Caribe

Today in tea drinking, our friend Rosehips begins to panic slightly about the size of her cupboard, and the fact that more teas will be arriving soon. So lets join her as she works her way through various samples.
Harney & Sons really, really want me to like this, as this is the third sachet I’ve got from them of this. Its not the blend for me. I’m not major on tropical flavors, and this just misses the mark for me.
Oh well. Its gone, and I can breath that much easier. Sheesh, Still so much tea to drink!

I tried a sample of this quite a while ago and absolutely LOVED it. I loved it so much that I asked Harney NZ if they would consider starting to import it as our country didn’t stock it at the time. Well, we do now and I’m very grateful to Harney NZ and their fantastic customer service!

Firstly, this smells AMAZING. I’ve caught my man going into my tea cupboard just to smell this and he is not exactly a fan of tea or the room it takes up…

The guava is the standout scent and flavour with hibiscus following. I don’t taste coconut (granted my bag seems to be devoid of coconut flakes), more of a melange of delicious tropical fruits. If a sweetener were to be used, I think various kinds of honey would compliment the flavours very well.

Since this is a green/black blend, I make sure to give the bag a good shake before scooping as all the green tea tends to settle on the bottom. Steeping wise, I treat this as a green, ignoring Harney’s suggestions to brew as you would a black tea as it then comes out very bitter I find. I also find this quite strong, so use less tea than I would usually. Today I’m doing a test steeping, just to make sure I’m 100% happy before making a huge iced batch.

Something that has rubbed me the wrong way is the review on Harney’s website. Specifically the text “Being a woman, she had to make it look pretty, and she added in flowers, the yellow of marigolds and blue of cornflowers”. Some men like making things look pretty, and not all women enjoy doing so either. Just saying.

TheTeaFairy wrote on this package that it tastes like Juicy Fruit gum. I can see that, but you have to look way down deep behind the floral. There is something cloyingly floral in this one. Offensively floral, and I can’t get past it. “The exotic tea fuses hibiscus, guava, coconut and strawberry, accented with marigolds and cornflowers mellifluously” No guava, no coconut, no strawberry – just vague fruit drowning in some annoying floar.
Sorry this doesn’t work for me. :((

SIPDOWN!

And i totally deserve brownie points from Kittenna for this once because…the lovely lala sent me enough of a sample for 2 cups of this delight and i’m choosing to have a “normal person cup” so that I can tuck away the other cup for kittenna to try because it was also on her list of teas to order to try! This likely needs to be brewed as a green, or closer to it than a black. i think at the higher temps it would just become bitter and you’d miss out on the delightful fruity flavours.

I would like to try this iced some time because i think it would be a fantastic iced brew. The smell of this one just makes me happy. I don’t get much coconut, rather the guava is like HEEEEYO! lookit me!

Thank you again Lala for this one!

Woohoo! My tea fairy came today and left me a mountain of tea in a gorgeous looking and gorgeous smelling box. Literally. The tea is from TheTeaFairy (she knows how to put together a swap, doesn’t she?) and because of her, tonight I’m totally blissful. Caribe, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata as we speak, steepster and the sweet anticipation of some pages from a good book. God, let me enjoy the simple pleasures for as long as possible!

I picked this to start tonight because it’s so damn fragrant. I have to isolate it also so I peeled the label written by TheTeaFairy and slapped it on a brand new tin. Stuffed caribe in there, ziploc and all. I have a feeling it won’t be around for long. It’s good but it is way more fragrant than flavourful.

To me it smells a lot like Kokomo green — the difference being of course than once brewed, this tea is enjoyable whereas Kokomo Green was the worst thing I ever put in my mouth. :)

I added sugar, I was afraid honey would add a new flavour to the mix and there’s already so much going on. It tastes like tropical fruit. People say guava. I’ll go with it because I know I don’t taste pineapple and it’s not coconut. There’s a gum that tastes like this. It’s not juicy fruit though.

Anyway, brews like most Harney’s black teas. Around 3 minutes, boiling, brews a dark brown colour and very aromatic. The sip is mostly base at first and then all the fruity flavours take over and leave a long lingering aftertaste. This would probably make an awesome cold brew. So so fruity. Aftertaste is amazing. I love the aftertaste more than the actual sip. I gotta find a way to make the fruit pop more. I already added sugar but it seems like the fruit is bursting to escape if you just said the magic word. Or something.

Thank you to TheTeaFairy for this great tea. A Harney order is on the horizon so you’ve given me the chance to see more of them. It will be an epic order.

Did I mention the freakin smell of this?!? It’s to die for. You have no choice but to drink it fast because the juicy ripe fruit smell can drive one NUTS!

ETA: good second steep. Less fragrant, not much change in taste. Used just a little less water for second steep (7 oz instead of 8) and left it maybe 15 seconds longer.

Backlog:

A forgiving tea! I had brewed it as I would a black, not realizing it was a blend of green and black teas. The green did not end up bitter being subjected to the boiling water and extended brew time. No bitterness, no scorched leaf taste, nothing foul. Just tasty.

I noticed the green tea and the guava right away, and then the black tea came through in the background. I found this to be unusual given that this is a black and green tea blend – and it has been my experience that the two teas together tend to produce a more “black tea” tasting cup than a “green tea” tasting cup … but the green comes through very nicely here.

A really lovely cuppa.

For some reason I thought this was mango when I grabbed a few ounces in the store, but it’s actually guava! Which is good, because I absolutely love guava. In fact I’ve been craving it recently, since I picked up a pastry at one of the many local bakeries around me without knowing what the filling was (I guessed strawberry from the color) and it turned out to be guava and dulce de leche in the best pastry crust I’ve ever had.

Well, this tea doesn’t taste like a pastry, but it’s very strongly guava-y! The smell is deliciously tropical, and a single sniff transports me to a nice beach. The strawberry is also pretty prominent, but not overwhelming—it’s a bright strawberry flavor, not jammy or sweet. Usually I like jam-like teas, but with guava I think that would be a little weird! I’m not getting any coconut but I don’t really mind, since I think that might be a little too much going on in here.

There’s apparently hibiscus in this blend but thank god I am not really getting any. Maybe a tiny bit of tartness, but in a pleasant way. It also doesn’t brew up red/pink at all like blends with hibiscus usually do. I think this is really a summer blend, but sometimes it’s nice to take a little tea vacation in the middle of winter!

Thanks to Sil for saving the last little bit of this one to try (originally from Lala!). Also, sipdown! 798.

So this tea? Super, super potent! It smells like a tropical candy, and I can’t quite figure out which fruits are comprising this tropical aroma. I see guava listed, but it’s really not guava for me. Passionfruit, perhaps?

Anyhow, I opted to steep this as a green (though I don’t recall how long I infused for… I intended 2 min, but I think it may have gotten 2.5). The flavour is just as tropical-flavoured as the aroma, which is certainly nice (and not usually what happens with such delicious-smelling teas). I can’t taste the green tea at all. However, even though this tea is definitely quite tropical, I’m not quite sure I like it. There’s a bit of an odd, almost smoky flavour in the background (black tea?) and I feel like it could really use some sugar in order to taste “right”, as in, all these tropical flavours without any real sweetness to speak of is throwing me off.

Overall, certainly an interesting tea, but I’m glad all I had was enough for a cup, because my curiousity has been thoroughly satisfied. Thanks Lala and Sil!

ETA: Second infusion (in my totally awesome forest bubble cups from DT that I bought a few weeks ago to match my teapot!) was quite similar and still quite fruity. That smoky flavour was still there making things a bit odd for me so yeah, I’m happy to have just had a single cup of this!

This sample is from the era I will call B.B.G.B.M., or before black/green blends moratorium.

In the sample packet it has an intense, fruit smell. I thought it was pineapple until I read the ingredients again. Now I’m fairly sure it’s guava. There’s a high sweet note that I’m thinking is the strawberry, and an undercurrent of hibiscus. I’m not smelling coconut, or much tea, for that matter.

The tea’s liquor is that sort of in between color that these sorts of blends tend toward. Not a deep black tea color, not a light green tea color, but somewhere between the two.

The aroma is primarily guava and strawberry, though I can smell black tea through it.

It’s actually surprisingly tasty, and I’d probably drink it again if I was offered it. But in truth, I drink guava flavored juice maybe once every year or three and I don’t think this tea, nice as it is, is enough to turn me into a regular guava consumer. That’s the primary flavor as well, though I can also taste strawberry, hibiscus, and a mixed black/green tea taste that is hard to explain. It’s fresh green but toasty, paradoxical as it sounds. It gets points for being well done and unusual, though.