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A Berry Frui-tea July! This is an old sampler, that has still never been opened… now, I’ve had other old samplers that have never been opened that, upon breaking the seal, I’ve discovered rancid coconut, so I know that means nothing, but I’m still crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. I actually grabbed this one because considering it’s age, and that it has the unlucky tea ingredient, I’d better check it now. * long sigh * Okay, here goes.

Well, it passes the smell test… The dry leaf actually smells like key lime pie to me, and I quite like key lime pie! But I’ve had other teas pass the smell test, too, so I’m still not entirely convinced. Eating a small piece of coconut from the package, it still tastes sweet and doesn’t have that sour taste, though, so I’m hoping it has, somehow, managed to be spared by the Tea Gods. Now I just need to give this a speedy sipdown before They decide to smite it…

The brewed cup is a bright yellow, and smells much more strongly of lime than the leaf (there is less coconut and sweetness presenting in the aroma now, so I’m not getting much of that key lime pie association). The lime is actually quite nice here, though. I’ve had other teas where it was very strong and overpowering, and here it is a very distinct flavor note, and certainly the strongest note in the cup, but it still doesn’t feel like it is completely dominating things. It is tangy with a noticable citrus bite which makes it feel more natural to me. The lime leads in the sip, with the coconut a softer flavor note that falls towards the end of the sip. It does blend with the citrus nicely, and if anything, I think the coconut could’ve been a bit stronger, since the lime is pushing a little heavy here. But overall, it is a very pleasant cup, slightly more tangy than sweet, but not overly so. I think the green base lends enough grassy smoothness to pull this off nicely, but the flavoring here is heavy enough that you won’t really notice any base flavors pulling through.

I like this, and am glad it has survived the test of time! Will probably be making an iced jug to help it on its way, both because lime is a refreshing flavor for a cold brew, and because I can drink up iced tea very quickly in this hot weather. And it’s just time for this sampler to go, before the coconut in this sampler decides to turn its back on me.

A Berry Frui-tea July! I got this at the same time that I purchased my mass of cheap after-Christmas T2 samplers, but this was actually a highly-discounted tin of one of their old summer fruit tisanes that they had discontinued. The dry leaf has a strong coconut smell, but is also quite sweet, and almost a little nutty.

I made a cold brew batch and it steeped up a nice deep ruby red from the hibiscus in the blend, but it smelled like… a sort of coconut creme dessert? It just had a really overpowering coconut scent. Then there was something very off-putting about the flavor. It could have been amazing. The red fruity hibiscus base was nice, but there was this very strong coconut flavor that tasted funny. The dry leaf didn’t have that “expired sour coconut” smell to me, so I didn’t think the coconut in the blend was off, but the coconut flavor in the blend tasted really over-powering, unnatural, and there was something about the aftertaste that made me feel like an aerosol coconut sunscreen or body spray had been sprayed into my mouth. It just lingered in this odd way and didn’t feel… right.

So, then I decided to try making a warm cup. After that steeped up, I took a sniff of the cup, and I definitely got that acrid, sour coconut smell that I recognize immediately from rancid coconut in a blend. I still don’t smell it at all in the dry leaf like I usually do… there just must be too many sweet ingredients in the blend that are hiding it (the licorice root and brittle, maybe?) It also didn’t present at all in the aroma, or even the taste, of the cold brew. In the cold brew, it tastes like sunscreen, but in the warm brew, it’s that sort of sour/acidic flavor that tastes sort of… too much like being ill to be pleasant.

There is a good chance that, being this was a discontinued, highly discounted tea when I got it, the coconut may have already been off or close to when I got it. Had I thought about it, I may have been able to put the sealed tin in a foil-lined bag and stuck it in my freezer until I was ready to use it this summer, but I didn’t. C’est la vie.

Not the fault of the tea, and I probably should’ve thought about it before I went on a “ooo, lots of cheap tea!” ordering frenzy, to be fair, so I’m not even going to rate it. If nothing else, I’ve now had the lovely experience of tasting liquified sunscreen. I do think with fresh coconut this tea would’ve been amazing, because the base was great, very fruity and and juicy with a nice balance of tanginess and sweetness, and the coconut probably would’ve blended in nicely with the berry fruitiness if it didn’t taste like sunscreen or vomit. If T2 ever decides to revive this blend, I’ll try to grab it when it’s in season.

tl;dr: The wrath of coconut strikes again!

A Berry Frui-tea July! I made a strong infusion of this warm, added just a touch of honey, then popped it in the fridge to chill overnight into an iced tea.

This has proved to be a lovely iced tea brew. There is a strong coconut aroma from the glass, and it has a very smooth and sweet coconut flavor that blends really nicely with the touch of citrusy bergamot. The black base is on the stronger side but carries the flavors well; at least in the iced cup, it is quite smooth, lacking bitterness, and only slightly astringent (though I do probably need to revisit this as a hot cuppa to get a better read on the base). The only thing that I’m a bit disappointed about is that I don’t really get any of the pineapple flavor that should be in this blend; it just tastes like a coconut-flavored Earl Grey, and I have a few others of those around (because I love the coconut/bergamot flavor combination). I really wish I could taste the pineapple, but it seems to be overwhelmed by the other flavors.

So, while I do love this tea, as it’s a flavor I really enjoy, I’m a little disappointed too… it just isn’t giving me anything new, which is what I was hoping for when I got it. I think the pineapple would’ve really brought this as an iced tea over the top, too. Still a nice, refreshing glass of iced tea, regardless.

A Berry Frui-tea July! Another of my T2 fruit tea samplers, and probably the one that sounded the most interesting to me, considering it had a lot of ingredients I’ve never tasted before (dragon fruit, sea buckthorn berries, chokeberries…)

As per usual, I brewed this iced, though I did hot steep this one and then pop it into the fridge to chill overnight. Sadly, this came out really weak. It just feels too watered down, like water with a slightly tangy fruity flavor to it. I’m not sure if it’s really supposed to be this light of a flavor, or if my sampler was just not as potent as I was expecting…

These T2 samplers have always held enough tea for two cups (16 oz.) so that is how I prepared it (with 16 oz. of water) but it is definitely tasting like there is a major lack of tea-to-water here… so I’m guessing this sampler just didn’t have enough tea in it (it is a chunkier herbal). Since I only had the one sampler to brew up, I can’t exactly try again with only a single cup of water, either, because I really would like to see if I could get a stronger flavor out of this… meh. So disappointing! I’m going to leave this unrated until the day I can give it a fair shake… I’d really like to try it again, but T2, annoyingly, is one of those companies that doesn’t offer individual samplers (you have to get sampler sets and hope the tea you want is in one) and I don’t feel keen on getting one of their badly packaged 100 gram “cubes” just for a retry.

If anyone in the US happens to have some of this and would be willing to trade a sampler sized amount of this tea, let me know! It would be appreciated.

A Berry Frui-tea July! Decided to have a bagged tea revisted tonight, and a fairly standard one at that… Stash’s Lemon Ginger. I’m six days in on a prolonged migraine attack, and mint and ginger have always been things that are fairly soothing for my migraine nausea. I actually have a special nausea blend that is a mix of both of those things that I’ll sip on when the nausea is at its worst, but this even a lazy ginger herbal sounded fine. I still have some of this, and though it’s old, it appears it isn’t past date yet.

I have had some very nice lemon ginger loose leafs in the past, so I’m imagining based on that this revisit is probably going to be a little more lackluster than I’m remembering… I do recall I used to like this quite a bit in the past. I really dislike the orange variety of this tea by Stash, Sunny Orange Ginger, which I revisited pretty recently and still have pretty recent memories of, so I’m even more hesistant that this will hold up now… but we’ll see. Of course I had to remove it from the paper bag, because paper teabags taste nasty to me.

If I’m honest, this… really doesn’t hold up, because it does remind me of Sunny Orange Ginger. It definitely isn’t as bad as that tea to me, but the same things that bothered me about that Stash flavor are bothering me about this tea now that I’m trying it again. The lemon just tastes too artificial, and the ginger tastes way too strong, to the point it leaves this lingering heat on the back of my tongue after every sip. Between the two I’d take a cup of this any day, because the lemon is definitely a more pleasant sort of artificial lemon taste than that weird orangey taste was in the Sunny Orange Ginger, but… eh. When I can make a cup of my Tulsi Lemon Ginger loose leaf, it’s just hard to imagine finishing all the teabags of this off…

A Berry Frui-tea July! Decided to cold brew another of my T2 sampler stash. Their samplers are only enough to make half a quart, but at least it steeps fairly quickly as far as cold brewing goes. This is their Citrus Punch, which as far as I can tell, doesn’t seem to be available anymore.

This is a pretty standard hibi-hip blend. The base is a very thick fruit punchy tart/tangy hibiscus. I also pick up a subtle note of lemon zest, and more prominently, notes of orange and, oddly enough, coconut, though there aren’t any indications of it being in the blend (unless that is one of the added flavorings?) The blend is tangy but still quite sweet from all the added apple, and a nice iced tea. I actually think that surprise coconut flavor was my favorite part, since I wasn’t expecting it.

A Berry Frui-tea July! This came as a free sampler with my last order. It was a single teaspoon sampler, so even though I usually prefer my fruity teas iced, with such a small amount I just made it as a hot cuppa.

I have to say, the leaf made me question the “oolong” part of the name, because it just looked like an herbal blend (of mainly apple, hibi, ginger, and licorice root… all things I personally like, but uh… where’s the oolong?) I poured the hot water on and looked for any signs of tea leaf opening up and… there were a few, but it definitely wasn’t abundant. I realize that could just be the luck of the draw with the sampler scoop, but that still doesn’t really give me much overall faith in the blend, especially when oolong is listed as the second ingredient after currants. Not particularly impressed and the cup isn’t even brewed yet…

In any event, the brewed cup is sort of a gingery yellow color, and has a very peach aroma. The flavor was… odd. The oolong base is a bit earthy, which already doesn’t really seem to compliment fruity notes particularly well. The main fruit note I get is a very strong papaya flavor, followed by peaches, and the fruit itself would be okay… if it weren’t for the overwhelming abundance of ginger. It isn’t that it’s “so hot it’ll burn you tongue off” levels of ginger, but it’s enough ginger that it is unsettling to the fruit flavors… it tastes really peppery and off-putting. There isn’t enough sweetness for it to come off like a nice candied ginger sort of note, so it just seems to not belong at all in a tropical fruit blend. Perhaps the licorice root was suppose to add some sweetness, but honestly, I don’t even taste it; I just taste ginger. I’m not getting any strong red berry fruity notes either, despite the currant/hibi in the blend.

Glad I only had a single cup sample of this, because this is a pass for me. I find it hilarious that Capital Teas describes the blend as having “just a hint of ginger”… if that is a “hint”, I’d hate to think what their ginger blends are like…

A Berry Frui-tea July! I originally tried this tea at Snake River Teas when I was on vacation last May, then realized I had a sampler of this tea sitting in my collection from Fusion Teas (no doubt they also wholesaled it from International Tea Importers). Well then!

I had mentioned before I was curious if the flavors would present themselves better in an iced cup rather than a warm pot of tea, so discovering I had this leaf at my disposal and didn’t even realize it, I made myself a quart of cold steeped tea and decided to find out. My experience really wasn’t much different than what I remember from having the warm cup, though. The main aroma off the cup was very grapey (like, that artificial grape in candies or Kool-Aid), and I was still getting that as the dominant flavor, rather than raspberries. There was still a nice floral/fruity element to the tea, but the fruitiness seemed more an element of the white tea itself than an obvious raspberry note. I will say that the iced tea had one noticable improvement over the warm cup, in that the mouthfeel had more of a slight alcohol bite on the close of the sip, which was very pleasant and did make it feel more “champagne” like. But if there is raspberry here, it is really subtle. They should’ve called it White Champagne Grape tea…

Increasing my score slightly for the improvement to the champagne quality from the iced brew, but I’m still overall not entirely impressed by missing the mark on the raspberry flavor.

A Berry Frui-tea July! I decided to finally try out one of the flavored matchas from the tiny little matcha sampler tins I picked up from my last Bird & Blend (back when they were still Bluebird) order. I decided to go with the Super Matcha, since it is blueberry flavored and I’m going for the whole fruity theme.

Since I still haven’t endeavored to learn to whisk my own matcha yet, I typically put the half teaspoon of matcha and a half cup of 175 degree water into my milk frother (without the frothing attachment so it’ll just mix with the centrifugal force) on the “cold” setting (since the water has already been heated in my kettle). After the matcha is done, I transfer it to my mug, then put about a cup of vanilla almond milk into the milk frother, and let that run on the “warm” setting, add that to the mug, and give the mug a vigorous spoon-stir. I also added about half a teaspoon of honey to this latte.

The result of this matcha latte was blueberry muffin in a cup. It was very thick, rich, and creamy, and I was surprised it had such a strong, full blueberry flavor that lingered on the roof of my mouth, very sweet, with the slightest touch of berry tanginess, and reminescent of blueberry pancake syrup. The vanilla in the milk and touch of honey sweetness just added to the pastry-like flavor of the cup. It was really nice! I wasn’t really picking up any of the grassier notes of matcha, but then, I also made this cup with a lot of sweet additives, so that is what I was going for here. I don’t really have any complaints about how it turned out, at all.

A Berry Frui-tea July! This was a free sampler I got with my order from Strand Tea, but it is quite old now (ya, my procrastination knows no bounds). Hopefully it is still okay? I’m actually shocked at how much tea was in this sampler though! I wanted to make a quart of iced tea, then noticed I still had quite a bit of leaf left, so I put some in my infuser to make a warm cuppa (and being an oolong, I’m sure I’ll get several good steeps from it), and still had a bit left over. I didn’t want to leave a random teaspoon around, so I just dumped it into my iced tea mason jar and figured my iced tea batch would be a little extra flavorful. The sampler has been sitting around long enough now, I’d rather use it up!

This is a Hairy Crab Oolong base (not an oolong I’ve had a chance to try yet, I admit) with pineapple and coconut flavorings. Steeped up, I’m already quite excited, because it has that smooth, buttery smell that I get from milk oolong, which is one of my favorite teas, and if that is all I get from this, then I’ll be happy! The flavor is really nice! It has a very silky, smooth, somewhat creamy mouthfeel, that is quite buttery, especially on the back of the tongue. There are some light vegetal notes, but they aren’t pronounced, mostly because of the fruity notes to the tea, as you really do get this wash of a sweet pina colada toward the finish of the sip, which really adds to the creaminess and the butteriness. I’d say the coconut is a little more dominant, and it reminds me a bit of a coconut pouchong (another of my favorite teas), but there is a slight fruit tanginess to the sip that reads as pineapple even if it isn’t a strong flavor note.

This is definitely the kind of tea that plays to my particular tastes, and one that I plan to pick up on my next Strand order.