Tags
david's tea, guayusa, Jungle Ju Ju, papaya, tea, tea review, tea reviews, yerba maté
Type: ‘Maté’ according to David’s Tea, though Guayusa is a completely different plant.
Instructions from packet: 1.25 tsp per cup, 85C water, 4-7 minutes steeping time
Description from packet: Head for the Ju Ju Jungle, made with a guayusa herb and fruit blend that’ll make you feel like swinging from the vines and hanging from the trees.
Ingredients: Guayusa*(Ecuador), candied papaya (papaya, sugar, sulfites, yellow 5, yellow 6, calcium chloride, citric acid), peach, natural and artificial flavours.
The look: Fine, small dark green leaves with largeish chunks of dried papaya.
The smell: The only thing I can smell is the dried papaya. It makes me think of a popsicle due to the sweet fruitiness of it, but there’s a vague milkiness to it too.
First steeping: The tea is astringent. The papaya flavour dominates. The tea has a bitter after taste.
Second steeping: At first, the second steeping is watery and unpleasant. Even though I’d read resteeping is recommended, perhaps I needed to use more tea. I left it to steep a little longer and returned to it. Leaving it for an extra five minutes marginally improves it. Drinking it twenty-thirty minutes after the initial steep it becomes actually quite pleasant, but this seems an unreasonable amount of time to wait.
Rating: 5/10. I really, really like papaya (I mean, I have a tag on my blog that’s ‘papaya is so good‘), but the astringency and bitterness seem chemical in nature.