Once again, I was sucked in by the “new tea!” at David’s Tea. I went in to smell this and the Canada Day blend and left with a pre-filled bag of both. As a “white” (I use quotation marks because I have trouble seeing tea amongst all the other ingredients) this is one of the more expensive teas at DT – I think it was $10 for 50 g. In general I have no problem with white teas costing more but since I have trouble seeing any tea in here at all, I think this is a classic case of DT over-charging and hoping nobody notices. I bought the 32 g bag for $6.50 and feel a little ripped off by how little there is in here. There won’t be as many pots of this as I would hope for the cost, especially since they recommend 2 tsp of tea to a cup.
Cost woes aside, the smell of this dry tea is amazing. I have had a couple mango teas in my day and found none of them captured the smell or taste of mango. This one has the ripe sweet mango smell bang on. This is very exciting! Once I poured the water into the pot, I noticed a lot of little floaty bits that escaped my fine metal strainer. I know it’s picky of me, but I hate when bits make it into my cup…it keeps it steeping and generally sort of grosses me out. Minus points for cost and floaty bits, but big points for smell. Lets see how taste holds up…
The liquor is really quite yellow and honestly smells still quite a bit like mango. Maybe more mango juice than fresh mango, but that’s okay. Still doing better than my other mango teas. First sips are bright and juicy. Not necessarily mango but definite tropical fruit with an almost sharp taste. No tea flavour at all, but I’d be shocked if there was. This is actually really satisfying as a mango taste for me. If you’re not looking for tea flavour, this is a tea that I would think has a wide range of appeal. I could imagine enticing my grandmother with this one (but only if I told her it was herbal…she doesn’t like true tea to not taste like tea. If I called it a tisane, she’d be all over it). Similarly, I think my 2,3 and 6 year old cousins would love this iced.
I really like this and on a taste scale it deserves mid 80s. I don’t know that I will buy more because it’s just more expensive than I would prefer. It’ll be interesting to see if this can manage a re-steep, since tisanes aren’t so great for that usually and this might as well just be a tisane. I look forward to the adventure, though!
PS – Thank you Mother Nature for giving me a day cool enough to enjoy a hot cuppa in my (always hot) apartment without complaining! I think it would almost be worth having air conditioning so I could still have tea in the morning and at night.
