Peach Apricot Iced Black Tea from Southern Boy Teas

Peach-ApricotTea Information:

Leaf Type:  Black

Where to Buy:  Southern Boy Teas

Tea Description:

Here’s our organic Iyerpadi black tea paired with the sweet, juicy flavors of peach and apricot. This is a great thirst-quencher and palate pleaser. Serve some of this to your guests and watch the double-takes you get out of this delicious iced tea.

Learn more about this tea here.

Learn about SBT’s subscriptions here.

Taster’s Review:

This Peach Apricot Iced Black Tea from Southern Boy Teas is a glassful of yummy, ice cold refreshment!

The flavor is spot-on!  I’m not sure if it’s the way that the Iyerpadi single estate tea melds with the apricot and peach flavors or just the flavors themselves, but it tastes like someone pureed a peach and an apricot and strained it into a glass of black tea.  The flavors are very true to the fruit!

The black tea is a smooth tasting tea – it’s strong enough to assert its flavor into the sip without being too aggressive.  It doesn’t taste bitter or astringent.  Just smooth and delicious.

Together with the authentic flavors of peach and apricot – this tea has a taste that’s sweet – the kind of sweetness that you experience when you take a bite of a sweet, juicy peach or a tree-ripened apricot.  It doesn’t taste overly ‘sugary’ sweet and it doesn’t have a fake taste to it.

There are a lot of ready to drink iced teas on the market out there and peach seems to be a flavor that those RTD tea companies embrace – but they are all so loaded with sugar.  This is so much better than anything I’ve tasted RTD!

Passion Fruit Cheesecake Iced Black Tea from Southern Boy Teas

SBT-Passion-Fruit-CheesecakeTea Information:

Leaf Type:  Black

Where to Buy: Southern Boy Teas

Tea Description:

Passion fruit and cheesecake? Does it get more decadent than that? Well, yes, actually it does, when we combine the organic flavors of passion fruit and cheesecake with our premium organic Iyerpadi black tea to make an iced tea from heaven!

Learn more about this tea here.

Learn about SBT’s subscriptions here.

Taster’s Review:

I made a half-gallon pitcher full of this Passion Fruit Cheesecake Iced Black Tea from Southern Boy Teas last night, and now (less than 24 hours later and I’ve only been drinking this for about 3 of those 24 hours!) the pitcher is nearly empty.  I think I have one glass of this tea left in the fridge!

In other words:  this stuff is so tasty that I don’t want to stop drinking it!

The black tea base is a very harmonious flavor with the added flavors of passion fruit and cheesecake.  The natural fruity notes of the Iyerpadi single estate black tea marries well with these flavors, allowing the flavors to come alive in my glass of iced tea while still managing to maintain its own presence there.  It tastes brisk and refreshing.  It’s strong without being aggressive or overwhelming.  It’s not astringent or bitter.  Just really, really lovely.

The passion fruit is a very well-defined flavor here.  The cheesecake is less pronounced but it adds a really lusciously smooth and creamy taste to the sip.  The tangy note of the cheesecake is there too, it’s a subtle little note that hits about mid-sip.  A slight contrast from the sweet and creamy that is quite welcome and keeps the tea from becoming cloying.

Every once in a while, I also pick up on light buttery/pastry type of notes.  This buttery/pastry flavor seem to mostly be hidden within the ubiquitous cheesecake note, not really standing on it’s own so much as being part of the collective ‘cheesecake’ but every once in a while, I taste a little more of that flavor, as if it is trying to stand up and shout: “Hello, I’m here too!”

So I guess if I were to offer any sort of criticism at all about this tea, that would be it.  I might like just a tad more of that buttery/pastry flavor here.  But as I mentioned at the start, I’ve nearly polished off an entire half-gallon of this magical liquid in fewer than four hours.

I think I’m going to be needing more of this.

Date Nut Bread Iced Honeybush Tea from Southern Boy Teas

SBT-HONEYBUSH-Date-Nut-BreadTea Information:

Leaf Type:  Honeybush

Where to Buy:  Zoomdweebies

Tea Description:

Organic honeybush is the perfect compliment to this melding of delicious and aromatic organic flavors, including date, orange, brown sugar, cinnamon, butter and pecan. This might seem like a strange thing to flavor an iced tea like, but just wait til you try it!

Learn more about this tea here.

Learn about SBT’s subscriptions here.

Taster’s Review:

I just ate some Spicy Sriracha Cosmos and let me tell you, my mouth is on fire!  Acha-cha!  Spicy!

So, I needed something cold and refreshing and easy to drink (read:  gulp!) to help cool my palate.  Since I brewed this Date Nut Bread Iced Honeybush Tea from Southern Boy Teas last night so it could chill in the fridge overnight, I figured it was the perfect thing to help me cool down my mouth.

And not only did it do just that, but I was happy to say that the flavors came through LOUD and CLEAR even though my palate might have been somewhat impaired after eating those spicy nuggets of fluffy goodness.  (It’s the very good kind of burn!)  After a tall glass of the tea, my mouth was feeling back to normal, but I wanted to wait a while before I finished the review so that my palate was back to a functioning level.

So now that my taste buds are refreshed and ready to taste things again – I’m really amazed at how much this actually tastes like date nut bread!  I taste the dates – this is a strong flavor.  The nutty flavor comes from a hint of pecan flavoring as well as the natural nutty flavor from the honeybush.  I taste notes of a cake-y/bread-y type flavor, as well as notes of brown sugar and butter and just a dash of cinnamon.

There is a bright note to this that didn’t taste immediately like “orange” to me until I got to the aftertaste.  The aftertaste has a sunny orange flavor.  I like that while I can taste the orange and cinnamon here, these flavors were added carefully and offer more of a gentle note rather than overpower the tea.

It’s a surprisingly refreshing iced tea.  Not flavors that I would normally think of when I think “Iced Tea” but it works and works very nicely!

Green Passion Fruit from Tea & All It’s Splendor

greenpassionfruitTea Information:

Leaf Type:  Green

Where to Buy:  Tea & All It’s Splendor

Tea Description:

If there could be one fruit that best represents a bright summer day it would be passionfruit! So naturally this green tea and passionfruit blend was the perfect fit for this edition.

The light grassy green tea is perfect for carrying the sweet and sour passionfruit floral flavours in a cup. If you’re the type that needs a sweetened cuppa, we recommend a drizzle of agave in this one. The agave flavour is gentle and pairs well with this tea.

Learn more about subscribing to Postal Teas here.

Taster’s Review:

Green Passion Fruit from Tea & All It’s Splendor is the third and final tea that I received as part of edition 11 from Postal Teas.  And it’s a good one!

The tea leaves appeared to me to be a Chinese Sencha – long, dark green spears that looked almost like blades of grass – and there were some yellow flower petals in the blend.  Probably marigold petals.  I didn’t see any dried passion fruit pieces but I could definitely smell the passion fruit!

I brewed this in my Breville One-Touch.  I measured 2 bamboo scoops of tea into the basket of the tea maker and added 500ml of freshly filtered water to the jug.  Then I set the parameters:  180°F for 2 minutes.

The tea is sweet and fruity.  The Passion Fruit flavor is well-defined without hitting me over the head.  I like the way the flavor is represented here.  It’s a strong, distinct flavor of passion fruit but the green tea flavor is the star of the show.  I am enjoying a nice balance between sweet, slightly vegetative green tea and juicy passion fruit flavors.  Delicious!

I also like that this is a very tropical tasting tea without tasting like every other tropical tea out there.  It’s got that tropical flair without tasting like a muddled recipe of mixed fruit.

The tea tasted great served hot but I liked it even better as it cooled – this would be a great refresher for the summer months ahead!  If you’re a fan of passion fruit, try this tea!

Streusel Topping Iced White Tea from Southern Boy Teas

SBT-WHITE-Streusel-ToppingTea Information:

Leaf Type:  White

Where to Buy:  Zoomdweebies

Tea Description:

Ever get one of those giant packaged muffins with the crumbly streusel topping, and find that the lower half of the muffin isn’t nearly as good as the top half? Here’s our premium organic shou mei white tea fannings blended with organic cinnamon, brown sugar, butter and pastry flavors to make it taste like a muffin top without giving you one!

Learn more about this tea here.

Taster’s Review:

Yum!  This Streusel Topping Iced White Tea from Southern Boy Teas tastes so much like a muffin top, all that’s missing is the blueberries (or whatever muffin you might be eating).  But I’m not missing blueberries because this is so tasty that I forget that I generally take my muffins with blueberries.

But since there are no blueberries in my muffin top, I might suggest that this tastes a bit more like a crumb doughnut.  You know the mini doughnuts that come in packages of six?  I taste top notes of brown sugar, and those notes almost taste caramelized.  The cinnamon isn’t overpowering.  And I get just enough of the butter and cake-like flavors to make this glass of iced tea taste like something other than just another cinnamon tea.

The Shou Mei base is an ideal choice for the flavors of cinnamon, brown sugar, and buttery, cake-y pastry.  The white tea is delicate enough to allow these flavors to be experienced but not so light in flavor that I can’t taste the tea.  Southern Boy Teas has achieved a delicious balance with this blend.

It’s a really refreshing iced tea and a very cooling beverage to drink, which is especially nice as the weather gets warmer.