Lupicia

I’ve been slowly depleting my roommate’s stash of Grapefruit Green. It’s my automatic to-go tea lately when I’m craving something light and fruity. I have a lot of other fruity-flavored teas but they all seem so much stronger than what I’m looking for lately.

I’ve been swamped with exams so I’ve just logging “blank notes”. In any case, this is one of my favorite teas from my roommate’s stash, which is weird because this tea is grapefruity but I don’t like real grapefruits. That says something about the awesomeness of this tea. <3

YAY! Fourth pot of tea of the day! I needed something flavored and this was just right. Going to steep a second pot of it.

Perfect for waking up at 2 in the afternoon.

This is my all-time favorite black tea. The strawberries give it a light sweetness that is simply delightful.

My only caution is that if it’s brewed too long it WILL turn bitter. It is a black tea, afterall.

(I’m drinking their bagged version)

Whoa, all these new features to play with! So many teas to add to my cupboard! And right when I don’t have loads of time to devote to all this! I know what I’ll be doing this weekend. In the meantime, have a tea review…

This tea is a really rare beast: a rooibos tea that I can drink happily. I didn’t mind the underlying taste of the rooibos, and that’s pretty much a first. It’s green rooibos, which I hadn’t had before, and perhaps that makes the difference. I liked the fruit flavour a lot. It was almost all in the aroma, but since it was present in the brewed tea and not just the dry leaves I breathed in that scent with every sip and the two blended really nicely in my mouth.

Another find to add to my growing collection of night time teas. Whee!

Yum! I steeped this the proper amount of time (for once; if you look over my tealogs you can see I’m a chronic over-steeper) and this tea is HEAVENLY. It tastes like french vanilla ice cream, but light and with enough black tea to prevent a descent into cloying madness. I’m drinking it straight out of the pot, but I’m sure that with milk this would be divine!

This is a sensitive tea, though. When I’ve made it in the past and steeped it 10+ minutes (because like I said, I am CARELESS) it was bitter and horrible, and my tongue was unhappy.

I bet this would make a great blending tea.

In an effort to stay away from a) green teas, b) flavoured teas and most especially c) fruit-flavoured green teas, I ended up drinking this one tonight – and hallelujah, I’ve finally ended up with a tea that I really wanted to keep drinking.

The last Ti Kuan Yin I had was looked greener and tasted grassier than this, but that’s really not a criticism, just an observation. These leaves produce a golden liquor with that distinctive strong smoky taste, which leaves the barest hint of astringency on the tongue. As Ti Kuan Yins go, this is a good one.

I should probably stop buying fruit-flavoured green teas. They almost always disappoint me. The descriptions always make me think they should taste so good, and then I do taste them and… sigh

The leaves were very encouraging. They have pretty red bits all through them, and there was a strong aroma of apples as soon as I opened the packet. The aroma dissipated a lot in the brewed tea, so by the time I came to drink it there was only a faint aroma left. Then I tasted it and discovered the main problem with this tea: I can’t taste the fruit in it at all. The flavour is not quite that of unadulterated green tea, but that something else is so indistinct that the only reason I know it’s meant to be apples is because that’s what it says on the packet.

If they’d managed to translate a little of that fabulous apple aroma from the dry leaves into the taste of the brew, this might just have been a fabulous tea. As it is, meh.

The black tea here I’s decent but the strawberry and the vanilla turn out to taste too cloying and artifical.

This is a black tea. I brewed this up about a couple of minutes so. It smells like a strong black tea. And the taste Is a good strong black tea pretty good.

Green tea and tropical flavors. This smelled good tropical like. I steeped it up. And the taste was too melon like. So not my kind of tea.

I’ve been experimenting with Lupicia’s Lychee Oolong this week, trying to make it into something I like. I’ve drank it hot and iced; I’ve steeped it three minutes, five minutes, seven minutes, ten minutes. I’ve re-steeped and messed around with the amount of tea in my teapot, but I just can’t seem to find a happy combination.

The oolong is sort’ve a generic oolong, slightly smoky/dusty in flavor. The lychee is present in the aroma – I can smell it on the dry leaves and in the tea’s steam – but not really there in the flavor. There’s a slightly fruity aftertaste, but it’s nothing like the lychee-flavored milk tea I buy from boba shops.

Dang it! I was in the mood for something fruity. If anyone has a good lychee tea to recommend, please do!

I like the name of this tea. It’s accurate, as well as being a different way of describing a flowering type tea. It’s always fun to watch those unfurl as they steep. This one is just the tea, without any added pretty ‘flower’ colours. It’s a bit like a giant jasmine dragon pearl.

As far as taste goes, it’s not bad. Not the best jasmine tea I’ve had, but certainly not the worst, either. I can see I’ll be coming back to play with more of these balls in the future.

When I was a little girl, we’d go to the Renaissance Fair every summer, and at some point during the day my mother would buy me a monkey’s tail. These treats were bananas dipped in chocolate and frozen – perfect in the scorching California sun. Now you can buy these frozen bananas in most grocery stores, but at the time this was the only place we knew to get them – so it was a special moment.

This happy childhood memory is what I wanted Banane Chocolat to invoke. It’s a nice, solid black tea. Lovely with milk. The banana is strong enough. Reminds me a bit of banana chips. The cocoa is more elusive. It’s there, I think…I can taste a little bit of its bitterness. But it’s either very light or overwhelmed by the banana.

I might try adding a little more tea next time for a stronger flavor, but I used 1.5 scoops when 1 is usually plenty. This may just be a very lightly flavored tea. Not a perfect imitation of a monkey tail, but there’s enough of the treat there that my nostalgia is satisfied.

Somehow I didn’t drink any tea at all yesterday, so I was really looking forward to this cup of tea. I really wanted to like it, and so it was a shame that this tea didn’t quite get there.

As a fairly standard green tea – the base is bancha – it’s okay. As a flavoured tea, it leaves quite a bit to be desired. There’s a very slight apple aroma to the tea that you really have be looking for to notice, and very little apple in the taste. I like my fruit teas to be more… fruity.

So, yeah, this tea is drinkable, but if I’m in the mood for a green tea or a fruit tea or a green fruit tea there are plenty of others out there that I vastly prefer.

A full bodied green tea with a very sweet, warming aroma with strong chestnut overtones. A naturally sweet, smooth tea. It reminds me of the holidays.

I know the tea says to steep with boiling water, but I just can’t steep a green in boiling water. I can’t. I did 190. That’s as high as I could go.

Anyway, this tea is yet another tea past its “best by” date. Oops. So that might play some part in why the scent and flavoring seemed kind of light. It smells light oranges, yes, but you really have to give it a good sniff to smell it. And as the tea cools, I can smell my hand lotion more than the tea. (My lotion is, ironically, unscented).

Taste is only a little different. There is a not-quite-bitterness to it that makes me think “SEE! This is why I don’t steep greens in too-hot water!” but then I revisit and think “Oh, wait… that’s not bitter from steep, that tastes like orange peels.” So the flavor is stronger than the smell… but not as easily identified.

Drinking this, I remember why this one got past its “best by” date. The sencha got there because I just wasn’t in a sencha mood for a bit. This one got there because I just don’t like it that much.

In its defense, though – hubby really likes this tea, giving it 4 out of 5 stars. He says it has “a good flavor to it with an odd combination of smooth and rough”, adding that he could easily drink a lot of it and thinks it would be awesome iced.

So there you go.

I’m still liking this tea a lot. I’d say the plum is mostly in the aroma, except that there’s something about the taste of the tea that makes it feel rich and full in the mouth, a particular sort of texture that’s very distinctive. Great stuff.

I spent the morning editing a loooooong document and just as I stopped for a break my latest order from Lupicia turned up at the door, so I decided to take that as a hint and went to make some tea.

The flavour of this oolong is elusive. Generally, I prefer the fruit flavour of a fruit tea to be more definite, but for some reason the delicacy of this one is really working for me. The plum is mostly in the aroma, but it lurks around the edges of the taste, too, and it somehow puts me in mind of the texture of a plum – and yeah, I have no clue how it’s doing that. The tea itself is smooth and feels a little viscous in the mouth, and now it’s cooling the taste of the Taiwan oolong is really coming through.

Time for another cup, before I start on the next fifty pages of this document.