New teas! Two new teas, to be exact – this one, and a herbal called Valerian Nights.
This one is a green tea with sea buckthorn, candied ginger, pineapple and rose among other ingredients – the main/featured one is definitely the sea buckthorn though. This isn’t my first time trying a sea buckthorn tea. In fact DT has carried one in the past too, Redberry Tonic which I was a BIG fan of – especially iced or cold brewed. This is the first time I’ve looked at more of the wellness things the berry is associated with and been introduced to it in that way though. Of course, I don’t personally care so much about that: I drink tea for the taste so that’s what I’m gonna focus on the most…
The dry leaf of this one smells weird to me; it reminds me of the smell of aloe scented hand sanitizer and tequila. I can’t place why it smells so funky to me though; usually there’s at least one or two ingredients that kind of ‘tip their hat’ so to speak, and you can pin point weird aromas on just the concentration of them in the wall tin. Not the case here. At least it tastes a lot nicer than the dry aroma, though!
The flavour is oddly light for how strong the aroma is; it has some of the sourness that I’d associate with sea buckthorn without the astringency/intense mouth pucker. It almost tastes more like a mild lemon/pineapple kind of cross though than distinctly like sea buckthorn. I am reminded of the same almost lemon flavour from my beloved Redberry Tonic, though! So definitely sea buckthorn nope overlap in both teas. Other things in this one are lemongrass, soft apple (definitely distinct to the spongy apple pieces in a lot of DT blends), and floral/rose undertones. I actually… don’t taste the ginger? I was braced for it, for sure, but I just got a lot more of the fruity element and really no spice at all. Not that I’m complaining.
I want to try this one iced/cold brewed before I make my mind up on it because that’s how I best enjoyed Redberry Tonic and there are clearly similarities between the two in terms of flavour – BUT my initial impression is that I prefer Redberry Tonic for the stronger overall body, and slight red fruit notes. However, this is pretty smooth and for both a green tea and a tea with ginger I like it MUCH MORE than I expected to.
Song Pairing: https://youtu.be/1Wk8ZRgXQnY
Friendly reminder that I do not numerically rate DAVIDsTEA blends as I’m currently employed there and it would be an obvious conflict of interest. Any blends you see with numerical ratings were rated prior to my employment there. These reviews are a reflection of my personal thoughts regarding the teas, and not the company’s.
