As with most teas from RoT, they come in disc-shaped pouches with tea-holding compartments about 3/4 inch in radius from center. That ain't much space for tea, and doesn't allow a lot of room for inflation of the wet tea either. They come stacked like Pringles chips in a steel can that has a paper label pasted on. Cracking off the steel and plastic lid releases a really nice, well-balanced dry aroma that is more complex than the flavor, and seems to mix mango with pineapple, banana and apple. Since they don't specify the "natural flavor" it could be anything. The third and last ingredient (sunflower petals) seems to work well with the fruit flavor(s).

As for taste: all of this is predicated on doubling up the tea to two bags, because as I've noted with other RoT offerings, they put about half the product in a bag as many other companies, and they're small bags. The can of Mango Ceylon (subtitled Metabolic Frolic Tea) had 50 pouches in it, so for me, "value" is based on 25 bags at normal price, or about 45¢ per bag. That's costly. So, even though I liked this tea a lot, and despite the fact my metabolics didn't frolic, the corporate skimping on quantity drags on the value and overall ratings.

Being a fan of tropical fruits of all sorts, it would take a sorry base tea to ruin the experience for me. Fortunately this was a fairly robust Ceylon that doesn't let the fruit flavor overpower it. However, steep it longer than about 5 minutes and it starts to get bitter enough to overcome the positives in the flavor. [Shorter steeping is another reason to double up.] When doing that, it's a mellow but fairly robust fruit black tea, again mostly mango, but now with more of an apple-peach bent. It's a fun, high-quality tea to drink as long as you don't think too hard about the retail price. If RoT just did normal, Celestial- or Bigelow-capacity bags with this blend, it would be in the top 10% of my ratings for all flavored black teas.

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