I was a little frosty towards Mr. Frosty. Or maybe you could say I was hot and cold. Allow me to explain, because it was a whole fun-fair of wackiness and an experience I have no answers for.
When I first opened the pouch for Day 6 of the Bird and Blend 2020 Advent Calendar and gave a sniff, I picked up a sort of slightly fruity mint tea. I’m not the biggest mint fanatic, but every now and then, and with the right crowd, we get on well. This smelled a little like, well, somewhere in the middle. It definitely is a spearmint, as the ingredients say, rather than a peppermint, and maybe I just wasn’t prepared for that. I’m more pals with spearmint’s well-known cousin, and tend to avoid spearmint quite easily. We don’t run in the same circles.Brewing this up, WOW. Talk about a show! I wished a little that I’d steeped it in a glass cup so I could enjoy the show even more – the dark blue was more dramatic than any other butterfly pea flower/blue pea flower teas I’ve tried before (which is only a couple, let’s be honest). This thing was a deep blue in seconds, whereas, say, David’s Tea’s Magic Potion will get to a semi-decent purple eventually, maybe, if you leave it steeping for 8 minutes and onward. … Usually. Assuming you chucked in a lot of tea. And I always thought, “That’s fair; surely it’s an expensive ingredient and sometimes that’s the best you can do.” But wow, this tea was an explosion of colour, so much so that within 1 minute of putting it to steep, I was double checking the ingredients list because I was CONVINCED there was artificial colour in there, possibly smuggled in by my suspicious friend Spearmint. But no, that was just the power of this tea. I was dazzled. I was excited. I was ready to experience a Mr. Frosty that was Toasty.
Or… was I? Because when I took those first few sips… And then subsequent sips… And from beginning to end of this cup, the flavours I got were… Mildly, unnamably fruity, slightly spicy, slightly spearminty… hotdogs. Yep, that’s right. To me, by whatever magic of science, I was tasting watery minty hotdog.
I have no answers; only questions. How did it get there? Where did it come from? What is it trying to tell me? Is our alien overlord to be a spearmint-scented blue hotdog named Mr. Frosty?
The biggest question of all, however, is this: if that’s what I was tasting the whole way through, why in the world did I eeeever so slightly… kinda like it?
Like I said. Only questions.
Flavors: Fruity, Spearmint, Spices
