Cat-sitting at my son's home explicitly unlocked access to their burgeoning tea collection, a few of which I sampled while there. This was the first, and his wife [She gets the credit for good taste in tea! :-)] found the best Republic tea I've had so far. In this blend, RoT finally suffuses their typically small, round, disc-shaped pouches with enough of the tea inside to yield flavor without needing two bags or extra-long steeping.

The bags, stacked as usual like potato chips in their steel cans (36 bags in this case), are only about 2/3 to 3/4 as wide as from other tea companies that do a round style. The difference with this blend is that the wet tea actually swells up to fill the bag, and has surprisingly robust taste. That and the sturdy dry-bag aroma are unusual in my admittedly limited experience chugging RoT products. The taste and smell are decidedly peachy, but with a hint of the orange blossoms (not peach blossoms!) they really use. [I'm not a big fan of false-advertising the literal type of blossom in the title. Tsk tsk...] The peach flavor must be added elsewhere and in sufficient quantity to push orange blossom scent to the background.

The Fujian oolong tea is just barely noticeable behind all that flavoring. If you value a more lightly flavored oolong where the tea asserts dominance, don't drink this. Because I do like peach a lot, and the tea is at least detectable, it's fine with me. For bagged teas, RoT products are expensive, but this is the closest I've had yet to being worth it (even if I didn't buy it).

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