It’s always so nice when you write a big lot of text for something and then your computer gets crazy and you lose all of it. Thanks very much, laptop. You’ve done well!
Anyway, I was surprised to see that many reviews if this either made no mention of the berry element or downplayed it. To me, it’s primarily a black tea (an assertive one that isn’t dominated by the other flavours) with the second most noticeable flavour being very much the red berries and then caramel. If I’m really looking for it, I can taste just a “vibe” of the bergamot (mostly at the end up the mouthful), but it’s really only a wisp.
The taste and smell of this in a latte reminded me a lot of these chocolates you can get in Australia called strawberry Caramello Koalas. If you’re not from Australia, you probably have no idea what that is, but it’s just milk chocolate filled with a strawberry caramel centre and I’m pretty sure it’d be no different to any of those generic-type boxed chocolates with the gooey strawberry centres. I don’t like any of that, so the fact that the tea reminded me of it wasn’t really a selling point, but the tea was actually pretty enjoyable. It was perhaps a bit too dessert-y with the sweetener and soy milk, but I thought even the aroma of the brewed tea with nothing added was quite heavy on the berries and caramel, so I don’t know think it’s one of those teas that gives you a lot of options. I don’t know—it just felt like a bit much to me to have that strong berry plus caramel plus sweetener plus soy milk. Arguably, you could leave out the sweetener and milk, but when it smells like something from a chocolate box, that doesn’t seem like a good option.
If you don’t like black tea to begin with, you probably won’t like this. It could be that I’m more sensitive to the taste than other people because I haven’t drank that much black tea in my life, but anyway. Also, the dry smell isn’t really an indication of the taste of this tea. It smelled much more citrus-sy (when I didn’t even taste citrus in the brewed version), but really, I always smell these bags before I brew them and the Kusmi ones often don’t taste like their dry smell.
I have another bag of this from my sampler pack to try, but my feeling is basically that this is a nice tea for a change of pace, but it’s not a “regular basis” to for me. It’s just a bit too weird to have all these elements coming together at once in one drink.
