AdvenTea Days 4-6: Lots of new tea ingredients!

Day 4

A doubly appropriate phrase: Joy to the world. The Incarnation. And tea. 

Pineapple and Coconut, Healtheries (made in New Zealand)

Yellow! On steeping further, the colour deepened to something resembling honey.

It didn't smell like honey though! A fruity scent, very pleasant. Ingredients include apple, rosehip, liquorice root, hibiscus, orange peel... Quite a list. Of course, pineapple and coconut are at the bottom of the list, 1% each of the total! 

I am an entrenched black tea fan. Black tea is the best tea. I have heard some people (not me!) go so far as saying that herbal teas are not teas at all. Easily 90-95% of the tea I drink is black tea.

But this AdvenTea experience is challenging my assumptions, even about my own taste! 

Staying firm, I tasted this tea without adding sugar or honey. And it didn't need it. Refreshing, and a bit tropical. Again, I would be happy to drink this again. I have no idea where my friend found it though! So, I'll have to see if she can remember!

It will be interesting to see how I feel about not adding milk to any black teas which may still be coming.

Day 5

Blue! My favourite colour!

Sleepytime Tea, Celestial Seasonings

Opening this at 10:20pm made me so happy! I have a personal rule of not drinking black tea after 10pm, and I worried that I would have to wait until Thursday to drink Wednesday's tea. On the plus side, that would mean two new teas in one day! But there couldn't have been a more appropriately named tea for unwrapping at that time of night! 

Spearmint was the dominant scent of the teabag, perhaps modified by the chamomile. The other ingredients were rather surprising, especially tilia flowers - one of the teas I experienced in Spain was called Tila, and I had no idea whether that was chamomile or another flower, but perhaps this was the same ingredient!

No added sugar or honey. A nice tea. The weather was possibly a bit warm to fully appreciate this tea at that time of day. But I did sleep well! Not a tea I would look for, but if someone offered it at a similar time of night, I would probably drink it again!

Day 6

     

This gorgeous blue doesn't show up very well in these photos! And a snowflake! Rather ironic...

Chai Tea, Arkadia. This is the largest tea packet so far! 

Thursday (day 6) reached 38 degrees Celsius. 

Fittingly, this is the first tea which suggested adding water or milk. And, given that when I opened this, the temperature was still above 30 degrees, I was a bit excited when I turned the packet over and read the back:

And discovered the cold serving suggestion.

So, this is the first tea in this AdvenTea experience which I tried cold.

Such a different look!

Even cold, it smelled like chai, or at least my good experiences of chai. Spices! And milk! I'm not generally a fan of milk, but I can enjoy flavoured milk, and I do enjoy iced drinks. Obviously, I did not add sugar, and neither did I add honey - there was plenty in the packet mix already, if you can read the ingredients!

And so refreshing, that after drinking this I boiled the kettle and had a hot cup of tea half an hour or so later!

I had planned to post this immediately, but I have only finished writing the post and adding photos on Sunday! So, very soon you should see the next few teas... if I can get the photos off my phone and onto my computer...

So, my fellow tea drinkers, and my coffee drinking friends, do you change your drinking habits when the weather gets warm... or very hot?