Creamy Soursop

Bought my first tea of 2021… and I didn’t even realize it in the moment.

As someone who works in R&D for tea, whenever I go grocery shopping I always check the tea aisles as well as the RTD section of the store to see if any new tea brands or new flavours for existing brands pop up – it’s important for me to always pay attention to what flavours reach “grocery store level” commercial sale level. I pay attention to a lot of other stuff too, like what limited edition flavours of other very established brands pop up and if new flavours/ingredients seem to be making more of a presence overall.

Well, my local store had a big end of aisle display for this company Jaf Tea, which I had never heard of, so of course I spent a stupid amount of time reading all of the tea boxes. Without really thinking about it much at all, I ended up adding a box of the weirdest/most interesting sounding flavour to my shopping cart and it wasn’t until I got home and was unpacking groceries that I realize that this was technically my first tea buy of the year and that I had technically broken my “no buy”. Oops!

This is really interesting tasting though! The black tea isn’t the best quality; there’s some roughness to it and it steeped pretty quickly with some noticable astringent bite and a bit of bitterness. However the “creamy soursop” flavouring!? Dang that’s weird, but good too! It’s not creamy in mouthfeel/texture but it does taste like a full fat cream with this sweet and a bit tangy kind of “tropical fruit” flavour. Just a bit waxy/artificial but decidedly quite unique in the tropical notes – and it works in a strange but fun way with that cream taste. I was skeptical, but the name… Right on the money.

For $4.99 I think this was worth buying – I don’t have a lot of bagged teas in my stash, but this was a really unique one and I like the flavouring in it a lot. It’ll be good for having something so unique, tasty, and interesting for travel or convenience.