I am not gonna lie, half of my reluctance to write these reviews this past week has been due to the fact that most of the time I have to add the tea before I write about it. This means finding a picture, and then translating whatever hilarious description the bottle has on it, which is kind of a pain. The only time it’s not a pain is in the case of the crazy blends that the Japanese seem to delight in creating, because it gives me some insight into what the hell I’ve been drinking.
This particular crazy blend, bought on a day when I was feeling a little better caught my attention because it was a morning blend. This means, apparently, that you add a bunch (8) of different kinds of grain to green tea. Also collagen. Well, collagen pretty much goes without saying really. I mean, collagen! The grains, what I can read of them are as follows: corn, roasted rice, roasted rice malt, two different kinds of barley, green tea, and “extraction from namacha” which is not really a grain but oh well. In other words, good times!
The color on this sucker is really dark, I would totally think it was an oolong or even a black tea before I thought it was a green tea. Similarly, the grains have pretty much overcome any of the original taste of the tea – especially the barley and roasted rice/rice malt/whatever. It kind of tastes like Kawa Inka, which is a caffeine-free instant coffee-like drink which tastes marginally sweeter than this stuff. Through the clever method of looking it up on Polish wikipedia and then switching to English, I have determined that this type of beverage is called “roasted grain beverage” which is why you should never let Leonardo da Quirm name anything.
Anyway, it tastes like a “roasted grain beverage” which, since the tea is supposed to be for mornings, and that type of beverage is a coffee substitute, isn’t particularly weird. It was interesting, but a bit too heavy for me that morning, would have have been better off with more oolong. And, well, the loss of the base tea flavor is kind of sad.
