Bloom Tea – Coconut Kola Punch
Today’s review is one of those ones where my tea choice is inspired by the book I’ve just read, rather than my usual practice of choosing the tea first and then selecting a book from my bookshelf which has some kind of – often tenuous – link to it.
The book in question is Flesh and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma, which came by way of the Shelterbox Book Club. I’ve mentioned this book club before in my review of Bird & Blend’s Mocha Chai which accompanied the previous book club selection The Wife’s Tale.
Shelterbox are an amazing charity who help displaced people across the globe. Their book club choices usually reflect the lives of people in the countries where the charity is active.
Flesh and Bone and Water is a book about Brazil which starts off in London, the current home of its protagonist, Andre. An unexpected letter from home brings his old life in Rio sharply back into focus. And as Andre relives his teenage years, we, the reader, travel on that journey with him.
Every character in this book is so well drawn that I feel like I would recognise them if I ran into them in the street. Andre often comes across as a spoiled rich boy who was handed good fortune on a plate, yet still managed to complain about everything and screw things up.
I might not have liked Andre but I felt for him deeply. Every new twist of his story helped me gripped and the fact that much of his misfortune was his own doing made me feel all the more for him. I would happily and heartily recommend this book to others. Also, if you buy it directly from the Shelterbox website, you’ll be helping a very worthwhile charity into the bargain.
So, what tea to pair with this novel? There isn’t any tea drinking in this book as far as I can recall, even in the London scenes. However, glasses of sweet Mate are sometimes imbibed. Yerba Mate is a tea-like non-tea popular in South America, and so it seemed appropriate that today’s tea should be a Yerba Mate one.
Blooms Tea’s Coconut Kola Punch contains – in addition to Yerba Mate – lemongrass, desiccated coconut, Siberian ginseng, ginkgo biloba and gotu kola. None of which are at all Brazilian.
I didn’t get along with Mate the first time I tried it (comparisons with boiled cabbage and stagnant pond water may have been made), but this Coconut Kola Punch could win me round to a pro-Yerba Mate standpoint. It really is rather nice. The other ingredients help, of course, especially the coconut whose oily sweetness does a lot of the work here.
I do want to like Yerba Mate. It contains caffeine after all, which sets it apart from all the other tisanes. It certainly makes it a lot less pointless than its herbal tea brethren. Yerba Mate is a very important part of South American culture. And having been steeped in the culture of Brazil whilst reading Flesh and Bone and Water, right now that’s something I want to embrace.
Today’s featured book is, as I may have mentioned, Flesh and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma.
