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Scheherazade shared some of this with me, and it has taken me almost the entire bag to work out what I think about it. I don’t think I’ve ever had a banana flavoured black tea before. The only one I can think of which had banana in it was a white tea blend from AC Perchs, but that one also had some other fruits. A large part of me is a bit surprised that flavouring anything at all with banana is even possible in the first place. I don’t know why my brain wants it to be so impossible, but there you are.

The recommendations called for boiling water which is something, in a flavoured black, I routinely ignore because I find that nine out of ten flavoured blacks yield a better result when the water is slightly cooler. About the temperature normally used for oolongs tend to suit me best.

So the first time I had it, I brewed it in my own way, and ended up with a cup of tea which both smelled and tasted like nuts. That was it. Just nuts. No banana or any other sort of fruit in sight at all.

Next I tried it with boiling water which had just cooled enough to no longer be bubbling. That gave me a great deal of banana flavour on the first few sips, but eventually it cooled down to a temperature where it’s actually possible to drink it without burning the mouth and we’re back to having a cup that tastes almost entirely like nuts.

Now, I like nuts as a tea flavouring. I’ve even discussed this very recently and how it rather surprised me, but you see, I’m attracted to nut flavoured teas that are actually flavoured with nuts. A tea that tastes like nuts when it’s supposed to taste like something else just doesn’t really work for me.

Because I’m lazy today and a bit bothered by Girl Tummy™ I decided to see if this is a flavoured black that will continue to be unusual and actually give a passable resteep.

Not quite. It’s a bit thin, but now it tastes like banana again, at least at the beginning of the cup. By the end, at this point, I’m fully expecting it to be nuts.

It’s difficult to rate this. If it had kept that banana flavour all the way through and not gone nutty, I would probably give it around 85. While the nutty flavour is quite nice as it is, it’s not banana and therefore I can’t give it more than 70. Therefore, I’m going to aim for the middle ground here.

I’m still quite curious about the whole banana flavouring concept, though. I might see if I can investigate this further.