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A big thank you to Ashmanra for sharing this one. My first Irish tea! I feel like we need a big tea map in the office somwhere, probably next to the door. The wall behind the computers might work, but it would be a pain to get to. Anyway, a map! A big map where we can put pins for all the little areas where we order or drink tea from! I’d say pins for where the tea is grown, but we’d have like what… two pins? China, India, and maybe a purple colored pin in… Ecuador? Is that where maté is from?

Rambling. Tea!

I wasn’t sure what to expect with this one. I’ll admit it, I do not like mango. I do not like it in a box, I do not like it with a fox. I’ve missed out on a lot of very tasty looking things because one of my favorite flavors in the world, pineapple, seems to be attached at the tropical-fruit-hip to mango in the most inopportune number of ways. I was totally willing to try it in a tea though, especially with spicy stuff!

Missy brewed this a little low, because the tea was a bit dusty, and we didn’t want to fly straight into Bitter-town, which has happened with some green teas. I can smell fruit in the brew, coming from the cup. It doesn’t give me that old-lady-perfume smell that I associate with mango, which is a definite plus!

Now the taste of this was intriguing. Much like the smell, I get none of what I stereo-typically associate with mango. I taste indistinct-grabbing-at-the-back-of-mind-fruit that I can’t identify, but it’s so there. SO there, I just need to identify it. After that, there’s just a tiny bit of pepper aftertaste that burns in your throat after the swallow. The flavor of the green tea seems non-existent. Whether this owes to the tea, the phantom-fruit, or the lowered steep temp, I have no idea.

But the flavor of the phantom-fruit is good, so I keep drinking. The pepper in the second, much larger drink was more apparent, but still nothing (for me) to be too worried about. The third drink, and it finally clicks in my mind… the phantom-fruit is a dead ringer for soaked in syrup fruit cup pear. This flavor is EXACTLY what I want out of a pear flavored tea, now that I’m thinking about it. I never would have suspected that from a mango tea, and I’m now going to suspiciously eye every mango tea I see, and wonder whether it’s really hiding a pear-flavored treasure trove, or a perfume-flavored bomb…

Thanks again Ashmanra! I feel very privileged to have had a chance to drink this!