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I had this tea as a sample in my travel bag and finally got to try it. It’s certainly interesting. It smells like lemon pound cake dry and even more tart when brewed. I had to add sugar because the tart smell kept tricking my mind.

The black base doesn’t come though very strongly in taste during the first steep, but did more nicely in the second steep. I had directions to brew 2 minutes and at 2 minutes it wasn’t overly strong but already beginning to be astringent.

Thanks MissB for send this in one of the mystery packs!

I got this one in my Steepster Select box for May. I’m bad this is the second box I’ve received but the first one of the samples I’ve gotten around to.

When I opened the packet the smell was soo beautiful and intoxicating. Floral in a vaguely perfumey sort of way, sweet, and an underlying green oolong smell. I was already salivating. The dry leaves are tight small curls.

A little bit of a rinse and then I brewed according to the printed directions, maybe a bit longer even because my timer didn’t go off. The brewed leaves are small in size and the color of stewed greens. The leaves are no more than 2 cm from tip to stem and completely unfurled in the first steep. It smells like savory greens when first brewed. At this point I wasn’t as excited about it. I brewed in a medium sized white porcelain teapot.

It has a full mouth feel, but not creamy. Cooler, the liquor is still quite fresh green tasting for an oolong. I’ve never had the chance to try first flush teas before so this is a nice treat. The flavor is light and only the the tiniest bit drying. It’s slightly sweet on the finish but only subtly.

The package says 5 resteeps. WOW. I don’t know if I’ll get through that maybe. But I think my teapot also considerably more than 7oz. We’ll see how it goes.

I’ve had this one a few times, and I think the more I drink it, the less enamored I become with it. The flavors are nice, but they aren’t particularly distinct. Actually I searched for ‘Tropical Green’ because I couldn’t remember the name of this tea. I wish that Mango came through more cleanly. It’s mango season and I’m just craving a good mango, if only I could figure out where to buy the Philippine ones!! It IS a nice tea, and one that I don’t mind coming back to, but when dry or brewed it doesn’t particularly scream MANGO or VANILLA to me. You kind of have to know what to look for, and even then… I think this is a tea I’ll have to sit down and have a serious brewing session with, it’s not living up to what is claiming to be, but I think that might mostly be me and how many times this ends up being a thermos tea from living in the kitchen cupboard and not with the other sit-down teas.

Dependable as always. I love this one in the mornings.

Pomegranate? Umm, not really.

I love pomegranates. I used to buy them by the bagfull from the farmer’s market during undergrad. They’re sweet and tart and soo juicy.

This though to me is cranberries. Not even fresh cranberries, more like the sweet dried cranberries. The little ornamental fruits even look like crasins! That I couldn’t get out of my mind, so the aroma was all cranberries to me and I couldn’t think of pomegranates when drinking it.

Most of the fruit is aroma though, and the other sensory is all straight green tea. The taste and mouthfeel was green and didn’t leave me with any fruitiness at all. This normally would have been fine, but I had brewed in a gravity steepster and transferred to an thermos. So sometimes I couldn’t even catch the aroma as it cooled and all I got was green tea. Which isn’t bad, but not exactly how I would have wanted it.

Second steep was just green tea with a hint of cranberry aroma. Not nearly as much aroma as the first cup, Persimmon tree doesn’t flavor their teas as much as I’m used to, and I’m not sure yet if that’s something I like. It kind of takes the fun out of multiple steepings.

I got this as part of their green tea gift set.

Oh! When they say that this tea is tightly curled, they aren’t kidding. The curls were so tiny and cute! Admittedly they unfurled to not very large leaves. Is that a good or bad thing?

The dry smell is like the tea smell in the tea section of the asian supermarket. It smells familiar, and I wonder if it’s very popular among green tea varieties. I’m still getting used to the idea of green tea varieties beyond “green, Jasmine, roasted, matcha, sencha”. Haha before Steepster, that was pretty much all I could identify by taste alone, not that I can say that I would be able to distinguish this as gunpowder on taste/smell, but maybe someday!!

This green tea is like BOOM! HELLO! I really really like it! And yet it doesn’t carry any odd flavors or notes I would distinguish as green tea. Alot of greens people describe as ‘grassy’ or ‘vegetal’ and I’m starting to see/understand that in some of the ones I’ve tried. This however to me tastes like straight up green tea, there is no other way to describe this flavor in my mind, and breaking it down to notes seems fussy. It’s beautiful and classic. I would PROBABLY like to try other gunpowder greens out there to see if I could tell the difference, but I do like this and would happily serve it to anyone wanting ‘just green tea’.

I’m soo bad, I’ve had four of these THIS WEEK already. Always 2X the matcha and without the whipped cream, but still creamy and sugary and yummy as the weather is warming up. 2x the stars for the holiday weekend doesn’t hurt either. =D

I was in the store today and they have a special edition cold cup. _. I have a slight problem with cups, I can’t stop buying them! At least it meant my drink was free with the purchase of a cup. ($13 cup- $5 frappe… = $8 cup?). Normally I wait until seasonal clearance for new cups but it was THERE and it’s PRETTY. lol. I probably should just buy some matcha powder and start attempting them at home. $5/16oz cup still feels heavy on the wallet, although I wonder how fast I’ll run through the matcha @6tsp/16oz frappe or 8tsp/24oz and if the tradeoff is worth the money. Or if that is even the right proportion.

I found a tin lying around my parent’s house, probably one of my sister’s. I didn’t know what to expect, the dry leaves smelled kind of off. I don’t know how old the leaves are, but the brewed product was pretty nice. I couldn’t find this on the lupicia website so I don’t know if it’s seasonal or something else.

The first brew was green and nutty and vaguely grain-smelling. There was also an overlay of cherry blossom scent. Sweet and floral, and not too strong. I didn’t let it brew too long as I didn’t have any way of gauging temperature at my parent’s house, but it could have sat longer. As it cooled the grain came through more strongly and lent to the brew a chocolately, kind of malty(maybe?) smell. This made it even more sweet.

The second brew is even more nutty/chocolately, and barely floral. Surprisingly I’m getting hit with a terrible headache right now though, so I’ll probably continue this note later… maybe.

I usually drink greens or oolongs so when I tasted this tea my first thought was that I somehow had contaminated my tea mug with coffee.

It is slightly sweet, and I guess what you would call malty. I haven’t had many teas like this, probably because it’s not something I think I would gravitate to. I can see a person that is trying to switch from coffee to tea really enjoying this, but to me personally it tasted like I was trying to drink hot water out of a cup that had been dedicated to coffee for too long.