Sipdown (1187)!
So, Kuda is a company I’ve been following on instagram for a while pre-site launch and this last week they finally launched their site/opened up for sale. I ended up ordering their sampler, which included one cup worth of all their tisanes. All of their teas are fruit infusions, made from very large cut/aesthetically pleasing dehydrated fruits and are intended be be added directly the a cup without a filter. They’re gorgeous looking which is what initially attracted me to the company.
The thing with dehydrated fruit, in tea especially, is that it generally doesn’t have much flavour at all – most of the time when you see large fruits in tea blends they’re there to either look pretty or act as flavour carriers, because the spongy nature of most dehydrated fruits makes them good vessels for soaking up flavouring and then releasing it once steeped. As such, my expectation for each of these teas is pretty low – but I knew that when I purchased the sampler, and I’m mostly just intrigued by the visuals of each tea…
This was the first flavour I tried, and it’s mostly papaya and strawberry. The smell of the “dry leaf” when you open up the packet reminds me of opening a package of any type of dried/fruit leather type food you’d pick up from a Whole Foods or Natural Foods store. Fruity, but with that sort of borderline stale-ish kind of note. Steeped, that’s pretty true. I think that of all the fruits used in this tisane in particular, the one that steeps out the most flavourful is the papaya – but papaya isn’t exactly a super flavourful fruit to begin with. It tastes sort of like someone sliced up a papaya, dunked that in a cup of hot water for thirty seconds, and then took the papaya out. To be fair, that’s sort of what’s happening here…
It doesn’t taste bad – just very light/mild. It’s actually sort of refreshing in how light it is as a subtle and gentle way to sip something hot and soothing without any harsh or intense flavours. I feel like this would be a fun way to wind down for the night…
