Scheherazade Send Message

077/365

I heard good things about this one, so I decided to pick a box up on my last trip to the supermarket. After my disappointment with Salted Caramel, I’m glad I did – this one is so worth it! Twinings surprise me sometimes. I mean, a lot of their teas are fairly low-quality bagged affairs; very heavy on the hibiscus if they’re fruit blends, and pretty much always fannings if they’re black. I don’t mind their Everyday as exactly that – a gap filling “normal” tea that I can drink without concentrating and not feel bad about, but they’re hardly renowned for producing brilliant tea. They’re a supermarket brand, after all.

Some of their green teas are a different story, though, and sometimes it feels like they’ve concentrated all their effort on those at the expense of other parts of their line. They can still be hit and miss, but the hits (and there are some) are really worth trying. This is one of them. It absolutely nails lemon drizzle cake, beginning with a sweet lemon flavour, moving into beautiful creamy, spongy pound cake notes, and finishing up with a heavy dose of icing sugar. It’s a brilliant dessert tea, and a flavoured blend that really and truly lives up to its name. Lemon can be a hard flavour to get right – sometimes it tastes like bathroom cleaner or cough syrup, and that’s hardly desirable. Here, it manages to walk a line between artificially candy-like and too sharp/sour, resulting in a pretty perfect lemon flavour. It’s like lemon you might have baked into a cake, tempered by the sweetness it’s surrounded with, but not overpowered by it. The cake and icing sugar flavours could rival any produced by high-end boutique or gourmet brands, but what it makes me wonder is this:

If they can flavour teas like this, why aren’t they doing it all the time? There’s a lot of filler among the killer in Twining’s range, and this blend proves that they can do better than they let on. Unless it’s just a happy accident, but somehow I doubt that.

Make more teas like this one, Twinings!