The Good: Amazing aroma, Good taste, Easy to prepare, Caffeinated, Great with sugar
The Bad: Extraneous tea garbage, Proportionately expensive
The Basics: A delightful tea with a complicated flavor, Stash's Coconut Mango Oolong tea is best with sugar.
On our recent day out together, my wife turned to me and made an implicit demand for me to get some more tea for around the house. This might shock those who read my many, many tea reviews, but because I review so much tea, I tend not to keep as much on hand any longer. Instead, good teas come in and go out while the dregs get pushed to the back of the cupboard. Knowing how my desire to stock the tea cupboard seems to be based on my reviewables, she ultimately broke down and bought a box of Stash Coconut Mango Oolong tea.
This Coconut Mango Oolong tea represents a departure in my reviewing of teas as I am enthusiastically recommending it. However, in all candor, on its own the tea does not taste especially like coconut. Even so, with its intriguing aroma, yummy taste and the fruity taste it takes on with sugar, I am able to overlook what it is supposed to taste like and enjoy what flavors it does have.
Basics
Coconut Mango Oolong is a tea from Stash. It is a tea that has caffeine and a fairly strong tea, not fruit, flavor. Coconut Mango Oolong comes in Stash's standard individually-wrapped tea bags, so that each tea bag has a wax papery envelope it is sealed in for freshness. Each tea bag has a five-inch string with a little paper tab at the end, which is more waste than I like from a tea bag. When I make pots of tea, I tend to use two bags and making a steeping pot of Coconut Mango Oolong reminds me of why I like the easy environmentalism of Celestial Seasonings' stringless bags. A box of Coconut Mango Oolong comes with 18 individually-wrapped tea bags, as this is one of their premium teas.
Coconut Mango Oolong is marketed as a fruit-flavored tea and it lives up to that with sugar, though on its own it is more intriguing than flavor-exact.
Ease of Preparation
Coconut Mango Oolong is a true tea (with tea leaves), which means preparation is as easy as boiling a pot of water! Coconut Mango Oolong tea, as the directions state, requires water that is boiling. A single tea bag will make the standard 8 oz. coffee mug worth of tea, though reusing the tea bags yields a mug full which is about 5/8 strength. It was only when reusing the teabag (or when the tea was cold) I found the tea to have a dry aftertaste.
To prepare Coconut Mango Oolong, simply boil up some water, and pour it over the tea bags in a cup, mug or steeping pot. This tea is recommended to take three to five minutes to steep and with boiling water, the tea was ready at the four minute mark and letting it steep longer does not truly change the results. Letting the tea steep more than five minutes does not net any additional flavor, nor does it denature the flavor of the tea. However, after brewing for five minutes, trying to reuse the teabag is likely to net the consumer a very weak second cup or pot.
Taste
Smelling the fresh-brewed tea, Coconut Mango Oolong has a delicious and potent scent that is best described as "floral." This smells like lilies in a pond and very strongly of the lilies! There is not a hint of the fruit taste in the aroma.
Appropriately, there is not truly a fruit taste in the tea when one first tastes it either. Instead, the floral bouquet makes the Coconut Mango Oolong taste like it was brewed with rosewater and the taste is slightly dry, slightly sweet and very much a light tea flavor. In fact, this tea tastes like someone spiced up tea from a traditional Chinese tea. In other words, Stash makes it taste like they took a bland thing and made it interesting.
With a teaspoon of sugar, Coconut Mango Oolong tea tastes like the mango it is supposed to and has a slightly dry aftertaste of coconut. With sugar it perfectly embodies all of the flavors it promises to and it does so quite well.
Cold, Coconut Mango Oolong is dry and loses some of the flavor, so this is definitely a tea that is better piping hot!
Nutrition
That Stash’s Coconut Mango Oolong is flavorful is somewhat surprising considering that the ingredients are: Wuyi oolong tea, orange peel, and natural flavors (pineapple, mango, coconut). Coconut Mango Oolong tea is all natural, Kosher, and does contain caffeine, though how much is unclear from the packaging. I tend to feel perked up just by the smell of this tea, so it would not surprise me if it had a decent kick of caffeine.
Were it not for the sugar I add whenever I make Coconut Mango Oolong, this tea would be devoid of any nutritional value. It contains no calories, fat, sodium, carbohydrates or protein.
Storage/Clean-up
Stash's Coconut Mango Oolong is a fairly light tea. As a result, cleanup is rather simple, save on fabrics. The mugs and steeping pot easily rinse out. This tea will stain if it is left on fabrics, so simply do not let the tea cups or mugs linger on light colored materials that might stain!
Coconut Mango Oolong is easy to clean up after - the tea bags may be disposed in the garbage, or composted if you have a good garden and/or compost pile. One of the nice things about this tea - like most - is that so long as it is kept cool and dry, it can last for a long time and it is easy to clean up. However, like all Stash teas, there is extra waste from the strings, paper tabs and individual wrappings around each bag.
Overall
Stash Coconut Mango Oolong is flavorful and one of the best teas I have had from that company - and tea companies in general. Were it not for the fact that it takes a little embellishment from sugar to truly make it taste like what it claims (and the environmental irresponsibility of Stash) this would be a perfect tea.
For other beverage reviews, please check out my reviews of:
Celestial Seasonings Zingers To Go Peach Delight
Duff Energy Drink
Republic Of Tea Orange Ginger Mint
8/10
For other drink reviews, please check out my index page!
© 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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