Teavana Jasmine Dragon and Roobios Tropica Tea Blend

I have been sitting on this review for quite some time now. This past summer, I went on a weekend trip to Washington D.C. with some friends of mine. While we were there, we stopped by a rather large shopping mall, where I had the opportunity to visit a Teavana tea shop for the first time. My experience at Teavana was strange, to say the least. Teavana has an interesting sales hook in that the store offers about thirty different kinds of fresh, loose leaf tea in bins behind the counter, and the custom flavors and varieties that are offered by the company are achieved by simply mixing and matching the individual tea varieties. 

As I found out soon after deciding to visit the crowded shop, Teavana runs a pretty aggressive sales pitch routine on their customers. The second that I stepped in the door, a sales associate was offering me samples of some of Teavana's special blends and filling me in on what custom varieties were currently on offer. After finishing the samples offered at the door, I was whisked away by another employee to sample several more teas at another station. It was here that I tried the subject of today's review, and also where I made the mistake of simply stating, "This is really good. I think that I might get some of this one." Before I really realized what was happening, I had been escorted to the register and was standing face-to-face with a cashier who had already launched into a lengthy explanation of Teavana's convoluted pricing system and was preparing to fill a container with the tea. It became fairly apparent to me at this point that Teavana's prices are specifically designed to disorient the customer. 

The prices listed on the bins of tea in the store represented the price of two ounces of that particular tea. As I'm sure that you can imagine, trying to calculate how much half a pound of an uneven mixture of two separately and unconventionally priced teas will cost while standing in front of an anxiously waiting store employee is the mathematical equivalent of Olympic level gymnastics. Even with my five years of engineering education, I was at a loss to come up with an estimate, and after several moments of hopelessly trying to figure out how much money that I was going to be spending, I simply gave up and asked for a quarter pound of the tea. The tea ended up costing me $25, and although I was left feeling a bit unsettled by the confusing prices and the out-of-control nature of my visit, I am happy to say that the tea was worth every penny.

As pictured above, the tea is a combination of jasmine buds and a rooibos blend mixed with dried strawberries and other tropical fruits. The jasmine buds have an excellent flavor, and have a strong "jasmine" taste while still remaining mellow and crisp. Although I am not typically a huge fan of rooibos tea, I found the blend included in this mix to be quite pleasant. The tropical elements mixed into the rooibos give the tea a light, fruity taste, without making the tea taste sweet. The fruity undertones of the rooibos blend also help to mellow out some of the the strong, earthy overtones of a typical red tea. This works well with the mellow taste of the jasmine, and the flavors complement each other much better than I originally expected. 

Overall, this is a wonderful tea. Although my experience in purchasing it was a bit manipulative, I have to admit that it is very difficult to complain about the end result. $25 dollars may seem like a lot for a quarter of a pound of tea, but the estimated serving size of 1/4 lb. is about 25 cups, and $1 per cup really isn't that bad, especially for a tea of this quality. If there is a Teavana near you, I recommend checking out their selection, and I definitely recommend their jasmine dragon and rooios tropica blend as a good starting point.

But a word to the wise: If a Teavana sales associate asks you if you've ever shopped there before, just do yourself a favor and say yes.

Verdict: Highly Recommended

Purchased: Teavana [Washington D.C.]

Size: 1/4 lb. [Approximately 25 cups]

Price: $25.00 [Approximation]

V8 V-Fusion Plus Tea

Ever since I was a child, I have always hated tomato juice. I do, on occasion, drink the occasional glass of the stuff simply because I know how good it is for me, but those occasions are always exercises in my mental capacity to manage disgust. However, I am a big fan of V8's other ventures into fruit/vegetable juice fusions, and I've been enthusiastically drinking V8 Spalsh and Fusion for several years now. Diminishing returns has been setting in recently, however, until I ran across this flavor at a local Big Lots and decided to give the stuff another (hopefully rejuvinating) try.

I am sad to say that this was not the particular rejuvination that I needed. I'm not entirely sure what this country's sudden obsession with mixing things with green tea is or where it came from, but there are some things that are better off just standing on their own. Don't get me wrong, I love green tea. But I feel like green tea is the new "last flavor resort." I imagine a lot of board meetings proceeding as follows:

"Sir, we have our new flavor finished and we've sent out samples for testing."

"How are the reactions?"

"Well...so far they've been subpar. People don't seem to like it a whole lot, but we've got two weeks before the finished product ships and we can't make any significant changes to the formula."

"Hmm...well...just mix it with some green tea. It will sell like crazy."

I understand that green tea is a wonderful beverage. It is rich in antioxidants and other nutrients, but it has a very distinct flavor and really only works well with specific types of other flavors. And yet, it is everywhere, being mixed with everything. It is the new "buzzword" in the beverage industry, and I'm not entirely sure why.

Anyway, rantings aside, this blend of V-Fusion is only okay. It is certainly not undrinkable in any way; in fact, I'd prefer it to a lot of the other casual health beverage alternatives that are out there. But it's not great. The flavors amalgomate heterogeneously into a strange pile of tastes on the palatte, and it feels as though the ingredients are fighting for dominance in one's olfactory. The strange combination of tastes also tends to accentuate the sucralose. I don't mind the taste of sucralose as much as other artificial sweeteners, but I still prefer it to be a background taste that is masked by the flavor of whatever I am drinking. In my opinion, the function of sweeteners (of any sort) is to accentuate the natural taste of the beverage and add a bit of drinkability to an otherwise bitter or acidic flavor, not to be present as its own taste.

Hence my rampaging distaste of stevia extract.

But, to get back to the point, V8 V-Fusion Raspberry Green Tea is just trying to do too many things at once. Between combining fruit and vegetable juice and trying to bring the raspberry to prominence, all while featuring the green tea, the drink just collapses into a black hole of flavors in which all flavors are contained but none of them escape. It's just...odd, really, and there are definitely better versions of the stuff out there.

Verdict: Not recommended, try another flavor

Purchased: Big Lots [Greenwood, SC]
Size: 46 fl. oz. [1.36 L]
Price: $1.50 [Discounted]