I love the taste of strawberries, but I generally steer clear of strawberry flavoured things. The taste of strawberries and the taste of strawberry flavouring are so distinctly different as to be many worlds apart. I know something is strawberry flavoured because I recognise the artificial, overly sweet taste that accompanies everything claiming to be ‘strawberry-flavoured’ and not because it tastes like strawberries. But I’m always eager to be proven wrong by an unfamiliar brand.
This time, I’m trying Healtheries Strawberry with a Lime Twist Infusion. The box describes it as ‘a careful blend of strawberry and lime [that] favours the former of those excellent fruits, with the sweet tang of berries evident from the first sip’. It lists ‘apple, hibiscus, rosehip, orange peels, sweetener, strawberry juice concentrate powder, lime peels, and banana fruit juice concentrate powder’ as its ingredients.
Infused for 4 minutes in 200 mL of boiling water yields a gorgeous jewel-like red-pink colour with an artificial strawberry and lime nose. Unfortunately, this artificial flavour came through as a sweet strawberry flavour in the head before developing to sickeningly sweet levels by the body ahead of a zesty lime finish, leaving an unpleasantly sweet aftertaste. The sweetness is probably a result of the use of sweetener whereas I prefer my teas unsweetened, and both the strawberry and lime flavours are artificial in smell and taste with the zestiness of the lime not being enough to counter the sweetness of the strawberry – there’s no hint of fresh fruity flavour. Rather, the tea tastes and smells exactly like cough syrup I had as a child. And anything that tastes like the cough syrup you had as a child becomes unpalatable as a grown up – case in point: D has an aversion to all things peach flavoured as a result of having peach flavoured cough syrup as a child.
This Healtheries Strawberry with Lime Twist Infusion contained 20 tea bags. It was packed in New Zealand and purchased in Auckland, New Zealand in 2014.