By all accounts, I am obsessed with tea. My go-to tea (that is, the one I drink all the time regardless of the weather or my mood, etc) is a brown rice tea, but fruit teas are my favourite to collect, closely followed by flavoured green teas.
Finding teas that I can’t buy in Sydney is one of my favourite things to do while traveling. London had an amazing selection of teas – I mean, how could it not, when the British love their teas? What I didn’t expect, however, was that New Zealand would have a wide selection of teas. I came home with 20+ boxes of tea (or 400+ tea bags), so I’ll be jotting down my impressions of them here for some time to come it seems!
I’ll begin with a quintessentially New Zealand tea: Healtheries Golden Kiwifruit tea. Golden kiwifruit was first grown commercially in New Zealand. I was quite relieved when I found this tea in my haul after I got home, because on the day of our departure I could not justify purchasing the only kiwifruit tea at the airport that was 3 times the price for the same quantity and had honey in it. Honey in tea is a no.
This is my first straight kiwifruit tea. I’d previously only tried the strawberry and kiwi fruit infusion from Whittard of Chelsea. Healtheries Golden Kiwifruit tea tastes sweeter and less astringent than the infusion, which are qualities that I attribute to the use of golden kiwifruit over original kiwifruit. The tea smells very sweet as well (almost too sweet), but its taste has the tropical, sweet and tangy overtones you’d expect from golden kiwifruit. I’ve only had it hot, but I’m sure it’d taste even better chilled, making it the perfect summer tea.
This Healtheries Golden Kiwifruit Infusion contained 20 tea bags. It was packed in New Zealand and purchased in Auckland, New Zealand in 2014.