Sparkling Sangria

For the sipdown prompt, “a tropical tea.” Prepared coldbrew.

I really enjoy this one! It definitely has a muscatel note to it… grape without being overwhelming grape-candy-flavor, with an effervescant feel that does remind me of wine. Drinking slowly and picking apart the flavors, I get a tangy papaya note and a sweeter pineapple. Very refreshing and easy to quickly chug.

This smells and tastes a little like alcohol, which I guess may have been the goal. Still, some low quality herbals I tried from Teavivre had that same flavor incidentally, and I disliked those. Due to that similarity, this whole thing ends up tasting pretty not great for me. I think I’ll still be able to finish the bag. Below the alcohol flavor is a mild fruity flavor. I feel like I taste melon most of all, but that can’t be right. It’s drinkable cold, but not really my thing.

2021 Sipdown 4/365!
(DavidsTea 19)

I suspect I had (or have) a small pouch of this somewhere, but this particular pouch was an unopened 25g pack from a sampler I purchased off someone. Perfect size for a pitcher of iced tea!

Can’t say I’m disappointed that I don’t have more. This doesn’t really work for me, although I think it’s reasonably successful at mimicking “sangria”. It’s floral, there’s a touch of citrus, and there’s sort of an alcoholic flavour that I’m not too fond of. It’s not a terrible iced tea, but I’m sure it would be terrible hot. I think I’ll leave the rest of this for my husband, who will likely blindly drink it without a second thought. Haha.

I drank this hot, which may have been the fault of this tasting, however, it still allowed me to get an idea of its flavours. The addition of rose isn’t overpowering, rather complimenting. I find it to be a very dense fruity tea. It’s almost syrupy in how strong it is, but it isn’t sweet by itself. It needs something to balance the tartness of the hibiscus. Now, I understand teas do taste different when iced vs hot which is why I still recommend this tea. With sweetener and iced, I think it would be a lovely tea for juice-lovers to expand their tastes. I’m going to keep it in my cupboard for summer.

The last of my samples from a recent DT order.

The papaya and passionfruit flavoring made the dry mix of this smell so deliciously tropical and sweet, and I love the look of the blue cornflower. Unfortunately, once brewed up, this didn’t even taste remotely fruity to me. It was all sour, dry, tart hibiscus and rose. I like floral teas, but hibiscus is unpleasantly sour to me, and even all of the extra sugar in this couldn’t mask that tart flavor. I get that DavidsTea likes to put in hibiscus or beetroot to turn the tea pink… actually, I don’t really get it… I don’t need my tea to be pink. The hibiscus is just overwhelming to me.

I poured this over ice. The flavor isn’t very strong but it’s very flowery. Not a huge fan of that :(

I made a large pitcher of this tea yesterday morning and let it sit in the fridge until I was ready to have a drink. Dried this tea as a very floral aroma which I was expected from the hibiscus. It brews a thrilling red colour (like most of the teas that adorn my cupboard currently).

I had a very interesting experience with tea though. The first two cups I did not get much of a flavour from, I felt like I was drinking more water than anything. My oldest poured herself a nice sized glass filled it with more ice and made her way to work for the night and told me it reminded her of gummy bears.

This afternoon I finished off the last cup full and my mouth came alive with flavours. It was a mix of sweet and fruity and I became a happy camper with this tea. I learned that it needs to steep a little longer than I do normally with my iced teas.

Sorry, but this was so sugar-laden that I could barely taste anything else. I am reminded of those off-brand sugar-free sparkling waters whose fruit flavours are off-the-charts artificial and the sweeteners used taste like sugar poison. This doesn’t resemble sangria in any way, shape, or form. Maybe a smidgen of papaya, but it wasn’t real in any way. There was a red berry-esque flavour buried underneath the sweetness. I think it was the hibiscus trying to be hibiscus but couldn’t be hibiscus? You know you have entered rough waters when already hibiscus can’t reveal its true identity. Absolutely zero passion fruit, which is to be expected. Oh well.

Iced Tea Sipdown (278)

I made this a long time ago and just didn’t drink it for some reason. The same way I had my laptop open all day and barely did school work. I guess it’s a procrastination day.

Unfortunately because of the procrastination, or maybe just the tea, I am so meh about this. It’s fruity and tastes fine but something about it is just so flat. I find some companies that make “champagne” teas have a way of adding an effervescence too the tea so that even made plain it evokes that sparkling element. This tea doesn’t quite get there so it’s all just ok but also one I don’t mind saying goodbye to…again.