Red Tea with Harvest Strawberry and Passionfruit

I’m in a Pyramid Tea mood today, apparently. Most of the time, they just kind of chill in my tea chest, waiting for my mood to shift in their favor.

Today’s the day! I still don’t taste passionfruit. And at this point, I probably never will. The rooibos is strong, and I let it steep too long because I got distracted by the Internet, so it got very strong, and now it leaves an olive-y aftertaste.

I despise olives. And rooibos. So now it’s time to bury this box of tea again for a while until I forget again why I never drink it.

Yeah. It’s that kind of tea, unfortunately.

Someone gave me a gift card to drugstore.com, so of course I don’t buy anything but tea. :) Grew up with the plain old Lipton tea bags, but these are their attempt to keep up in the growing loose tea market. First sniff smells to me like pure strawberry. Not overwhelming, just a nice light hint of strawberry. Supposedly there is passion fruit in there, which I’m not quite sure that I could identify if I tried :). After steeping, the liquid is a medium colored brown and smells wonderfully sweet, and less like strawberry. My guess is that is the passion fruit chiming in. Served iced, its a very nice light sweet fruit tea, predominantly tasting of strawberry. Pleasantly suprised for a bagged tea.

Second try; now that my tongue isn’t being assaulted by foreign flavors and can taste the tea itself, I find the blandness replaced by a tartness, like unripened strawberries (without much strawberry flavor) that ends with passion-fruit tanginess. I don’t find it that interesting; the only fruit flavor is that hint of passion-fruit, and that tartness could easily have come from some lemon juice.

Certainly wouldn’t get this if I had to actually pay money (got it for free); time to upgrade to a better quality rooibos. I’m going to take takgoti’s advice and try Ocean of Wisdom if I can find it.

Again, bought this because it was on sale…but am so far excited about this attempt. I was a little afraid because it had the potential to be overly sweet and tart and fruity but I really think the red tea base helped that cause. You can taste both the Strawberry and the Passion Fruit…almost equally, it seems. It’s sweet but not too sweet. Tart but not too tart. Fruity but not too fruity. And Refreshing. Because I don’t like over the top fruity blends this seems to be ‘just right’ for me.

nothing better that strawberry tea for a sunday sunset. (plus the red tea is amazing to lose weight; green tea is so last season)

Don’t really have strong feelings on this tea either way, and I’m usually not a fan of red teas to begin with. It’s a little bitter; I think the passion fruit might be a bit too overpowering, I wish there was more strawberry flavor! Sweetened up with honey or something might help it, but I haven’t touched it in a while.

Today was my first time having this tea. I purchased it because… well, I was on the tea aisle and I never leave empty-handed. Plus, it was somewhat on sale. There was a certain bitterness to it that I could not identify. I didn’t taste any strawberry or much else. I’m going to try again tonight to see if I get different results.

Just a so so tea

It smells absolutely delicious—and tastes like it smells! Sweetened with strawberry honey = perfection.