Tea Review: Ambiance Orange Jasmine Green Tea: Meh Hot, Not Bad Iced

We are back with another tea review. No drink is left behind here, I literally drink every tea that’s in front of me 🙂 Today’s review is the Ambiance Orange Jasmine Green tea, delivered in tea bags. I picked this up at Smart and Final B&M stores, where this brand typically goes for under $3 in 25-packs, such as the one I got.

INGREDIENTS

Trigger warning, this contains unspecified “Natural Flavors”. It does not specify how the jasmine green tea was made (they rarely do in tea bag tea).

HOW DOES IT TASTE?

Brewing was standard western style, in tea pot, with hot water. Needless to say, this is not intended for grandpa-style or gaiwan brewing 🙂

This tea is rather meh when you drink it as hot. The natural flavors come out as rather off when this is hot, the flavor does not feel natural, which is often the case when companies use unspecified natural flavors.

However, this tea is saved when you ice it! The flavor opens up a bit and does not taste objectionable like it does hot. As such, you can also dilute it some more while still getting flavor.

MIXING IT: of the experiments I made using this, two stood out. Mixing it with mint tamed the natural flavor for something more subdued. And if you want to bring up the jasmine and dial down the orange, I mixed this with the Stash Jasmine Blossom [another tea I’m reviewing at the moment].

VERSATILE PACKAGING

There are two ways to open the box. You can pull the tab and have it on the table horizontally (the two pictures below), or you can have the package standing tall, and push in the perforated area and have tea bags come out one by one (no picture of that).

TEA BAGS are INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED

This is a portable tea in that tea bags are individually sealed in their own foil wrappers, so you can take individual bags with you or hand them off to other people. They kinda had to do this since it is a flavored/aromatic tea, and the flavor would evaporate a lot faster.

TIP: Not visible in the picture above, but it’s there, a gaiwan lid is really handy as a mini display stand for a tea bag. Irony in that? Sure! But it’s very useful 🙂

TEA TAGS

One thing that drives me (and some other people) crazy is having staples in tea bags. Some teas have as many as two staples, one on the tea bag, and one on the tea bag. Thankfully this one is held together with a string, there are no staples. There no wittisms written on the tea tag 🙂

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