The Good: Good nutritional benefits, Has caffeine!
The Bad: Bland, Completely bland, Does not taste like plums, Lack of aroma, Unmemorable!
The Basics: White tea might be hard to make, but Powerfully Plum White Tea by Celestial Seasonings, simply isn't powerful or plumy enough!
As Celestial Seasonings repackages some of its teas, one suspects they are trying to cover some of their duds with new, clever names. When I went out to Colorado a few years back, I picked up a box of "Antioxidant Plum" white tea (reviewed here!) and did not enjoy it. So when I was shopping recently and saw "Powerfully Plum" white Antioxidant tea, I felt something might be fishy. Still, I gave Celestial Seasonings the benefit of the doubt. After all, they wouldn't just repackage a dud, would they?
Well, they did in this case. This is the same, disappointing tea that they tried to pawn off on consumers before as Antioxidant Plum. Make not the same mistake! Here's why it should be shunned:
Basics
Powerfully Plum is a white tea "supplement" from Celestial Seasonings. What makes it a "supplement?" No idea, the box doesn't say, though I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it has something to do with the vitamins that are packed into this drink or the "antioxidant" claim it makes. Either way, it is not a controlled substance. It is a 100% natural white tea and it is loaded with caffeine (see "nutrition" below!). It comes in Celestial Seasoning'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 Powerfully Plum comes with ten pairs (20 individual) of tea bags.
As one might guess, this tea is intended to be plum flavored. I have a B.A. and that is supposed to make me more employable, too. Sometimes the fantasies don't live up.
The Powerfully Plum is a white tea. White tea is made from virgin tea blooms (I kid you not, the tour went on and on about how hard it is to cultivate the buds while they are still new) and as a result, white tea is very uncommon. Because of the limited window of time to harvest the buds and first-growth tea leaves, white tea is very difficult to process, yet buyers still get a box with twenty teabags, just like virtually any other Celestial Seasoning tea!
Ease Of Preparation
As a white tea, Powerfully Plum requires a little more care to prepare than most teas. A single tea bag will make the standard 8 oz. coffee mug worth of tea and could be reused and make a second cup of Powerfully Plum with little loss of flavor (there's a good reason for that, see below in "taste!"). I tend to make my tea using a 32 oz. steeping tea pot and that works well, though it's virtually impossible to get a decent second pot out of the bags.
To prepare Powerfully Plum tea, bring a pot of water to a near-boil and pour it over the tea bags. The water should not be boiling, but rather a few degrees below boiling when you pour the water over the tea bag(s) in your cup, mug or pot. Powerfully Plum takes only one to three minutes to steep according to the directions. In my experience, it needs the full three minutes (at one minute, it's little more than colored water. Come to think of it, after three it's . . .), though letting it steep longer than that does not make the flavor any more full.
Taste
The problem with Powerfully Plum is it might well be the weakest flavor in the Celestial Seasonings line-up. To answer the question, does it taste like plum? The simple answer is "no." Does it taste like antioxidants? Beats me. . . do antioxidants taste like hot water?
Wow, this is one of those times I wish I had a thesaurus here at my fingertips. After all, in movies and music, there are plenty of words I can use to describe something as "bland." I doubt a tea can truly be characterized as "insipid." Powerfully Plum is one weak tea. Other white teas beat it up and takes its lunch money. Plum? It's nowhere to be found. Far from "powerful," this ia barely plum and not at all forceful enough!
Just to be perfectly clear; this tea does not taste like, nor smell like, plums. It has a faint sweet aroma reminiscent of fruit, but not plums specifically. In its hot form, this tea is simply bland with an undercurrent of non-threatening sweet. As the tea washes over one's tongue, the general sensation is hot with a hint that sweet is hiding behind a curtain in an adjacent room. It's not quite an aftertaste of sweet, more like a vapor of . . . this is ridiculous. It's bland. This tea is flavorless and it barely colors the water. A second seeping doesn't make the flavor any less strong because it is such a weak tea.
Adding sugar to this tea does highlight the sweetness of it, but does nothing to make it taste more like plums. No, that ship has sailed; no amount of sugar makes this taste like plums. Even if it were called "Hint of Plums" that would be overstating its actual pluminess. See? This tea is so boring I had to make up a word to describe how much plum flavor it lacks!
Cold, the tea is even worse. If the Powerfully Plum tastes like hot water with a faintly fruity bouquet, the tea when cold tastes like cold water. That's it. I never added milk to the Powerfully Plum, hot or cold, though milk should be able to be added to this tea without any adverse effects (at least in terms of chemical composition). I imagine it would taste like hot water with milk then, though.
Nutrition
Okay, the ingredients for this tea freaked me out because the ingredients are listed as "Other ingredients" and it's just "Natural plum flavor with other natural flavors (contains soy lecithin)." I suppose the other ingredient is the white tea leaves. It is cited as being all natural and Gluten free on the box.
In terms of nutrition, this might as well be a vitamin supplement. One 8 oz. mug of this tea provides the person drinking it with 110% of their daily recommended vitamin c, as well as 20% of vitamins A and E. This rates a 55 on the caffeine meter (based on milligrams of caffeine in an 8 oz. serving), which puts it just above Cola and a little over half of what one would expect from a cup of regular coffee.
I suppose one could drink this for the nutritional benefit, but there has got to be a better, especially tastier, way of doing that.
Storage/Clean-up
Powerfully Plum 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 so weak I doubt it could stain anything if one were trying! As a result, mugs that hold the tea ought to clean up with a rinse without any problems.
Overall
After all the hype over white tea, I was tremendously disappointed with the Powerfully Plum White Tea from Celestial Seasonings. If anything, I was biased toward it going in and now . . . wow. This is the Segue of teas; remember how Seques were hyped to be the next huge thing . . . Yeah, I still walk everywhere, too.
For other Celestial Seasonings tea reviews, please visit my reviews of:
Gen Mai Cha
Green Tea Sampler
Organic Green tea
2/10
For other tea and drink reviews, please click here to see my complete listing of available reviews of this type!
© 2011, 2008 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
| | |
No comments:
Post a Comment