When I was at Ikea the other day, I couldn’t resist picking this up. First off, it’s rhubarb flavored. I’ve never had a rhubarb tea before (shoot, I’ve only had rhubarb itself maybe twice, both times in pie form) and I’m always up for something novel, even if it ends up icky. Second, it was cheap ($2.50 for 3.5oz!) so even if it was icky, I wasn’t going to feel bad about blowing a couple of bucks on it. Third, it’s tea and apparently I have a disease that makes me compulsively purchase tea whenever I see it for sale.
This tea is definitely more vanilla than it is rhubarb but it’s a pink-tinted vanilla. There’s vanilla but it has a noticeable hint of something else that just tastes lightly pink. (Or maybe that’s just me. Does anyone else ever taste colors? And I’m not talking about when you eat fingerpaints.) Eventually I figured out what the pink taste made me think of – lychee. Yeah, yeah, I know. This is rhubarb. But I still think this tastes like a lychee tea, though more on the lychee fruit end, not lychee flower end (no hint of rose). Of course, this could be because my only exposure to rhubarb has been in pie-form and, since I didn’t add half a cup of sugar to my mug this morning, I don’t really taste the similarities. Not that I’m much more versed in lychee – I think I’ve had lychee once but I have had a couple of different lychee teas and that has to count for something, right?
