Snapple Peach Passionfruit Tea Review
By thatfrood 18 Comments
It's been a little under two months since Ash Wednesday, when I gave up all things sweet, including the obvious like cakes and cookies but going on to include everything from fruits to Snapple. Catholic Easter was last sunday, but this sunday is Orthodox Easter and I am free to forget my Lenten promise. Two months without drinking Snapple is a long time, made even longer when I discovered on the last two weeks that my grocery store now stocked two new flavors of Snapple. Cherry Pomegranate Tea and Peach Passionfruit Tea. I bought 3 each and tucked them under my desk and waited out the two weeks until I could finally try them.
So here I am, Sunday April 15th. I have an open box of citrus marmalade half moons, a SiteBuilder mugsworth of PG Tips (the biggest mug I have), and a classy little glass for the Peach Passionfruit Tea. It's one of Snapple's white teas, which is just another way of saying it's gonna taste a lot like flavored water. Respectable flavored water, but the point stands. Some things to note before drinking is the washed out color of the bottle. This threw me off at first because Snapple usually reserves that color for their diet drinks, ie the light pink of the Diet Raspberry or the light orange of Diet Peach. I have never enjoyed diet drinks so seeing the pastel coloring of these bottles initially turned me off. Luckily, these aren't "diet" in the sense that they use artificial sweetener. Instead they are just lightly sweetened. Which is good, I'd prefer if more drink companies chose to do that instead of using artificial sweetener. Only 80 calories!!! :O :o :O
So, open the cap. It's #735: "A full moon is nine times brighter than a half moon." Well, I have at least one of every snapple fact between 600 and 900, so it isn't a new one. Oh well. Into the pile.
First sip, it's pleasant and light. You do get a bit of the coarseness of the white tea from it, which is good as that was lacking in their Nectarine White Tea (which truly tastes like water with flavored sugar mixed in). Getting it under my tongue a bit it certainly doesn't taste lightly sweetened, though that might just be the sugar withdrawal talking.
The peach flavor comes across pretty well, passionfruit maybe less so. Passionfruit has always been one of those exotic flavors for which I have never had a good grasp. Passionfruit always plays second fiddle to other flavors in most new age drinks and thus I don't quite have a good idea of what it should taste like. In the aftertaste I can definitely make out something that isn't quite peach, though. Except maybe that's just the Acerola Fruit? Which, after looking at the wikipedia page, has bisexual flowers. Sounds sexy. Apparently it's a good source of vitamin c as well which makes sense, on top of the citric acid already added to the drink you can make out the dry and sour taste that comes with that vitamin.
I normally like to cleanse palette with regular black tea, which I know is stupid, seeing as tea doesn't exactly cleanse the palette, but I like how it tastes. Because of this, I may be thinking the white tea is stronger than it really is, which is shocking, considering the drink really could do with a more pronounced tea taste. It's a step stronger than the Nectarine, but a step isn't much. It's a full Ziggurat's worth of steps away from where I'd like it to be. But I recognize that not everybody wants the bitter of tea in their refreshing summer drink. But why are they buying snapple then?
For people who drink Snapple's regular Peach Tea, which is by far one of their best flavors, their Peach Passionfruit Tea isn't very moving. It is a good, light drink, but in the absence of a stronger, blacker tea flavor the acidity of the drink drowns out the peach. That is the real problem, that the label flavor is neither subtle or strong. It washes off quickly and leaves behind the clenching, dry taste of citrus. Peach and white tea are both very meek flavors, even over-steeped white tea is a far cry from a weak black. The drink does right in using less sugar than usual, and I continue to hope Snapple will one day find a way to do their white tea flavors right in the way it does its black tea, in a way that plays off the strengths of the tea and the flavor, but this is not the day nor the drink.
Edit: Since the first tasting of this new snapple flavor, I have come around to liking it more and more. It really is just a crisper version of their regular Peach Tea, and I'm okay with that. I'm keeping it at a 3/5 because in my mind that's still a mark of quality. The tangy-ness of the drink I've come to accept.
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