This was without a doubt the worst cup of tea I’ve had in a long long time. It even surpassed Adagio’s white cucumber concoction in terms of vileness. And it probably wasn’t even the tea’s fault.
See, this is a backlog from this afternoon on the way home from work. I’ve got a 45-50 minutes train commute and sometimes I buy some sort of coffee drink to go for the trip. Today though, I was super-sleepy (through every fault of my own) so I thought it would be good with some caffeine on the trip. Coffee does indeed have plenty of caffeine, but cappucinos and cafe lattes also have lots of milk, and milk is not all that good at keeping people awake. So something without milk and with caffeine in it. I thought, “hey, this place has Numi teas! Why not give that a shot?” Of course they only had a smaller selection and not the chocolate pu-erh one, so I picked this one because it sounded nice with a vanilla tea.
Erm yeah. Staying awake. Decaf. NEVERMIND!
So that was the first mistake.
I get a to-go cup of water of a temperature that means business, but with my mitten on it was possible to hold the cup. I steeped and then removed the lid from the cup, so I could drink it and get the benefit of the aroma as well. And this is where is started to go wrong, Steepsterites.
The aroma was extremely fruity and sweetly berry-like. Vanilla was there as a hint and I think the thing that added the sweetness.
The tea itself was pretty weak in flavour, and what flavour that actually was there was largely cardboard-y and rooibos-y. Very much on the rooibos, actually, in spite of the bag wrapper not saying anything about it containing rooibos. In fact nowhere I look does it say anything about it containing rooibos so I can only conclude that it’s not supposed to be there.
There was no vanilla in the flavour at all. Not one bit. As a matter of fact there wasn’t even any black tea in the flavour either. Nothing. Not even a hint. All I could pick up was a watered down plain rooibos, which a) wasn’t what I wanted, b) I don’t even like that much and c) doesn’t exist in this place. In fact you could have blindfolded me and let me taste it and I would have said it was a rooibos and I probably wouldn’t even be
the slightest bit in doubt.
How in the name of all that is sweet and wholesome could this have gone so dreadfully dreadfully wrong? I wasn’t expecting perfection but I thought I’d at least be able to get a mediocre cup of tea. I think I know the answer to this.
Cardboard. Cup.
I’ve had that happen before. A cardboard cup that stole all the flavour from an otherwise strong and oversteeped teabag. It was like drinking just hot water. I think this phenomenon was at fault here too. It stole most of the flavour and warped what was left of it into the rooibos-y stuff.
I’m not going to give this a rating due it the nature of the taste-thieving cup. Under other circumstances this might actually have been a lovely tea, but right now after having tried it, I still have no clue what it tastes like.
Let this be a lesson for you, Steepsterites. Cardboard to-go cups = Eeeeeeeevil! Beware!
