June Wedding! This something borrowed came from one of the volunteers in my department at the library, RoseAnn. She was cleaning out her cupboards and gave me some bagged teas to try some time ago. Thank you, RoseAnn! I thought I only had a single serving sealed foil bag of this, but somehow found another one inside a box with a different flavor of tea.
I was pretty tired (been working on transcribing a manga, and those Japanese kanji radical sheets are getting to my head!) so my first cuppa I just dropped the teabag into my cup and used the steeping suggestion on the bag of two minutes. Big mistake. I can’t stand the taste of paper teabags, and in hindsight, I’m not sure what possessed me to even drop a paper teabag into my teacup when I know full well I can’t stand the taste of paper teabags. The cup tasted of nothing but paper to me, and the tea itself was super weak, at that. Bleeeeeeeeeeech. It was immediately poured down the drain.
So. One teabag of this one remaining to try again…
Even after removing the tea from the paper teabag and steeping it in my gravity well steeper this time, it still tastes like paper somehow! This time I doubled the steep time to four minutes, and the tea is at least stronger this time around. It also has a sort of sour, acidic flavor, with a hint of orange mid-sip and an overwhelming unnatural clove taste at the end of the sip. Nothing about this is pleasant. On top of that, the tea was a fair bit on the astringent side as well, leaving quite a bit of drying of the mouth after the sip. I’m not ruling out that age may have been part of the problem with this one (I have no clue how old these gifted tea bags may have been when my volunteer gave them to me, since there were no dates on the foil sleeve around the bags), but that lingering paper/acidic flavor does not leave a good impression regardless.
Flavors: Artificial, Astringent, Clove, Medicinal, Orange, Paper
On the other hand, Constant Comment teabags are offered for free by company at my office. And in countless other offices. But yeah…
They just can’t give the things away. :-P