I haven’t the foggiest what’s in this stuff. Lemongrass, because I can see that. And green tea because that’s what it says it is. There are some other leafy bits of some sort mixed in that I don’t know what are. The actual green tea looks rather a lot like this kokeicha I had from Nothing But Tea once, except here they are tiny pellets instead of tiny needles. The kokeicha, for those who wonder, is matcha is made into a dough which is then kneaded and passed through a machine to create these uniform little needles, which are then dried and subsequently brewed same you would regular green tea’
It’s rather dark in colour, but it turns out that although the leaves, the word ‘leaf’ used in the broadest possible interpretation of the term here’ look like kokeicha, they can’t be because they haven’t disintegrated into dust. They just really are this mangled from the beginning, it seems. CTC green? O.o What a travesty.
The aroma is somewhat spicy. There’s definite lemon there, but also notes of something that I can only describe as coffee-ish. I believe my views on the various coffee blends out there are well known. Yuck to the nth degree. Nothing can ruin a good tea like a coffee bean. Just the thought of what happens to a tea if served in a coffee pot. Blech and blech again. There is a reason all the literature out there will advice readers to avoid teashops in which they are also grinding coffee. The aromatic oils of the coffee ruins the tea, there is just no two ways about that. Fact.
So yeah, one thing is coffee notes in a black tea. That’s bad enough. But in a green? Wow, that’s just unthinkable. How is it not punishable by law?
There is also a pseudo-lemon-y note from the lemongrass which I assume is what the ‘citron’ in the name refers to. I have a problem with the use of the word ‘citron’ here. I am aware that this is not danish, but ‘citron’ = ‘lemon’ in danish. As in the actual yellow fruit. So even though I know this is an english languaged tea with a ditto name, and I can’t expect it, that name makes me expect actual real lemons. Not lemongrass or verbena or whatever other pseudo-lemon flavoured stuff you can think up. Certainly not this other weird citrus fruit that the word apparently covers in english. Lemons. I can’t help it. It’s probably because I had never heard of citrons (as in the english meaning) before.
And this is very definitely not lemon
Obviously. It isn’t supposed to be either, is it, but that’s what I, try as I might, can’t help but expect.
The taste of it is a little closer to my expectations than the smell though. The first sip is heavily lemon-y and slightly astringent, so my very first thought was one of relief that I wasn’t about to have something that just totally didn’t come anywhere close to my expectations.
And then halfway through the sip, it turned so bitter I couldn’t swallow it with a straight face. I can’t tell if it’s the flavouring that does that or if it’s the nature of the leaves. I’ll have to experiment a little further with that before I can tell for sure. Right now it tastes like a combination of all of the above.
It’s not very nice. The first bit of the sip, where it still tasted nicely lemon-y, that was pretty good and refreshing, but the bitterness it turns into so quickly is just destroying it so utterly. For something lemon-y and refreshing, I believe I’m way better off sticking to the Lemon Oolong from Nothing But Tea.
