The Good: Amazing scent, Tastes good, Nothing bad in it, Caffeinated
The Bad: Slightly more mild taste than I would like, not at all strawberry flavored.
The Basics: Vanilla Strawberry Rose tea is good, but smells better than it tastes and with more aroma than flavor.
In my many reviews of teas, I often find myself encountering flavors that are not quite congruent with the taste they claim to possess. This is not always a detraction and sometimes I find myself delighted by the result. In some cases, I find myself possessing a mix of delight and discomfort. So, for example, in the case of Vanilla Strawberry Rose Tea, as much as I like the tea, objectively it is less like what it claims and it smells exactly like the rosewater I have had in the refrigerator for years.
This tea was one of the few I picked up last year at the Celestial Seasonings Factory and if it is not available locally yet, it ought to be soon. However, for those looking for a real blend of flavors that is truly diverse and rich, Vanilla Strawberry Rose is aromatic, but understated with the strawberry flavor being almost nonexistent. As a result, those with a discriminating palate and a lot of experience with teas will likely find this to be a wonderful diversion, but hardly the flavor-rich beverage the name implies. That said, I love this tea and I keep brewing pot after pot of it!
Basics
Vanilla Strawberry Rose is a Ceylon Black Tea from Celestial Seasonings. This black tea is 100% natural and has caffeine because the base is black tea. In addition to the all-natural tea, the other ingredients are natural herbal ingredients and spices.
Vanilla Strawberry Rose comes in Celestial Seasonings's standard stringless tea bags, which are paired together with easy to separate perforations that allow one to separate the tea bags. When I make pots of tea, I tend to use two bags and leave them connected. A box of Vanilla Strawberry Rose comes with ten pairs (20 individual) of tea bags.
Ease Of Preparation
Vanilla Strawberry Rose is like a standard black tea as far as the preparation goes. A single tea bag will make the standard 8 oz. coffee mug worth of tea. The tea bag could be reused and make a second cup of Vanilla Strawberry Rose and this is a fairly good flavor for that. The second cup or pot, comes out about five-eighths as strong as the first, but provided the first steeping was not more than the recommended upper recommended steeping time of six minutes, this is pretty good. I tend to make my tea using a 32 oz. steeping teapot and that works well for both a first and second steeping.
To prepare Vanilla Strawberry Rose tea, bring a pot of water to a boil and pour it over the tea bags. This tea takes three to five minutes to steep and when the water is actually boiling, it comes out strong by the four minute point without needing any additional time. After six minutes, though, the flavor does not concentrate any more so there is no benefit to letting it steep longer than that.
Taste
Vanilla Strawberry Rose Tea is a good tea, which starts with the aroma. Pouring this tea into a mug is to invite the deep, pure scent of roses into one's nostrils. If you've ever smelled rosewater, this is the precise smell of Vanilla Strawberry Rose when it is piping hot and the scent is extraordinary and delicious. When the tea cools slightly, the smell of vanilla takes over.
Hot, Vanilla Strawberry Rose is surprisingly bland. It tastes like black tea with a slight dry aftertaste which is supposedly what the vanilla flavor is. Unfortunately, for a tea that promises so many flavors, Vanilla Strawberry Rose is a bland flavor that tastes more like tea than any of the promised flavors. This is a tea-flavored tea and there is little differentiating the taste (as opposed to the scent) from other, more generic, teas like the basic Lipton tea.
As the tea begins to cool, it takes on a slightly sour aftertaste, which is the closest to a strawberry flavor the tea ever takes on. This is tremendously problematic and as one who has had some great teas - that DO taste like strawberry - this is disappointing that the most strawberry flavor comes out only as an aftertaste and is otherwise a fairly lousy representation of anything even remotely fruit flavored.
With sugar Vanilla Strawberry Rose becomes sweeter, but tastes no more like vanilla or strawberry than it does hot. It still possesses the strong rose scent, but the flavor is still fairly generically tea. As the tea cools, the strawberry sourness is slightly cut by the sugar, so it is not as unpleasant as it cools. With milk, the tea gets overwhelmed and is not accented in any notable way.
Nutrition
This tea is all-natural like most of Celestial Seasonings's teas and people who simply must know all of the ingredients before purchasing something are encouraged to check out the manufacturer's website. The top three ingredients, though, are Ceylon black tea, cinnamon (which might account for some of the dryness to the primary taste) and natural vanilla. Given that vanilla, strawberry and rose flavorings are so far down the ingredient list, it is unsurprising it is such a flavorless tea! There is nothing unpronouncable in this tea and it is 100% natural. It is noted that this tea is gluten-free, but is Kosher.
In terms of nutrition, like most teas, Vanilla Strawberry Rose is not something you want to try to live on. An 8 oz. mug of this tea provides nothing of nutritional value to the drinker; there are no calories (save what one adds from sugar or milk), no fat, sodium, nor protein. This tea also has caffeine, but how much is no longer on the boxes. This is, strangely, not a great tea to use to wake up with, so I suspect it does not have a ton of caffeine.
Storage/Clean-up
Vanilla Strawberry Rose tea is very 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. The tea itself is not a very dark tea, but will probably stain light fabrics if left on them. Vanilla Strawberry Rose tea does not stain mugs or tea pots or leave any offensive odors that might make one want to wash it away quickly.
Overall
I try to apply the same objective standards to all of my teas that I drink and one of the things that always brings them down is when a tea does not taste like what it claims to. Vanilla is a pretty bland taste, but strawberry is anything but. Because there is no real strawberry flavor to this tea, it's tough to call this incredible. The tea smells far better than it tastes. While I enjoy it and enthusiastically recommend it, objectively it is not the best tea on the market.
For other Celestial Seasonings fruit tea reviews, please check out my takes on:
Lemon Zinger
Saphara Mango Ginger Green
Tropic Of Strawberry
6/10
For other tea reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here for an organized listing!
© 2010, 2009 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
No comments:
Post a Comment