Teavana's Strawberry Misaki Blooming Tea Review

A while ago I went to a store called Teavana with my friend Kaylie from Cafe Groenhout to try fresh loose tea. When we got there a worker came over and took us through the various teas that they had available for tasting. Now, I am not a tea connoisseur so anything aside from black bagged tea was new to me. One of the teas he had us try was the strawberry misaki blooming tea and it was delicious. It had an intense sweet strawberry flavor to it that the second I tasted it I knew that was the tea I was buying. He had told me that all you do is put in one bloom and let it steep for a few minutes in hot water and that is it. He said that I could add water to the same bloom 8 times before it lost it's flavor. I had not idea what a blooming tea was until he told me that it opens up to a flower, which I will admit seemed cool but I was buying it for the flavor not the look.


$20 later and 8 blooms in hand I was heading home to show my husband the tasty new tea that I had just bought. I was so proud of myself and I knew that he would just love it. I got home brewed one bloom and... no flavor! It tasted like water with a small hint of strawberry in the background. I then started nuking the water with the bloom in it in the microwave over and over for about 30 minutes tasting it in between to see if it was working and still no flavor. Needless to say hubby was not impressed and I was pissed. I tried making the tea again at a later time and tried 2 blooms and there was little bit more of a strawberry flavor but still nothing compared to what I tried in the store and I was doing everything that the guy at the store told me to do.


So I went back to the store to ask what I was doing wrong. I spoke to a different guy who told me that they might have used two blooms in their sample tea and made me a sample of the tea with two blooms and a ton of sugar to see if that was what I had tasted previously at the store... and it wasn't. It was sweeter than what I was making at home since I wasn't adding sugar but it still had a very weak flavor to it. So the guy said that they probably used 4 blooms in the tea that I originally sampled, that they add a lot of sugar to make it sweet and that it was probably sitting out all day and was steeping for a long time to make it so strong in flavor. So basically I would have to use half of what I bought on one pot of tea and steep it all night long to have a nice cup of tea in the morning. He also said that it would only hold it's flavor for 3 times before you would throw it out.


Now the tea was awesome in the store but to pay $20 for 2 pots of tea is just insane to me. Without the added blooms and sugar the tea is horrible and has no flavor to it. From now on, I will stick to what I know, bagged tea. My tea of choice... Yogi Organic Tea. They have a lot of various flavors and herbal teas to help balance your moods like calming and bedtime. They even have a tea that is good for dieting called Blueberry Slim Life which has a nice blueberry flavor that I usually drink when I have my blueberry scones. I have yet to try the other flavors but so far I like the three listed above and am looking forward to trying the others. They even have Mommy to be tea!

*Yogi did not offer me anything to post this, I just love their tea. The views in the post are mine alone and were not influenced by a third party. I just wanted to warn everyone that what you taste and what you get when you go to Teavana might be two different things. Make sure to ask the sale associate how much tea they put in that sample, how much sugar is in it and how long it has been steeping for. I would hate to see someone else go through what I went through.