Christina / BooksandTea Send Message

And now I try the first tea from my very first RiverTea order!!!

I chose this one because it’s extremely fragrant. You can smell it from outside its cardboard canister (by the way, I agree with everyone else in that RiverTea’s packaging is absolutely lovely). It smells heavily of roses and fruit, and also has a sort of tangy aroma that smells like champagne – I guess that’s where the natural flavouring comes in. The smell definitely matches the name of the tea.

The leaf itself is dark green, almost brown, and looks like a sencha, and mixed in with large chunks of the other ingredients – you can definitely see pink peppercorns, white rosebuds, and huge slices of strawberry.

I followed the steeping instructions – 1 tsp per cup, 80C, 2-3 minutes – and got tea with a very rosy scent and golden colour. The champagne and rose flavours, and perhaps a very very soft hint of the pepper, are noticeable in the taste, but I’m not getting much strawberry. Perhaps it’s really meshed well with the rose. I wonder if adding some sweetener would make the strawberry come out more.

Anyways, I have a huge pile of this to experiment with. It smells so lovely that I can’t wait to try it in other ways.