First, I should probably mention I had this one hot. Maybe I’d like it better iced…
The tea looks pretty awesome in the bag, thanks to all these bamboo leaves! I was pretty excited to taste bamboo leaves and see what they taste like (then maybe I’d feel like a koala!). My excitement, however, stopped on my first sip. It wasn’t totally bad, but definitely not what I had expected. The strawberry taste takes the whole place, and this strawberry taste is precisely what I didn’t like… don’t get me wrong, I love strawberries, but to me, this doesn’t actually taste of strawberries. Strawberry candies? Yes, very much so. If what they were going for was the taste of Swedish berries (strawberry-flavoured chewy candy), then it’s spot on, and the flavour is even more intense than in candies. But to me, this sort of strawberry flavour tastes so artificial and chemical, I can’t find much of the joy of eating a fresh strawberry in there. It’s the kind of strawberry taste I would expect from a strawberry “juice” (read: cocktail) tin I’d buy for 25 cents at a corner store. As for the peppercorn, I couldn’t taste it at all – definitely no tingle on my tongue. However, I did improve my experience of this tea by adding some lemon juice to it, which added something I felt was missing to the taste and made it more enjoyable.
But I am still left wondering what bamboo leaves taste like…
