Holiday Tea-son! This is another addition to the Bird & Blend advent calendar that I decided I’d rather have cold than warm, so I cut open my sachet and let the leaf cold brew in 350ml of water today. Now I’ve strained the cup and am ready to try it out.
I have had plain ol’ Butterfly Pea Flower tea before; the herbaceous, earthy taste of it used to be something I didn’t like, but my palate has sort of adapted to over time. I’ve never tried it iced before, though I have added it to a few pitchers of iced tea in the past just for the color. The flavor of the pea flower is coming off very strongly in this cup, as I’m getting that somewhat earthy, brocolli-like vegetal taste to the forefront; in fact, I’m hardly tasting the raspberry. Maybe that was luck of the draw with my teabag, I don’t know. I can smell a bit of raspberry from my cup, but the flavor just doesn’t seem to be strong enough to really be holding its own against how strong of a flavor the butterfly pea flower is, and if they wanted to emphasize the raspberry, then they needed either more flavoring or less pea flower to get a better balance (unless my teabag was just a bad representation of the balance of the blend, I’ve certainly already had that happen once).
Had I had the time, I would’ve made some lemonade to brew this in, as I think that would’ve been even better. I think coldbrewing a bit more leaf in some lemonade rather than water would probably be the way to go with this one. Lacking the time to make a pitcher of lemonade for one little teabag of leaf, I just added some liquid sugar and a dash of lemon juice, and unsurprisingly, that did improve the cup a lot — my favorite way to drink plain butterfly pea flower tea is with lemon juice and honey (or lemon-infused honey!) so I know some sweetness and citrus helps temper that overly earthy/vegetal note just a bit. The citrus-sweet also helped bring a little of that hidden raspberry tang out, too. So this would definitely be a lemonade tea for me… would I buy it just for that, though? Eh, maybe in the 20g size. But it was a bit underwhelming to me taken plain, and certainly not the kind of tea I’d like taken warm.
Flavors: Broccoli, Earth, Grass, Raspberry, Vegetal
