With Sydney skipping over spring in usual style and jumping from a late-winter into an early summer in late October, we pulled out this Teavana Watermelon Mint Chiller White Tea to cool down with.
The blend consisted of white tea blended with pieces of cantaloupe melon, pineapple, papaya, apple, honeydew, blackberries, tangerine, pineapple, raspberry and lime, as well as lemongrass and eucalyptus leaves.
It’s described by Teavana as a tea where ‘juicy watermelon, brisk peppermint and soothing, stimulating eucalyptus marvellously with notes of pineapple, tangerine and berries’. Surprisingly, though, there is no watermelon or peppermint in the ingredients.
The tea can be prepared as a hot or iced tea. For a hot tea, I steep 3 g of loose leaf in 200 mL of water at 80°C for 3 minutes. For an iced tea, I double the amount of loose leaf, halve the amount of hot water used, and top with ice after steeping. Here, I steeped 6 g of loose leaf in 100 ml of water at 80°C for 3 minutes to give a translucent dark red coloured infusion with a watermelon candy aroma.
Topping with ice to make up 200 mL after steeping, the infusion was a cloudy medium red colour with the same watermelon candy aroma. Served chilled, a gentle cantaloupe sweetness emerged ahead of a developing fruity acidity with prominent hibiscus notes in the body. The pine and menthol notes of eucalyptus give a cooling finish that combines with the sweet acidity of the fruits and hibiscus to create the sensation of eating ice cold watermelon on a hot day. The sweetness recedes in the aftertaste, though, leaving a slightly unpleasant bitterness from eucalyptus lingering on the palate.
Overall, as a flavoured tea, it lacked any tea leaf flavour, but it does an excellent job of emulating the flavour of watermelon and mint without using either of those ingredients and uses just enough eucalyptus to give the cooling sensation without veering into watermelon gum territory.
This Teavana Watermelon Mint Chiller White Tea contained 55 g. It was packed in the United States and received as a gift from family visiting the United States in 2016.