Chai Wallah Margate – Banana Oolong
Chai Wallah Margate’s Banana Oolong is a vibrant little fruit salad of tea. It sounds fun, doesn’t it? Bananas always sound fun. They’re the most irreverent of all the fruits.
In addition to Chinese Oolong and freeze-dried bananas, this tea also contains apple, rosehip, sunflower petals and natural flavouring. But it looks and tastes like there’s a lot more fruit action going on. This might be the work of the natural flavourings of course. But it could also be down to the Oolong that Chai Wallah Margate have used. Some Oolongs are very fruity.
The teamongers have tried to capture the taste of penny sweet favourites, foam bananas in this blend and I reckon they have done a pretty good job of it. Although if I’d done a blind taste test and been asked what penny sweet this brew most reminded me of, I would have probably plumped for fruit salad chews. (Fruit salads are apparently raspberry and pineapple flavour though so that shows what I know about anything.)
It’s interesting that this tea is inspired by a banana-flavoured sweet rather than actual bananas. This tea contains actual real-life bits of dried banana in it. Banana foam sweets very decidedly do not. I looked up the ingredients and they are sugar, glucose syrup, water, dextrose, beef gelatine, maize starch, colour and flavouring, which is quite, quite different from the ingredients of Banana Oolong tea. (I would certainly discourage any teamongers from popping beef gelatine in their tea blends. I wouldn’t like that at all.)
Banana flavoured things don’t actually taste that much like bananas do they? It’s like the bacon-flavour taste of Frazzles compared to actual bacon. Absolutely nothing like the taste it’s emulating but a recognisable and distinct flavour of its own.
I prefer banana-flavour to the taste of bananas, as it goes. I would much prefer a glass of banana Nesquik to a banana smoothie. So I think Chai Wallah Margate made the right decision here with this tea’s flavour profile.
This is a pale, light-coloured Oolong and what with all the sweet fruity flavours going on, it comes perilously close to tasting like a fruity tisane. Happily, the good quality Camelia Sinensis at its base stops that happening. It’s probably a bit too fruity to become a regular on my tea shelf but I enjoyed the Proustian recollections of my penny-sweet-munching childhood.
Today’s featured book is Je, Tu, Nous by Luce Irigaray because it is the yellowest book on my bookshelf.
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