I don’t think I’ve ever been in quite this position with a tea before. Are you ready for this, Steepsterpeeps?
This tea is pretty good. The dry leaves smell very fruity (they’re dark and I think saturated with something, which leads me to believe it’s artificial flavoring), and the steeped tea smells wonderfully creamy in addition to smelling like blueberry. The ‘blueberry’ in question smells a lot like a blueberry cereal bar — maybe nutrigrain? — which I kind of like. It’s pretty light across the board, and just sweet enough to be satisfying.
But…
It tasted familiar to me, and I couldn’t figure out why. I don’t have any blueberry tea!
Then I realized that the blueberry quality of this tea is echoed in the Golden Spring I have and love…which is not a flavored black. Golden Spring is a normal black that just happens to be one of the most savory umami-filled teas I’ve ever had (since I don’t drink many greens, I suppose), and it may have caused this very tasty blueberry tea to get bumped down a few notches. This tea’s blueberry flavor reminds me of Golden Spring, but makes me miss the brothy, savory fullness of that other tea, and its lack of astringency. Comparing the two — as my palate inevitably must — this one tastes somewhat flat.
Just another one of those situations where a personal rating scale doesn’t really match up with an ‘overall quality’ scale. This wouldn’t jump the hurdle of 71 for the former…but I would still recommend it to anybody looking for a tasty blueberry tea.
