Zenobia's Garden

Day two of my custom advent calendar from Sara!

The taste of it brewed is vaguely vegetal. The color is very blue!

The flavor is very mild, but it’s… a bit vegetal and earthy. Like I just steeped some high-quality dirt. The vegetal notes are pleasant, and even the earthy flavor isn’t bad, just… not really my cup of tea. I love the color, and it could go well with other things.

Sara recommended combining it with honey and lemon juice. I didn’t have those on hand, but should pick them up when I want to brew the other sample bag.

June Wedding! Something blue! My last tea for this month’s theme, and I’m just going for plain ol’ Butterfly Pea Flower tea!

I originally got this tea around a year ago, when I wanted to do a “rainbow” theme of reviews for my tea blog for Pride Month and discovered you could make “blue tea” using this flower. At first I was discouraged because all the sources for it were overseas with high shipping, but then I found this Etsy seller, Zenobia’s Garden. They were great! The price was excellent, the shipping was fast, and it was a quite large bag of dried butterfly pea flowers, which I expect to last me quite some time!

The first time I tried it, I didn’t really care for the taste; it was a little too mellow and herbaceous, but I did enjoy it when I added lemon juice and honey (which masked most of the natural flavor). Since then, I’ve expanded my palate a lot, and find that now the “earthy” taste of the tea doesn’t really bother me.

The dry flowers smell, oddly enough, just like brocolli to me, though it doesn’t have a brocolli flavor… it does have a sort of mixed vegetable kind of taste, though. The flavor of the tea is best described as a mild earthy, herbaceous, vegetal sort of taste; I tried a chrysanthemum white tea not long ago, and found chrysanthemum to have a somewhat similar flavor to butterfly pea flower, only butterfly pea flower isn’t as sweet as the chrysanthemum, and has a stronger vegetal note. I actually really enjoy this tisane now (ah, how a palate can change over a year…). I do still like the taste of it with citrus added though, as it just compliments it really nicely, so I usually add a teaspoon of my lemon-infused honey (or, if I’m out, simply add equal parts lemon juice and honey). The odd thing is while the tea did change purple when I first got it a year ago, it doesn’t anymore. Since it’s just pH levels that cause that, you wouldn’t think the age of the tea should make any difference, but there you have it. Now that my flowers are older, my tea always stays blue, even when I add citrus and make the tea more acidic. Strange, no?