The last of my three England teas. A perfect example of how my choice of tea is easily influenced. I’m not particularly interested in rose teas and I only have a little experience with them, but I was in England. It’s called English Rose. How could I not buy it? Seriously?
The dry leaves smell surprisingly fruity and sweet. Like there’s some kind of berry in it. It prompted me to take a closer look at the box. It is indeed a Ceylon and Keemun blend with rose petals in it, but it also has flavouring by something called ‘jackfruit’. I’ve never heard of that before. Turns out it’s the fruit from a tree of the mulberry family and it’s native to southern and southeast Asia.
Excuse me, but that doesn’t strike me as very English sounding. I’m just saying!
Anyway, that would account for the fruity sweet aroma. It’s present after brewing as well, but not as cloyingly sweet. It reminds me a little of an average tropical fruit flavoured black, which makes me wonder how often it’s actually used in tea flavouring. It would definitely count as a tropical fruit.
Hm. Not the best tea I’ve ever had, I have to say. It does have a good deal of rose on the back-end of the sip, but the stuff in between is just tropically flavoured black. Wikipedia tells me that jackfruit is supposed to taste sort of like a tart banana (how odd!), but I find neither tartness nor bananananess in this.
It’s drinkable. It’s even a kind of interesting flavour. But I wouldn’t buy it again. I think I’ll need a little experimentation with leaf dosage on this one.
