This tea is very sweet. You’ll expect that when you open it…you can smell the vanilla right away…and also a faint trace of something else that’s almost but not quite chocolate, even though chocolate isn’t represented anywhere in the actual flavor or scent once you brew it up.
It’s not ‘in your mouth’ sweet. Well…it IS, but the sweetness seems to linger after you swallow, in the aftertaste, rather than being picked up by your tongue when you actually have a sip of tea in your mouth. After taking another look at the ingredients I find myself unsurprised…it has honeybush and stevia leaf in it, and that seems pretty typical for both of those.
The ingredients list also includes kukicha. I confess that while I’ve had this tea multiple times in the past, I never bothered to look up what kukicha is. It seems to be bits of a green tea plant aside from the leaves? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kukicha
Learn something new every day.
It brews to a very pretty golden-honey color, with much warmer and deeper smells than I’m getting out of the foil bag. Trying to suss out the individual flavors is difficult for me tonight…I blame this cold I’m still fighting…but I can get a sense of every listed ingredient on the bag save for the coconut. There’s always a creeping sweetness at the finish, climbing up the sides of my tongue to linger toward the back. Every time I cough or clear my throat, it intensifies a lot. Crazy!
When I first tried this tea, I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It is very sweet, and I was accustomed to a very mellow, completely unsweetened, almost sort of bread-y cup when I thought about chamomile teas. I think I’ve finally decided that I like it, though. It’s an off-beat kind of sweet, and the way it happens mostly on the swallow is interesting enough to keep my attention.
I did cut the amount it recommended to brew by 1/3 though…I used 2 tsp. in 3c. of water. I should probably try their recommendation sometime to see how it goes (maybe I’ll find the coconut on the other side of that threshold) but in the past I’ve never had any trouble infusing a plenty-strong cup with even less than I used tonight.
Now, to spend 20 minutes in the kitchen trying to get this stuff out of my infuser. I think I need to invest in some silk pyramid bags or something for a few of my pesky Particle Teas. :|
Ugh, anything chamomile-based is SUCH a pain! I need to get those baggies too, because it’s very traumatic and problematic trying to get every single pollen bit out of the little mesh holes.