Adagio Custom Blends, Susan Sholander

The last tea from my trial week of Adagio’s CommuniTEA subscription (from yesterday) and another fandom blend! I’m actually really impressed with the ratio of fandom teas in this week – 3/7 were fandom blends!!

Of all the teas I had this week from Adagio, this is EASILY the one I was most excited about. The reason for that is that I was actually familiar with this blend BEFORE this sampler – I’ve had this, along with the creator’s entire Stranger Things assortment, in my cart so many times when building fandom tea doomcarts on the their website and I got REALLY close to ordering it as well when the most recent season of Stranger Things came out, to watch along with the series. Ultimately it was dollar conversion that stopped me from ordering – the Canadian Dollar sucks, man…

The dry leaf smells amazing though – very “strawberry banana” smoothie in terms of vibe and now that really has me wondering why I can’t think of any strawberry banana teas, because damn that’s such a good idea. Why aren’t people on the strawberry banana smoothie tea blend train? Can we kickstart that train? I need to try more strawberry banana teas…

And, y’know, this tastes really nice too! I can definitely taste the Honeybush Banana Nut in this mix the most strongly – possibly because it’s the tea in this mix that I have the most familiarity with? It’s complimented with a nice bright, ripe strawberry note and a little bit of a fruitier stonefruit undertone. I’m pretty comfortable sticking with my strawberry banana smoothie comparison, though some more creaminess could really strengthen that. I imagine it would be nice iced, too.

Now, is this accurate for Barb’s character? Honestly, I don’t know – I feel like we didn’t really see enough of her to get a true sense of what her blend might be. #justiceforbarb

This is probably the only one of these CommuniTea blends I would reorder as well; not only does it taste really good but I feel like I have an attachment to the character (observant instagram followers of mine may know that I have a Barb Funko POP that features pretty prominently of many of my stories filmed at my tea desk) and it also feels unique/different from other teas in my stash right now!

Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-4Y9NvgIIP/

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKy9C_yWev0

This was the Adagio CommuniTEA selection for April 8th – I’m a little behind in tasting notes.

I was excited to see another fandom blend in the mix, and even more excited because this is a character I know. I mean, I don’t know her the same way that, like, actual hard core batman fans know her but I have peripheral knowledge of this character!

One of my favourite things with the fandom blends is breaking down the idea behind the conceptualization of the blend; why were the teas/flavours/ingredients used selected? What makes this raspberry and chamomile blend the blend for Poison Ivy? Admittedly, I think this is a missed opportunity to not use a green tea based blend – that seems like an obvious direction, no? But like I said, I don’t know the character too well, so I’m not sure if there’s significance to what was selected that I’m just missing…

As for the blend itself, it’s not bad – I’m sure that I would like it more if I liked chamomile but that’s a big aspect of the flavour profile in this tea and I’m having a hard time getting past it. Aside from the pronounced chamomile flavour, this has an almost sour raspberry flavour, like the nostalgic “Sour Raspberry” candy flavour that I grew up with. It’s almost a little weird having chamomile juxtaposed with something so sharp and tart, but it still kind of works in a weird way!? I’m not totally sure what the ‘Rooibos Bonita’ in the blend is meant to taste like, but I’m really only getting chamomile and sour raspberry/apple notes…

It’s not a tea for me, but I feel like it’s still a well constructed blend overall.

Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/B-uDbpaA5Qs/

Song Pairing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhfs1CzzUPM