Nectar & Leaf – Exotic Elixir
This tea was very kindly gifted to me by Nectar & Leaf. Being sent free tea is something I am very keen to encourage and if any teamongers reading this feel the urge to do so, you can contact me at em@teafancier.com or via my Instagram account @theteafancier.
Readers, rest assured that the freeness of any tea I review makes no difference to the star rating or the review itself, which will be as appropriately complimentary or condemnatory as I believe the tea in question deserves.
Exotic Elixir is a rooibos-based blend with mango, apple, hibiscus, rosehip, lime leaves, orange blossom, safflower, vanilla and natural flavourings. It’s a pleasant, vibrant little number with all the cosy warmness that you expect from rooibos jazzed up with some fancy fruity florals.
It does seem like an awful lot of ingredients for one tea though. Once a blend hits double digits, it seems unlikely that I’m going to get a representative distribution of all the different flavours in a single spoonful. Personally, I’d have jettisoned the hibiscus and rose hip, but that’s just because I have a particular beef with those two generic-red-tisane flavours.
Also, if – like me – you are in the habit of adding milk to your rooibos, I need to sound a note of caution here. Don’t do that. It goes all weird and curdly.
Although when I say ‘milk’, I have only tried it with soybean-based milk alternative. I don’t know what happens to Exotic Elixir if you add dairy milk to it. That’s a whole other scientific experiment.
And when I say ‘dairy milk’, I mean as opposed to non-dairy milk, not Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. In the ever-increasing list of things that I don’t know about this tea, I also don’t know what happens if you put a bar of chocolate in it.
It certainly doesn’t need anything added. The safflower and vanilla give it a satisfying creamy edge and the bits of freeze-dried mango and the like provide a real hit of sweetness. Hey, maybe it does need all those ingredients after all.
Today’s featured book is The Girl of Ink and Stars by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.
