Champagne Raspberry White

It seems like most people are displeased with their Caraway, so I am pretty nervous about digging into mine. Especially this one, since it was over $20 before discounts. A tea that pricey should be delicious, right? In the bag this smells like Element’s Pink Sonoma, which I loved, so I was cautiously optimistic. I decided to cold brew it since that seems to lessen the artificial-ness of some teas, which seems to be the main complaint with Caraway’s product.

I’ll admit that I totally forgot this was in the fridge and steeped it for about 20 hours instead of 12. Oops! Fortunately it didn’t seem to do much damage, just a bit of bitterness because there was too much leaf. I’m gonna chalk that one up to my spazziness and not the tea. The raspberry here is very subtle, not as bright or fruity as I was expecting based on the smell. The champagne comes in at the end of the sip and tastes like, well, champagne! It’s sweet and almost sparkling, which I didn’t expect. The white base is bright and a bit fruity, with some soft floral notes. Overall this is a nice tea and much better than I was expecting based on some of their other teas. I do prefer Pink Sonoma, but that tea isn’t even available anymore so I suppose this is a fair substitute!

Another one from the teabox! Alphakitty included this one. thanks so much! The price was pretty steep on this one, which I saw on the site while I was searching for steeping instructions. Since it’s a white tea and I knew I wasn’t going to love it anyway, I just wanted to try a cup before sending the rest on in the traveling teabox. It’s a nice white tea base, but I wasn’t tasting much raspberry or champagne flavor. (I feel like I’m saying that a lot now… that I’m not finding the flavors.) It is light and sweet. I think that Caraway might just be using the “champagne” in the name to up the price though. I hope not but that’s my cynical mind (not like I expect actual champagne in a tea or anything). And now that I think about it, sometimes white tea might already have a champagne type of flavor to it normally… though I haven’t had much experience with champagne. I certainly appreciate being able to try this one though!

I don’t particularly like white tea OR champagne, but I love this tea!

The raspberry flavor is prominent, but not overwhelming. No bitterness or astringency that I’m picking up. I bet this tea would be DELICIOUS iced! But since it’s too cold for that, I’ll stick to it hot today. Still yummy :)

This from the Momo box! And Yay Steepster is back!

My sister put this in my pitcher steeper this morning when she finished off the Jasmine tea that was in there yesterday- I have trained her well! ;-)

It starts out with the taste of the base, which is pleasantly buttery and light. The raspberry is next and although it is bright and tangy like a real berry, there is a slight artificiality. It doesn’t take too much away from the flavor. At least it doesn’t taste like bubble gum! Also there is a warm, flowery element, which I’m starting to identify with safflower.

After a while the tea leaves me with a dry mouth. The tang of the berries grows and grows until it eventually leaves a bitter build up in the mouth, so I started to not like the taste toward the end of the bottle of it I had. If I had had just a small cup, I would have liked it the entire time, but the build-up was just too much in a 12oz size.