It’s nearly the New Year here on the East Coast, so I decided to relax a little bit before the party I have to attend and have some caffeine-free stuff. So I pulled out more TG stuff, specifically, Strawberry Pepper.
When I heard that they had a strawberry pepper tea, I leapt at the chance to try it! I love it when sweet blends with savory (an aside: if you’ve ever had Moroccan food, they do a great job of blending the two), so I couldn’t pass this up. The leaves smell pretty much entirely of strawberry. It’s a very juicy-tart strawberry. Not particularly overly sweet, like a vanilla-strawberry. Just a plain strawberry. There’s a bit of a rooibos smell underlying the tea. Not very strong, but it’s present.
It steeps up to a very pretty strawberry-red, and the smell coming off the cup is a deep, juicy strawberry. So if you like strawberries, this will definitely get you pumped to taste it. The taste… is interesting! It’s actually a bit more watery than I expected it to be. I wanted a more robust strawberry taste. I might need to steep this a bit longer, even though I steeped it at the amount that TG suggested. The rooibos flavor is completely overwhelmed by the strawberryness. There’s flashes of subtle woodsy sweet, but it’s really just a base to hold up the strawberry flavor.
As for the pepper… it didn’t really come out strong in this cup. There was a slight tingling sensation on my tongue, but it wasn’t a flavor. It was more of a feeling. Maybe my peppercorns all dipped to the bottom of the bag, but I made sure to shake it. Maybe I just didn’t get enough of the peppercorn in there. Anyway, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t manifest itself as a full flavor, but rather as a bit of heat.
I’m not the biggest fan of strawberries, and I tend to like them somewhat on the sweeter side, or mixed with something creamy (like vanilla-ish things. So if you like tart-ripe strawberries, you’d probably like this. This one would probably be pretty interesting iced as well. And maybe even sweetened a little bit, if you want it to have more of a sweeter strawberry flavor.
Overall, though, I think this is a great herbal to relax with and sip. I actually feel like it’s more of a daytime tea than a nighttime one, and it tastes very summary. It’s not particularly a favorite of mine, but I could see someone else really liking this one and getting into its unique flavor profile. It’s a bit fruity and one-note for me. I prefer a bit more body and oomph to my tea-drinking experience.
