Tea Review: DAVIDsTEA: Organic Orange Blossom

DAVIDsTEA’s Organic Orange Blossom is a blend that can serve as a nice alternative to pure leaf teas when an alternative is desired. I have a tendency to really enjoy the flavors of foods and drinks that are primarily citrus fruits, so I expected that I’d like this after reading its description, and I found that it had a bright scent and taste which were quite refreshing. DAVIDsTEA’s description of it reads:

“The orange is native to China, and its aroma is said to delight the senses while calming the heart. Which is just what this fairly-traded organic green tea, with its sweetly scented blossoms, will do. It contains organic lemongrass, osthmanthus flowers, lemon myrtle, and natural essential oils of rose, orange lime and tangerine. Refreshing and soothing, for any occasion.”

As you can probably tell, looking at the picture of the pre-steeped blend above, it’s pretty heavy on the lemon grass. Just perusing the list of ingredients leads to the logical assumption that it would be heavy on the citrus flavors and have quite a tang to it, and it does, but in a gentler way than one might expect.

I really like the way this tea smells before it is brewed. Since I was curious about what sort of associations other people might come up with, I handed some of it over to a friend to see what she would say upon smelling it. Her assessment was that it smelled like SweeTarts. I can see that similarity, although I find it kind of funny since it’s made up of entirely of bits of dried plants, which seem quite different from the great little colorful blocks of industrialized dextrose that fill a SweeTart wrapper. The actual brew doesn’t really taste like SweeTarts. It’s a sweet, lemony, orangy, acidic, but not at all bitter drink, and one that’s quite nice.

Oranges remind me of Sergei Prokofiev, and writing about them has resulted in the March running through my head, so here’s a clip from the opera Amour des trois Oranges (“For the Love of Three Oranges”), performed by the Opera Bastille in 2005. The story for the opera was adapted from a rather horrifying Italian folktale in the Commedia dell’Arte tradition.