Mermaid

(52teas (Anne) 2022: 177)

M is for… Mermaid!

Made sure to bring this tea along on my travels. I didn’t remember at all what flavours were in it, but it ended up being a nice coconut/blueberry green tea. Couldn’t really taste the other flavours (lime, lime leaves, pineapple).

If you like piña coladas, and getting sung to a rocky death by sirens…

The brewed tea smells fruity. This tastes very tropical, fruity, and a little sweet. The blending balance is excellent, as I’ve come to expect from 52teas. Thanks!

Happy National Unicorn Day! Oh look, I have another tea with a magical creature in the title (and one I happen to collect, too… I have a whole bathroom done in mermaids!) (Also taking this as my Ode to Tea M entry!)

I prefer my green tea cold brewed, and this one seemed like a good candidate regardless, so that is how I prepared it! The steeped tea smells like coconut, blueberry, and lime, which I think will be an interesting combination.

On the tongue, I’m picking up a lot of pineapple flavor which I couldn’t detect on the nose, and I really like it; the coconut is soft and creamy and it has a nice mellow pina colada backdrop. I do get the blueberry, not as strongly as I was picking it up in the scent, but it hits about midsip and has a sweetness to it (likely from the coconut). I taste the lime right at the end of the sip; the sweet pina colada sort of fades and then my tongue is hit by a hint of blueberry and a slightly tangy lime (lime and coconut is one of my favorite flavor combinations, and I really like how they are working together here, as well). Very thirst-quenching and refreshing!

Sipdown (257)

Thank you for sharing this one, Sil!

There is something a touch bitter here. I think it’s the base tea. Beyond that I get blueberry and coconut but both flavours are a bit muted. Overall, I don’t particularly care for this one but that’s probably for the best since there are so many other 52 Teas blends that I enjoy. Can’t love them all.

My sampler was packed with coconut flakes, so I’m surprised I’m not getting more coconut flavor from this blend. The primary flavors are lime and blueberry, with just a hint of tropical pineapple and coconut. The base tea has a seaweed taste that (to me) doesn’t go especially well with the fruit flavorings, but it does match the name!

So I still had a whole thing of water left over from the ETS tea (which I had no desire to re-steep), so I figured I’d go for this instead.

Mmm, yes that is much better. There is a gentle sweetness to this tea, along with strong umami flavors and other savory notes. Warm hay and sweetgrass present, and there’s just enough coconut there to give it some complexity. It’s just tropical enough that it is pleasant, but not overpowering. Very tasty. I don’t drink enough of these 52teas Green Teas, as I only have the Breville 1-Touch to use as a kettle, and I get downright paranoid about dropping it on the trek from my bedroom to my kitchen. (Yes, my Breville is in my bedroom. I don’t have enough counter space in my teeny apartment kitchen.) Pretty much anything you see me brew up on here of the Black or Herbal variety, the water comes from my Bunn. (It’s a hybrid device with an attachment for just making hot water.)

Anyways, this is tasty. Another hit from Anne. Great job, as usual.

Sample from an order. Not one I would have thought to grab even though I do love a good green tea when pineapple is involved. This was light and refreshing and thoroughly enjoyable. Rest of this is set aside for variaTEA to enjoy ( also side note it makes me laugh that my iPad autocorrects variaTEA’s name to have the tea in caps ) lol

This is a tea that matches its name well. It does smell of seaweed and water and some undetermined spicy aromas of faraway tropical lands. The taste is savory and umami: seaweed, cooked spinach, succulent grass and some exotic spicy notes.

All strands blend well and create a unique and memorable taste that I had no desire to dissect. Very mermaidy indeed. Usually green tea-based desert blends leave me underwhelmed but not this one really impressed me.

I cold-brewed the very last bit of this tea that I have for my “Tea with spinach/artichoke notes” for the Steepster Scavenger Hunt. When I blended this, I went with an amazing Japanese Tamaryokucha tea for the base which has a strong vegetal note that reminded me vaguely of seaweed. Although, generally speaking, I don’t care for seaweed, I did enjoy the vegetal notes of this tea that is somewhere between broccoli, asparagus and cooked spinach & I thought that it would work well as a “Mermaid”/Oceanic type of base for a tea. (On a side note, after I blended this tea, I found some cool little mermaid tail sprinkles that would have been cool in this blend, so maybe someday I will need to do something else mermaid-y so I can get those sprinkles. Or maybe I’ll just make cupcakes for my daughter.)

Anyway, I was a little worried that maybe this tea wouldn’t hold up because it IS almost 3 years old now & coconut. But, I was hopeful that maybe, because the package was still sealed, that maybe, just maybe it’d be OK. And it is. I get a strong vegetal taste from it, but I still get a soft creaminess from the coconut, notes of pineapple, a touch of blueberry and a kiss of lime. Actually, it’s more like a combination of these flavors rather – like a medley – than one specific flavor that is particularly strong. The strongest flavor here is the green tea – I don’t know if that’s because I cold-brewed it or that the flavors have softened because of age. That’s not meant to be a slight on the tea because I am enjoying it & this turns out to be a really good choice for the tea with spinach/artichoke notes. Also – it is a tea – so I don’t really dislike it when I can taste the tea.