It’s not often that I buy pre- brewed teas in Sydney. Yet the Stolen Recipe Speciality Teas were so pretty lined up at the local supermarket, I couldn’t resist. They come in four flavours:
1. Rooibos Red Tea in Wild Cherry. This is the most pleasant of the four. I still haven’t acquired the taste for straight rooibos tea, so the bold cherry taste masks those hay/ tobacco roobios flavours well, without being overwhelming.
2. Oolong Fujian Tea in Berry Guava. The berry flavour speaks louder than the guava here, and both are pleasant, although the more complex nutty notes of an oolong tea are lost.
3. Darjeeling Black Tea in Peach Hibiscus. This one I expected to be the most pleasant because pre- brewed flavoured black teas tend to get the balance between the bitter tannin taste of black tea and the sweetness just right. The flavours of peach and floral notes were present, but I’d have liked them to be punchier against the black tea.
4. Gunpowder Green Tea in Mint Lime. This one tasted more like peppermint tea with a hint of lime -the green tea came through only as an astringent aftertaste.
The four flavours are “sweetened naturally’ with white grape juice. And this is where the teas fall over -the taste of white grape juice came through strongly and gave a sour and weak sweetness to the teas that aren’t masked by the flavours the teas claim to be. Flavouring with sugar would very much improve the flavours of these teas.
These bottles of Stolen Recipe Speciality Teas contained 250 ml. They were bottled in Australia and purchased in Sydney, Australia in 2015.