Lemon Mango

Another big, chunky fruit mixture. This one brews to a really beautiful melon color. OK. I want a sweater in this color, too.

I was in this for the lemon, which isn’t very fair. The aroma is at least one part lemon to one part something else, but the something else is probably closer to two parts. The lemon comes first, then the other, which is denominated mango in the name of the tea.

Thing is, it doesn’t really smell like mango. It smells sweet and fruity, in a Jolly Rancher sort of way, but I’m getting more of a generic fruit back end. If I hadn’t known it was supposed to be mango, I probably would have pegged it as nectarine.

That said, the taste of the tisane only suffers if you expect it to taste like mango. It’s actually, in some ways, better tasting than mango. Mango, the fruit, can have a mealy thing going on that squeezes the taste of the fruit into a unidimensional almost pungent, not quite delicious sweetness. (Other times it is wonderful.) This tastes more like a mixed red fruit taste than a one note mango, which may spare it the risk of mango disappointment.

I like it just fine. It’s as good or a better example of its genre as the Strawberry Kiwi from The Necessiteas that I tasted recently, and probably about as good as Teavana’s Strawberry Lemonade. It’s sweet enough without doctoring. It’s just a different mix of tastes, and isn’t what I was looking for in the continuing lemon search. I prefer the Strawberry Lemonade. But I’m trying not to let my bias cloud my judgment of the lemon Mango’s merits.