Numi - 7 Reviews

I have always heard that pu-erh tea was supposed to be super fancy. I'm not a big fan of hot tea so I never looked into it. When I saw this bottle at the store today I thought, "Hey I can finally try this and see what the fuss is all about". Verdict: I don't like it. After doing some "after the fact" research, I find out that pu-erh tea is fermented. In my top 10 most hated drinks, 8 of them are fermented. I don't know why, I wish I could like fermented drinks. Everyone swears by Fentiman's and Bionade, but I can't enjoy them at all.

All that being said, this is a good clean tasting tea. There's only a slight peach flavor, and an even slighter ginger flavor. The latter really disappointed me because I really like tea with ginger in it. Even though I'm not big on lightly sweetened teas, even if this had more sugar in it I think I would still not like it very much. Sorry tea connoisseurs, it's just not my thing.

Things that should be weird to read on a beverages bottle, but that get me excited include "Real Fruit & Flowers." Obviously everyone wants real fruit in their drinks. Is there a single person roaming this Earth that prefers artificial fruit flavoring to actual fruit? If there is I'd like to give them my condolences for having the worst taste buds ever. Real flowers? That is just weird, yet exciting. I have grown to love slightly floral drinks during my tenure here at Thirsty Dudes. Two years ago if I drank this I would probably think it was garbage, but my tastes have been refined and I do enjoy it. It is a bit too floral though. It may be the pu-erh tea though. I just discovered that it's a post fermentation tea. I'm not positive what that means, but I think that mixed with the flowers pushes this a bit too far into the "I just ate something off of a plant at the botanical gardens" region.

The tea is very lightly sweetened, and it has some passionfruit juice in it to give it a little extra flavor. It's there, but a bit hidden under the flowers. The more I get the stronger the flower taste becomes. Now that I'm at the bottom fifth it's kind of out of control and I'm not longer a fan. When I started this I would have given it four bottles. By the end I would give it two bottles. I'll just even it out and call it a solid three.

In the 80's there was nothing cooler than skateboarding. It's all my friends did and talked about. Somewhere along the lines skate videos came out. Companies took video of their best skaters, put it to music, and made magic for kids everywhere. My friends and I all had Powell Peralta decks, so we were obsessed with the "Bones Brigade" series. My favorite out of them all was "The Search for Animal Chin." The plot of the video was that the skaters were looking for a wise man named Won Ton "Animal" Chin. They searched everywhere for him and skated everything in their path. It led to some pretty intense sessions. At the end they find a half pipe in the desert with a Chinese symbol on it. The message is that "As long as skaters keep searching for Chin, they've already found him." I feel the same way about iced tea. We search high and low for the perfect tea and we come across a ton of incredible stuff in our adventures. This may not be the ultimate tea that we're searching for, but it's good. It's a blend of a bunch of different teas mixed together. It's "barely sweetened", so it's nice and bitter with a slight peach flavoring. This may not be Chin, but it's certainly a tea he would drink.

This is an iced tea for adults. I might go as far as to say this is an iced tea made specifically for grandmothers. I could never in a million years imagine a child drinking this, let alone enjoying it. Is that a bad thing? Not at all. There are tons of different people out there and everyone likes different things. It's not really my thing, but I'm sure others will love it.

This tastes like a kindly old grandmother brewed a kettle of red tea. She put some slices of lemon in it and lightly sweetened it with agave (okay so maybe this grandmother lives in Portland or Austin, who am I to say?). She then realized that it was the middle of the summer and it was blistering hot out (looks like she lives in Austin). She then poured the kettle into a nice pitcher and put it in the fridge. A couple of hours later she had company over so she poured some glasses and everyone sat out on the porch enjoying the Texas summer (I knew it was Austin!).

This just came in over the wire: Chewing Gum Industry Single Handedly Takes Down The Mint Tea Empire. This morning officials met in an undisclosed location to discuss the state of mint iced teas. In recent years there has been a steady decline in the amount of mint in teas. It was put to a vote after hours of deliberation and the results came back unanimous that mint chewing gum is the solely responsible for this unfortunate demise. Stuart VonBrewenburg, leader of the anti-chewing gum league, was quoted as saying the following, "How can we continue to make our wonderful refreshing beverages when all our customers can say after a sip is that it tastes like they are drinking plain tea whilst chewing a stick of gum?" The most recent victim of this crime is the Numi company from Oakland, CA. Their "Moroccan Mint" line never stood a chance once the Wrigley Spearmint hit the streets back in 1911. Average citizen Kevyn Godwin from Buffalo, NY was heard to say, "It's hard to swallow when you imaging you're downing a bottle of spearmint tainted saliva."

When I was in about 9th grade I can remember a conversation that I had with my home and careers teacher verbatim. First of all, I started with "I'm going through a lot of changes." which was probably the worst thing I could have started with. I thought that she thought that I was going to talk about body hair, or at least something involving my wiener. I followed up that ambiguous statement with "I like to drink tea." I then followed that by saying that I think that I like listening to classical music, which lasted about a month and never, went past one compilation album of "the essentials" of classical music. I probably wouldn't touch the stuff now.

So anyhow, back to teatime. As soon as I started liking tea, I thought it was all the same. I don't even think that I had ventured into the Celestial Seasonings line yet. It was just whatever we had in the house. My best friend growing up's parent were right off the boat from England, Liverpool to be more precise. Being English, they knew their tea and bought me some loose Earl Gray tea. It was alright. Not too strong, pretty basic, but drinkable and very consistent. This Numi tea is the first time I've had Earl Gray of any variety in probably over ten years but it reminds me of way back when. This is sweetened, barely, but nonetheless, sweetened and it's very good. You can taste that it's different than just black tea and has a little something else to it. It's got a sophisticated, worldly taste to it that I cannot stand behind any more.

Americans and Englishmen alike. Please split a bottle of this and together we will have a feast.

You know what? This is really good tea. If you don't like sweetened tea, this is a gateway to sweetened tea. If you don't like unsweetened tea, this is a gateway to unsweetened tea. It's right there, in tea purgatory, but a good purgatory. Think of this tea like a waiting room for kids. When you go to the tea doctor, and you have to wait in the waiting room, they've got video games, first edition books in mint condition, your favorite movies in HD with a giant LED TV. We're talking 72 inches of viewing pleasure. Also, a sub tray. I love when I got to parties and they have sub trays. Also, they have an endless bowl of guacamole and chips. Like Chi Chi's salsa but with guacamole instead. They will also have an endless array of Numi teas so that you can train yourself to like either full sweetened or full unsweetened tea. When you are satisfied, you get your parking validated and you can leave.

This is my first go with agave and I've got to say, I like it. It's a very soft, fruity flavor. Everything is subtle, but after a while the fruit get stronger and just makes you smile because it's good. Mango and passion fruit are good friends in this drink and although I'm no teaman, that's a Jewish tea maker, I think they should be combined more often.