was seriously the horror of horrors. Cold-brewed it was seriously window cleaner in a cup. I haven’t been able to drink citrus-flavoured rooibos since, so I figured I’d better give this a try, seeing as it seemed a suitable back-up-on-that-citrus-rooibos-horse contender.

This is the sample that had leaked ever so slightly, so smelling puts me back in the state of excitement one unavoidably enters when receiving one’s swap box. (Oooh!) This one you can smell forever without it turning chemical, too – the citrus/rooibos balance is perfect and there’s a sweet note rounding everything off. This is more or less what you get in the cup as well, but the aftertaste has a warm, slightly creamy, vanilla-esque note to it that is very nice.

This is just good, delicately flavoured, high-quality rooibos.

I don’t need a citrus rooibos in my permanent cupboard, but if I did, this one would be a very fair contender. In terms of a rooibos-off between French tea merchants, Mariage Frères would still be in the lead, however.

Thank you for sharing, cteresa!

[Sample from the second round of the EU Travelling Box, spring 2014.]