Twinings Green Tea with Apple and Pear

I knew Twinings had a lot of flavors of tea, but what I didn't realize was that they had a lot of flavored teas. As someone who is slowly becoming tea-dependent, this was a serendipitous realization. I love trying teas and drinking teas and just...tea! As a kid I never thought I'd say that without a gob of honey in my mouth but as I've gotten older I've grown into tea.

Still, I have a liking for sweet things. As a kid I'd found the intense fruity tartness that you get in addition to the sweetness of fruit teas unbearably strong, but seeing a green tea with apple, one of my favorite fruits, looked too good to try.

I was pleasantly surprised. I was afraid that the fruit would be too intense, but it ended up being like drinking green tea, with the fruit flavors being quite subtle. They were mostly a gentle aftertaste -- nowhere near as strong as I'd expected.

Unfortunately it appears this tea is only available in England.

Fruit2O and Hint Waters

Recently I've discovered that I can actually stomach flavored water. It used to be that I couldn't take the feeling of water with flavor, but I've found these are enough to my taste that I can handle them. I'm not sure if it's that they're 'gentler' than whatever I'd tried before or if it's my palate changing, but it has happened.

• Hint Premium Essence Water

As you can probably guess from the picture I chose, I tried the watermelon version of this stuff. It was pretty good. It helped that watermelon is a light flavor, because the overwhelming flavor is what stops me when I'm drinking something thirstily and expecting something water (i.e. flavored waters). The hint was light and came across as...well...a hint of watermelon. Just as you'd kinda expect.

• Fruit2O

 
 Like the Hint, this was surprisingly nice and light flavoring, though it was definitely more intense. Again, though, this could relate to the flavor choices -- the Fruit2O I came across didn't have a watermelon flavor, so I can't do a direct comparison; the flavors I had instead were Strawberry, which is nice and light while having a sweet, strawberry punch to it, and Grape, which was slightly reminiscent of the just-too-sweet medicine grape, but not quite. It wasn't bad, though, just a little oddly sweet. (but then, I found the grape medicines among the most tolerable as a kid.)

Body Armor SuperDrink: Strawberry Banana Guava

I've been drooling over this bottle every time I pass. It's all pretty and pink with a nice macro of a ripe red strawberry, yellow bananas, and the adorable green-rimmed pink of what I'm assuming is guava (I should get myself one if they're really like that). Plus, I love anything strawberry banana, I think I mentioned that in a few posts; I remember specifically in my ramblings about Chobani Yogurt and Tropical Starburst.

It was very powerful on the strawberry banana - the combination hit hard. I don't know where the guava went, though, to be honest, I don't know if guava is a flavor I would recognize. The texture was nice. I thought it was going to be watery and odd because the drink is pretty transparent, but it felt more like I was drinking a thinned-out smoothie. Not an exceptionally watered down one, just one that had lost the edge to its thickness. It definitely felt more smoothie-like than I expected.

Starbucks Doubleshot Energy+Coffee Mocha and White Chocolate

Starbucks Doubleshots. Actually, these are Starbucks Doubleshots + Energy, officially -- rather than the smaller cans, which are listed as the pure 'Doubleshots', this is a mixture of coffee and an energy drink mixture, rather than what is touted as purely espresso and cream/flavoring. The flavor that I usually get is mocha, and the taste got some time to get used to -- I think because, in addition to the getting over the coffee in the mocha flavoring, there were the unexpected zings of an energy drink (other than these, I hadn't really partaken of energy drinks).

As for effectiveness, I had one in the morning and I'm jittery as anything. I take energy strangely, where I get foggy/sleepy before it kicks in, so during the hour or so I sipped this I felt a bit groggy. About half an hour later, though (this being about an hour and a half before typing this), I felt my mind start to race and my brain start to be on hyper mode. Typing this, I'm still jittery and hyper. I still feel my eyes wanting to sleep, my body's yawning, but it's not complete lethargy. It's like being tired but overly energetic at the same time. There may or may not be a crash in the near future, but as it is, I'm in a semi-productive state of mind -- that is, if I can get myself to concentrate.

Though, the effects I'm having are probably due to my body, personally. I'm guessing this affects different people differently. It can work as something of a boost for me, if I time drinking it right. If I'm already exhausted it'll keep me on a semi-awake plateau.

If you know what energy drinks do to you, it probably does something along that order. I can't really say much for sure.


Until recently, I'd only really had mocha whenever I had a doubleshot (which depending on my workload/schedule, varies from like once a month to once a week at least...it's been much towards the latter over the past two months). Maybe a month ago, I came across a non-coffee, non-vanilla, non-mocha variant of the drink that I'd not seen before: white chocolate. I was curious, so I tried it.

It could be that I'm used to mocha to the extent that the combination of coffee/energydrink and flavoring tastes odd with nythig else, but I have to say, I didn't really like it quite as much. There is a white chocolate flavor, but it's sort of tame, or light. I had to take a big sip to definitively taste it. The drink is definitely more 'mellow' feeling than the mocha. I don't know how to quite put it into words others will understand, but the adjectives "dark" and "deep" as compared to the mocha came to me. Kind of like it's more subdued, less sweet, less chocolatey. You get used to it as you drink, but at first I was a bit taken aback by the flavor, and not in a good way.