Raspberry Vanilla

last tea of the evening as i’m trying to make sure to have a cup or two of some of the samples and smaller sizes that i have in my giant box of TEA! Mostly so that maybe I can manage a few sipdowns on the weekend from tea that will finally be good to be sipped down. Right now i have an abundance of teas that will take 2-3 days to be sipped down. This of course makes it hard to manage my one sipdown a day but i’ll keep trying!

I’m not a huge fan of this one, but i don’t hate it either. It’s for sure a creamy sort of raspberry tea. The one thing i don’t like as much is that i can taste the rooibosy flavour a little more than i like. I much prefer when the rooibos isn’t as distinctive in blends. likely part of the reason i enjoy della terra’s chiffon’s. In any case, this isn’t bad but nothing i feel the need to order.

Thank you Cavocorax for sharing this one with me!

Edit: And if you live in an internet black hole and haven’t visited www.google.com today….just go do it.

Oops, I forgot to log this last week! This is a decent tasting rooibos, the first time I steeped it I did for 4 or 5 minutes and got more rooibos flavor, so this time I tried 6 minutes and it is much tastier! The raspberry is the predominant flavor, and a pretty good raspberry at that, I don’t get very much vanilla, might have to try mixing this with some of my vanilla cream by DT and see if that adds a bit more. Mmm, as I keep drinking this I am liking it a lot more than the first time I had it. I maybe should have gotten more than 1 oz of this, since it was only 80 cents for an ounce! But I have quite a few other rooibos’ that I need to drink as well. But this is tasty, and I’m happy I got a bit of it at least :) hopefully it is not discontinued in case I want more in the future!

Another one from Starfevre! thanks so much! Raspberries are my favorite fruit and I love vanilla. This is very nice! It’s the perfect tea to have at night – no caffeine and a bit of a sweetness to it that could be a replacement for a dessert. It’s a lovely buzzy raspberry flavor (a bit like candy but mostly like an actual raspberry) and the vanilla evens it out on such a nice rooibos base. It’s simple yet interesting. Better than a plain rooibos, obviously! (But why drink plain rooibos when there are so many nice blends like this one?) The raspberry vanilla name isn’t lying!

This is the first of my free Zen Tea samples and I have to say it’s my new favorite Rooibos.

Dry: it smells quite strongly of raspberries and vanilla. I can see the rooibos, but I can’t smell it.

Steeped: Ok, now I can taste rich rooibos notes nicely blended with the raspberry and vanilla. It’s naturally very sweet, so I didn’t even consider adding anything. I can’t wait to try it a few more times. I think I should have enough for 2-3 more cups!

Starting to think that Roobios might just be something I try to stay away from. Not because the flavors aren’t good, but because they have an overwhelming flavor of mulch blended with all of them. Not to mention my strainers tend to let the small peices of roobios tea through and into my cup, which isn’t a terrible problem but it is a petty annoyance.

As for this tea, it took me til the second steep to be able to really enjoy any flavor. The woody ‘mulchy’ scent that I’ve complained about before was mostly overwhelming. Which was a shame because I love raspberry flavored anything. On the second cup it wasn’t a terrible tea, but not something I’d buy again.

On drinking this a second time, I enjoyed it far more. Still not a daily drinker but much more tolerable. Apparently I’ve discovered that the ‘mulch’ smell bothers me far more on certain days then on others, and as long as I find a good day, then Roobios is drinkable. Weird thing, but whatever, it just makes them for special days.

The tea smells like warm raspberry syrup and vanilla, slight hint of rooibos,faint dry woodiness, followed by a cool vanilla cream dominated raspberry, leaving a warm sweetened raspberry coulis aftertaste, leaves a drying freshening feeling in the mouth. Despite my initial description the rooibos is quite well hidden by the flavouring but acts to add depth to the tisane. The flavouring is
not as strong as the almond marzipan and chocolate mint rooibos.

I find that this tea requires a little more leaf than I usually use for Zen Teas Rooibos’, but it re-steeps really well and has a really pleasant flavour if you love raspberry desserts.

Now normally I don’t like rooibos very much, so I went out on a limb a little when I bought some of this tea from Zen Tea (and it comes in such a pretty tin too), but I find I’m actually quite enjoying this. The raspberry and vanilla flavours mingle very nicely with the rooibos so that nothing is overpowering anything else. The raspberry and vanilla flavours are definitely distinct and strong, but also well balanced and the rooibos is there but not quite as…rooibos-y as I’ve tasted in other teas.

All in all, I quite like this tea, next time I’ll try to drink it while it’s warmer rather than putting it down and forgetting about it until it’s barely above luke-warm, tasty as it is at this temperature.

Had this last night and it was delish! Good to have evening tea options. Going to have to get K to try it; he loooooves raspberry.

I enjoyed this one. Not usually a big fan of Rooibos, but I’ve never had it flavoured. So I’m just starting to experiment with flavoured teas, and this one is very nice.
Nice, fruity, raspberry and vanilla.
I added about 1/4 tsp sugar, and a little milk.