Fruit Fusion Green Tea

Not bad, not bad. I don’t like hibiscus, as I’ve mentioned many times, but, when it’s not brewed too long it doesn’t taste bad at all. And because I only steep green teas about 2 minutes (which is exactly how long I brewed this) the hibiscus didn’t have enough time to get too tart or syrupy. It adds a nice berry-like tartness to the cup which melds nicely with the orange notes.

Overall, it’s pretty good. It’s got a sweet and sour thing going on, with the tart notes most noticeable near the tail end of the sip and in to the after taste, while the sweeter notes are up front.

An interesting cuppa.

Sweet and sour is right! I was expecting this to be very tart – I drank straight hibiscus tea for quite awhile until I burned out on it, so recognized the smell right away. The color is quite pink for green tea, but also a bit orangey – I’d say a rich salmon hue overall :)

Upon sipping, at first the flavor is just like the smell: sour and fruit. But then I got a lot of sencha on the middle- and after-taste, which surprised me (pleasantly!) The sencha gives a really solid base to the tea, adding some savoriness to balance the sour. I often add honey to fruit teas, but something about the sencha flavor made me want to drink this straight – it just blended so interestingly with the fruit, I didn’t want to overwhelm that with sweetness and lose the complexity.

There is still a lot of hibiscus and rosehip flavor overall (the orange is less prominent to me), but this is a pretty good blend considering the tendency of hibiscus to dominate anything it touches.

I expect this will last more than one steep, and I’m curious how the balance will shift. It would probably also be very good cold!

thanks again Naturestealeaf.com for providing samples for me to try! I was a bit worried about this one — rosehips, hibiscus, and orange peel? Hmm.. but I haven’t had much sencha, even though I love it (usually the sencha I have is in Genmaicha.) This blend looks like a good mix of sencha and fruit. I’m not sure if I waited too long to steep after it cooled, since the steep color was a light pink, so I steeped for five minutes rather than the recommended one minute. As I predicted, the sencha disappeared behind the usually stronger other flavors of orange and hibiscus. But it IS interesting that the sencha had a flavor that I had assumed was only from the popcorn and rice in genmaicha! I don’t love this tea, but it isn’t terrible. (I really don’t like orange, rosehips or hibiscus in ANY tea, so it isn’t Nature’s Tea Leaf’s fault.) This MUST be the worst offering from Nature’s Tea Leaf, because all of their other teas look delicious!

My laptop died a few days ago (though I think the data is all going to be recoverable, I just need to reformat my HD due to a lovely corrupted OS), so I am SO behind on my tasting notes! I actually have a desktop for emergencies, but I was so sad about my poor little laptop that I didn’t have the heart to write about tea. It’s been with me for almost 6 years, the disk drive hasn’t worked for 3, it’s old and beaten up but I’ve grown very attached to it. So I actually had this tea 3 days ago (!) and never logged it. Oops! I have a lot of catching up to do, but I thought I’d start with my last sample from Nature’s Leaf Tea.

I cold brewed this overnight—sure, it’s cool outside, but I drink iced tea all year round! The color of this was almost hot pink when it was done, very pretty! Though usually that kind of coloration comes from hibiscus, here it’s the rosehips. And it’s tart because of them—quite tart! Not hibiscus icky tart, it’s nice and refreshing, though it’s hard to drink a lot at once due to the kind of sour aspects. They’re balanced by the orange quite well, and there really is a lot of orange flavor! I feel like the sencha is kind of lost though, since rosehip and orange are such strong flavors. It took a bit of getting used to, but it’s an interesting flavor combo! A bit sour/tart for my palette, but good nonetheless.