Both my grandmothers loved roses, and managed to pass that love onto me. After finding the perfect rose perfume (The Peacock Queen 2009 by Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, if anyone's curious), I went in search of a lovely rose tea. Sounds strange, considering most people prefer roses bunched into bundles in a vase than drinking them, but I'm eccentric. I can accept that. And since I don't have cut flowers in my home (my cat eats them), I figured why not try for a tea.
There's a sweetly pink tag on this teabag and when first opened, it smells of a garden full of roses. On second sniff before brewing, there's something more spicy, almost liquorice-like, that I can't quite identify. I used to love these mints when I was a child, that were rose on the outside with an anise center, so this smells promising.
Drinking it (and burning my tongue in the process), it tastes like hot rose petals resting on your tongue. It tastes the way roses smell, if that makes any sense. The manufacturer's website says it's a blend of tulsi, roses, lemon myrtle, and stevia leaf. Tulsi is another name for holy basil (ocimum tenuiflorum for the plant geeks among us), which is in the mint family. Its' other nickname, the Queen of Herbs, is apt after tasting it in a tea. It is mint-like, though decidedly not basil-like. Stevia is a sweetener derived from a plant in the sunflower family and is a sugar substitute, so this tea needs no additional sweetener. It's notable that there has been some concern about stevia being dangerous is large quantities; the FDA has rejected stevia as a mainstream sugar substitute several times. (Though I'm a little skeptical of how good an indicator of safety FDA approval is, considering they didn't start regulating things like ephedrine until far after they should have.)
Lacking instructions on the package (this was a freebie from a local organic market), I steeped it for 3 minutes in boiling water that had been taken off the stove for about half a minute. I like that it's caffeine-free and flavorful without being overpoweringly so. This might be a good palette cleanser between courses at a long meal (though really, who does that anymore?), because the taste is so light and it's not overly sweet. It's not a dessert tea, which baffles me because I thought it would be, but it's also not one of those teas that would be really good for sick people. I didn't add sugar or other sweeteners, and I don't think I'd recommend that; the rose taste would probably be lost entirely. It's definitely not bitter, so it doesn't need the sweetening anyway.
It's just what it says it is: rose tea. Nice, simple, sweet. Not overwhelmingly flavorful, but not boring. Oddly, it makes me smile for no reason. I think it would round out a garden tea party very nicely. So good, I went and bought a box of it after trying the sample.
References
- Holy Basil
- Stevia
Taken from http://thatpourgirl.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment