Jaf Tea

Bought my first tea of 2021… and I didn’t even realize it in the moment.

As someone who works in R&D for tea, whenever I go grocery shopping I always check the tea aisles as well as the RTD section of the store to see if any new tea brands or new flavours for existing brands pop up – it’s important for me to always pay attention to what flavours reach “grocery store level” commercial sale level. I pay attention to a lot of other stuff too, like what limited edition flavours of other very established brands pop up and if new flavours/ingredients seem to be making more of a presence overall.

Well, my local store had a big end of aisle display for this company Jaf Tea, which I had never heard of, so of course I spent a stupid amount of time reading all of the tea boxes. Without really thinking about it much at all, I ended up adding a box of the weirdest/most interesting sounding flavour to my shopping cart and it wasn’t until I got home and was unpacking groceries that I realize that this was technically my first tea buy of the year and that I had technically broken my “no buy”. Oops!

This is really interesting tasting though! The black tea isn’t the best quality; there’s some roughness to it and it steeped pretty quickly with some noticable astringent bite and a bit of bitterness. However the “creamy soursop” flavouring!? Dang that’s weird, but good too! It’s not creamy in mouthfeel/texture but it does taste like a full fat cream with this sweet and a bit tangy kind of “tropical fruit” flavour. Just a bit waxy/artificial but decidedly quite unique in the tropical notes – and it works in a strange but fun way with that cream taste. I was skeptical, but the name… Right on the money.

For $4.99 I think this was worth buying – I don’t have a lot of bagged teas in my stash, but this was a really unique one and I like the flavouring in it a lot. It’ll be good for having something so unique, tasty, and interesting for travel or convenience.

This tea is actually better than I have expected.

I don’t know if the mango and papaya flavours are right; but certainly some fruit ones which are tropical. I mean, it was quite similar to banana and mango, but not distinctive enough to say: Oh, have I took a bite of banana/mango? But it is flavoured just right (and not feeling artificial) and base tea is still very present too, although no notes from tea itself. Not tannic or astringency, but without it it would be somehow bland.

Quite surprised with this one.

I had a cup of this with dinner and it’s not bad. The smell is really good—I’m not sure what kind of fruit is in here but it smells and tastes good with the Ceylon. The cup is a little bit bitter but it’s not terrible. I’ll have to see if they have more of this set out at breakfast tomorrow.