Island Blend

This is the very first time trying a tea from this company, and I’m liking it a lot. It brews to a beautiful, pale green color. It smells rather unusual, I can smell a vanilla note and a fruit note, but there is also a very strong… almost baked kind of aroma to the cup. Almost like cookies. It doesn’t smell like a typical tropical blend, that’s for sure. Nevertheless, it does smell delicious in its own way and it is a very intriguing sort of fragrance…

The vanilla flavor is strong here, very creamy and sweet tasting… The mango also holds its own in the blend. The green tea offers a light, fresh taste to the mix, I’m not getting a lot of what I would call grassy flavor but there is some vegetative characteristics to the cup. The combination of the vanilla, mango and Sencha is a very tasty one, indeed.

This is really good.

Tea of the morning. My oldest chose this as the breakfast tea today. She’s on a vanilla kick at the moment, so any and all teas in my cupboard that contain vanilla are on her drink-it-now list. While she was sipping this one at the table I was making a different vanilla tea to go in her travel mug so she could drink it at the bus stop.

This is a really pleasant tea. The sencha is a nice base for the mango and vanilla flavors, and although fruit and vanilla are the front notes I can still taste the sweet grassy note from the tea. It works very well in the blend and I do get a tropical feel as I drink. The mango flavor is fruity and juicy, and the vanilla flavor is spot on. No candy like flavor or funky aftertaste. The tea is sweet enough on its own that I added no sugar, and I noticed that my daughter added less than she normally does. She even mentioned that she would like to try plain sencha some time which made me smile.

I find it’s good for one additional resteep with the sencha being much more noticeable. The mango is still there but much lighter, and there’s just a hint of vanilla. Again, it’s very nice.

I can’t say I’d choose this as an everyday breakfast tea, but it is a tea I like to keep on had because it is pleasing to so many different pallets. Even my youngest, who is not a hot tea drinker, took a couple of sips from my mug.

A solid sencha, if a bit on the bitter side for me. Did I steep it too long, ever-so-slightly? Hm. Perhaps. I’m getting little mango – perhaps due to the overly mango tea I had earlier today, which may skew my tasting – and only a faint creaminess. The bitterness is what’s most apparent, sadly.

This is the first time I’ve ordered from Design-A-Tea, and I was impressed with how quickly it got to me. Sadly however, all of the samples I also ordered somehow got mixed up in the process, and I only got this tea. I’ll have to try again soon, and make sure that the samples go through.

2 tsp in 12 oz.

A nice, solid Sencha – clean and satisfying with subtle vanilla and mango undertones! I’m not sure where this one was hiding but I am darned happy I located it!!!! YUM!!!!

I’ve had this one a few times, and I think the more I drink it, the less enamored I become with it. The flavors are nice, but they aren’t particularly distinct. Actually I searched for ‘Tropical Green’ because I couldn’t remember the name of this tea. I wish that Mango came through more cleanly. It’s mango season and I’m just craving a good mango, if only I could figure out where to buy the Philippine ones!! It IS a nice tea, and one that I don’t mind coming back to, but when dry or brewed it doesn’t particularly scream MANGO or VANILLA to me. You kind of have to know what to look for, and even then… I think this is a tea I’ll have to sit down and have a serious brewing session with, it’s not living up to what is claiming to be, but I think that might mostly be me and how many times this ends up being a thermos tea from living in the kitchen cupboard and not with the other sit-down teas.

Oh hey, this is pretty good! Thanks for sharing, MissB!

It’s vanilla-fruit green tea. I was hesitant because I don’t often reach for green teas, but I really like the flavours. It probably won’t give me quite the caffeine kick I’m looking for, but it’s really nice at brunch. :)