Tiesta Tea

First day back at work after a head cold. Still recovering. Feel lightheaded and congested. Dry office air is exacerbating sinus irritation and coughing.
Planning to down copious amounts of these Immunity teas; my timing on ordering this dry flight sampler pack of them could not have been more perfect.
This is the perfect citrusy, juicy, anti-inflammatory, Vitamin-C loaded brew.
Down the hatch!

Dry leaf is comprised of pleasingly large chunks of dried fruit, pieces of fruit peel, and hibiscus. Very pretty!
Steeps a gorgeous orange-red color.
Smells pleasantly fruity and crisp, as one would expect from citrus.
Liquor is sweet and sour— reminiscent of orange juice.
Tastes mostly of oranges.
Feels very… healthy going down. I can tell that this is loaded with vitamins and minerals and will kick any cold’s butt.
Perfect!

Additional notes: I just love this one and I just happened to visit their website and they have some teas on a 40% discontinued sale. And this tea is one of them! Which is odd because I thought it was already discontinued. But I certainly had to buy some! It was too much of a coincidence to visit the site at such a convenient time. It’s a balanced blend, fruity and creamy and when the oolong shines through in later steeps, it is the most interesting oolong. Unless it’s the soaking coconut and then the pineapple fading to the background, but the later steeps evolve into something interesting. I just want to keep steeping the same leaves. I HOPE the harvest I’m buying now is even remotely similar to the sample pouch I have. Raising the rating from a 94. If anyone wants a $10 referral code for Tiesta, let me know.

Thank you for the sale, Ost! This blend sounded dreamy – oolong, coconut, pineapple. Couldn’t resist trying it. LUCKILY it turned out very similarly to what I was imagining! The coconut isn’t bad yet, which is a great sign. BIG coconut shavings. Chunks of pineapple. The flavor is an even balance of pineapple with hints of coconut. There is a sweetness to it, which is nice. All on a base of oolong which is a great idea. I can tell looking at the leaves in the infuser that the oolong isn’t the best quality, but hey, it’s a blend and the additional ingredients are tasty enough. The third steep is ridiculously creamy and smooth somehow, while still having a ton of pineapple flavor and now I wish I had saved the leaves before tossing them for a fourth cup. It’s a shame – no other tasting notes for this one.
Steep #1 // 1 1/2 teaspoons for a full mug // 9 minutes after boiling // 2 minute steep
Steep #2 // 10 minutes after boiling // 3 minute steep
Steep #3 // just boiled // 3 min

The trick with this one is to drink it when it’s extremely cooled-down. The flavor really develops as the water temp lowers.
Steeps a muddy pinkish red color.
An oily flim forms on top of the liquor.
If you sip it while it’s still hot, it tastes like water with a twinge of hibiscus tartness.
Once it cools, it tastes of raspberry tartness, fruity, and not super chocolatey, which is surprising because there are huge chunks of chocolate in the dry leaf.
It has an oily, thick mouthfeel.
Not my favorite thing in the world as a hot beverage. But it would definitely be good as an iced tea.

Another tea from my “dry flight” Immunity variety pack.
I really, really liked this one!
Liquor is a ruddy, brownish- red color.
Dry leaf and liquor both smell of chocolate and ginger.
Brothlike/ creamy mouthfeel.
Notes of cocoa, wood, wet earth, and ginger.
Lightly spicy and very warming.
Yum!

I got this in a SipsBy box and it was certainly not my favorite. I tried it both hot and iced and while there was a nice enough passion fruit flavor, there was such a fruity sourness and a metallic twang to the base that I just wasn’t into it.

Check out my full review here: http://sororiteasisters.com/2019/01/25/passion-berry-jolt-from-tiesta-tea-3/

Sample from VariaTEA!

this tea smells wonderful. Fruity, delicious goodness. I was pretty excited to try it out. And then….bland. the brewed tea taste is just meh. nothing like the aroma…it’s a muted, in the background sort of thing. doesn’t taste BAD but what’s the point? lol

Not as flavorful as some of the other Tiesta Teas (my favorite is Fireberry), but delicious anyway. I made this one in my Primula iced tea press. It was pleasant and mild and didn’t need any added sweetness.

My second tea from the tea box. This one smells and tastes like blueberry muffins, except they’re muffins with almost too many blueberries in them. It’s pretty tart, even with lots of sugar, but I still find it drinkable. I’m not sure which ingredient contributes the muffin-like flavor, or maybe that’s my imagination. So it’s a little too tart for me, but possibly combined with rooibos, this one would be a winner. I may try a second steep like that.

This tea is flavorful and absolutely delicious. It’s a great afternoon tea when you don’t want caffeine but want something to put pep in your step—the flavor is that good. I love this one!

Sipdown!
So this tea is pretty much the same as DAVIDsTEA’s Mango Fruit Punch which happens to be one of my favorite fruit tisanes. This tea just has less ingredients. It was very good prepared as a Tea Pop.

Don’t do what I did and brew it with less water than what it says on the bag – it’ll end up tart. Pretty good and fruity, but tart. I actually quite enjoy this tea and would recommend it to just about anyone.

Hmm. Maybe I need to edit my Sips By account. I’m getting tired of caffeine free tisanes. A girl needs her caffeine buzz.

I was all around unimpressed by this. It’s yet another fruit blend where they added hibiscus for color, but it ended up drowning out everything else. Brews up deep magenta and has a tart, tanginess that I’ve never really been a fan of. I guess I can taste some berry and apple underneath? If I try?

The whole experience was just not my thing. I used up my sample by blending it into other fruity teas. Which made them taste like nothing but hibiscus, too.

Cold Brew!

This cold brew was the thickest/strongest and more dense version of this tea that I’ve experienced to date – it still wasn’t good, but at least it had some level of flavour that was actually substantial. It felt like the tea wanted to be jammy and rich with this interesting intermingled floral element, but it just never actually got to that point. It was also a little bit astringent.

Over leafed this cup, and steeped it with boiling water – all in an attempt to get it to have some sort of stronger and more distinct strawberry flavour. It was a total bust though, because it just tasted like oversteeped and somewhat burnt white tea.

Arghh!

Practically flavourless…

And this time around, I’m not sick at all so I can’t blame the lack of their being great flavour notes on a shoddy palate from my being unwell. It’s even worse though, because the flavour that does come through is a very abrasive white tea base that feels more like a low quality green tea than anything else.

Wildly underwhelmed by this one.

Saw that a local coffee shop was selling this, and bought a tin.

Then came home early from work because sick. Left tin next to my downstairs living room tea set up. Fast forward several hours later, around midnight, and during late night Nyquil/sick deliria decided to crack open the new tin of it to steep up a cup during my midnight sick binge watch of The Flash on Netflix. I finished the cup. I have no memory of finishing the cup of tea or what it tasted like.

Will revisit in a better state of mind.

Happy September! I wish the weather was as ready for autumn as I am…but as we will be tooling around in flip-flops for a few weeks yet, I succumbed to the novelty of a fruity, summery tea yesterday. The huge orange hunks are what suckered me in. And the mention of carrots. It has to be good for me if it has veggies in it.

My package of Palm Beach Punch came from our (sort of) new Natural Grocers/Vitamin Cottage store in the bulk section, but as it has a “packaged by Vitamin Cottage” label, I’m assuming it’s a privately-labeled version of this Tiesta blend. Ingredients are nearly identical.

OK, enough with the introductory remarks. This lives up to its name: a nice mélange of fruit and berries without, as it advertises, tasting like Hi-C. Nicely balanced; no particular flavor overpowered the others. I’m thinking it will be tasty on ice.

Thanks again for the awesome teas, StarFevre. I didn’t realize, close on the heels of reviewing the last Winter Wonderland, here is this one. Though this is old, there is still plenty of mint flavor here. It says there should be white chocolate but I don’t see any at all… possibly it melted in with the rest of the tea? It’s tasty and I can never say no to a minty caffeine free blend, as it’s the most healing for my headaches.

iced Sipdown (627)!

Don’t know why, but I had just assumed this was a herbal tea. I opened up the sample bag that VariaTEA sent me of it today, though, and I saw right away that it’s definitely NOT a herbal tea. Nope, definitely very much a black tea.

It’s ok iced; kind of has a sour passion fruit/mango taste to it that would be perfectly fine (arguably even delicious) if it was the only flavour in the cup. However, it’s also somewhat floral and the finish is really buttery and I’m just NOT into that buttery tropical/citrus fruit duo so it detracts a lot from the overall flavour for me. I wonder where that buttery quality is coming from!? If it could be eliminated this would be such a more pleasant cuppa…