Cola

#VacationTea

This was this morning’s tea, which I made during breakfast in the hotel lobby. It was delicious, I just wish it was caffeinated. Sadly, at this point in our vacation journey I had exhausted all of my caffeinated options apart from the teas I’ve purshased since we left – and I didn’t particularly want to crack into any of them just yet.

Since I acquired these teabags from DF my biggest concern with the cola ones has been that they’ve tasted somewhat weak/mild in terms of flavour. This was perfect though! I don’t know what the difference was, apart from the fact it was in some crappy hotel paper cup instead of an actual mug. The cola flavour was really strong though, and really bright! I mean, I’ve had enough ‘fake’/replicated cola things at this point that I can easily break down the ingredients that are generally paired together to replicate them so I wavered back and forth between tasting cola and tasting the other ingredients: lemon and cinnamon.

Still did the trick though – I was in a happy place sipping on this, and munching away at my hotel waffles and scrambled eggs.

Sipdown! (6/202) This was a sample from the EU TTB Round 2.

This came as a single sachet, and was not wrapped in anything, so maybe that affected the flavour. I brewed it for 5 minutes, as suggested on the tag, and could maybe detect a slightly cola-esque scent as it was steeping, but it is totally missing in the flavour. To me, this tastes like a straight black. An average, not particularly complex black tea with maybe a touch of sweetness as you swallow. I really am struggling to say more about it that that. Despite following the brewing instructions, the resulting tea was weak, so I popped the bag in for a couple extra minutes to see if that helped. It did strengthen the tea a bit, but it also became astringent. I drank the last half of the cup with a drop of milk to alleviate the astringency, unfortunately this made the tea even weaker. Maybe if I had more than one serving I could play around with it until I struck the right balance between strength and astringency, but I’m quite glad to not have any more.