Grapefruit Dragon

Sooooo good! Had this today as well as it had been a long time since i’d had a chance to sit down and enjoy MY grapefruit tea. I’m so impressed with how much this tastes like grapefruit. It was totally worth the wait to finally get this one from Stacy. I’m not sure she’ll ever really want to tell me about upcoming teas though with all the poking i did in anticipation (is it done now? how about now? now? when will i have it? naaaaaaaaooooooo!) :) I highly reccommend this to anyone in search of a grapefruit tea. So good!

Buttery Dragonwell and citric grapefruit together!? I must be dreaming because this is too good. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for existing! This is my new favourite tea.

The beautiful dry leave scales have a very potent sour grapefruit smell and they initially both excited and worried me. After steeping, the scent becomes less tart and more like a sweet white grapefruit. The flavour is exactly that, with a smooth and delicate and restrained vegetal base. It’d like I’m consuming the most divine grapefruit to ever step foot inside a cup. Yes, I’m aware that grapefruits don’t have feet that we know of… Second steep was equally amazing.

Third steep sees a toning down of the sweet grapefruit and a greater focus on that buttery vegetal Dragonwell that I enjoy most of all. I don’t think I’ve ever loved a tea so dearly. I’m extremely pleased with myself for randomly choosing to go with 1oz of this.

Sipdown of this one too. Wow.

This is an old sample from CrowKettle, so I know the tea isn’t at it’s prime. Still, it’s so interesting. With the grapefruit flavour and age, it’s almost savoury. In With Open Eyes, the same base tea is sweet and buttery.

I like it both ways, although green teas are not my favourite, especially when savoury. The dragonwell that Butiki stocks is just really nice.

I think I’ll add the tiniest bit of salt to this, and savour it that way. :)

OMG, tea people. This is so freaking cool with salt. Just a tiny bit. Try it.

Uggg tired! I did lots of canning today!

Yesterday was 30lbs of tomatoes – diced tomatoes, pizza sauce (with roasted tomato) and a couple jars of salsa.

Today was watermelon jelly and chunk pineapple. Both were a little stressful as we ended up with more product than what the recipe said! But oh man, that watermelon jelly tasted fantastic before I processed it – like magic!

Anyways, I was working on this tea while I was working at cleaning, chopping fruit and making syrup. I went with 175 for 3 minutes and the tea came out a little sweeter and mellower than I remember! Great perky flavored tea to have while working.

I really wanna make tea jelly sometime, but need more jars and some time to experiment.

I’ve been feeling like green tea lately since flavoured blacks (and maybe with milk) don’t appeal to me right now. Probably due to the chocolate I’ve been rewarding myself with over the past few days.

So I thought I’d give this another try and it’s still a little sour. I don’t get the buttery nuance that peeps keep talking about, but it does taste vegetal, and the grapefruit is too delicate to compete with the base, I find. Maybe I just suck.

But FWIW, I’m sure Dragon Wells aren’t my thing at all. Although With Open Eyes is awesome.

As you may know, I am on the quest for the perfect grapefruit tea. There are a lot that I love, but many of them have other flavors added that while they do go well with grapefruit (like Zen’s Orange Grapefruit) prevents them from being the one. You know, the one tea I’ll give my heart to and we’ll run away and live happily ever after in a castle by the sea in France. Uhh I really like grapefruit. And I also love Butiki, so I have been eagerly awaiting this tea for months, as soon as Stacy announced she was working on it! Of course tragedy struck and I shipped my order to the wrong place so I was supposed to get it LAST Tuesday but had to wait until yesterday when I could take a trip up to my parent’s house. Stupid paypal, why do you default to my billing address! Depriving me of tea!

In any case, I was ridiculously excited to open this one up and made everyone around me smell it including… one of my cats. My little girl (well, she’s my mom’s cat, but we handraised a group of kittens from 10 days old so I consider the three of them “mine” haha) LOVES tea leaves and was very fond of this blend. She’s always trying to eat them but I think the citrus prevented her this time, though she did take a big whiff. The smell is delicious, like fresh grapefruit. It’s not as strong as I assumed it would be, very subtle and nice.

I cold brewed this one because, come on, I can’t drink grapefruit warm! It’s like… a travesty against all that is natural. Grapefruit must be ice-cold with just a teeny teeny splash of sugar. I can’t drink sweetened grapefruit juice to be honest, it has to be the regular stuff (which no one else in my family will drink haha), BUT I did put a pinch of sugar in as this was brewing, just to bring out all the flavors.

Oooh man, this is grapefruity heaven. Sweet, tart, citrusy. And nothing else is competing with it, so it’s all grapefruit all the way! Well, of course there’s a lovely dragonwell base which adds some interesting nuttiness and grassy freshness. It’s perfect, sweet grapefruit. Ruby grapefruit! The tartness is right on point, not overpowering but also still there. In my book, grapefruit teas need a little bite. They’re just not right without it! And this is perfection. Oh grapefruit tea, I’ve found you! Never leave me! Thanks so much to Stacy for coming up with this amazing concoction. If you like grapefruit you NEED to try it. But no I won’t put samples of this in a swap, it’s mine, all mine, bwahaha! One of those treasures you guard carefully and savor every last leaf.

Thank you Stacy (Butiki) for this sample tea!

(I’m Whispering…
…..we all know how good Stacy is at creating tea’s that
are…
not nasty and artificially flavored…the really special tea’s that we love! Shhhhh, listen up!…..
…..This one is my favorite Butiki Tea Flavor of all!)

I want a pound of this tea already. I ONLY HAVE A SAMPLE! STACY!

The wet leaves had the softest aroma of green beans and sweet grapefruit as though the clock had been turned back and Spring was here once again.

I had just enough tea leaves for one precious mug full.

I took a sip of the pale yellow liquor and was amazed at the restrained taste of the grapefruit next to the more robust but smooth savory bean flavor. This was a juicy tea.

I added a little sweetening (as Stacy suggested) which brought more of the grapefruit flavor to the forefront, still perfectly complimenting the savory base flavor of the tea.

I used to make a grapefruit salad years ago with ruby grapefruit, carefully removing segments of ice cold fruit from it’s membrane, then mixing it with chopped avacado, salt, olive oil and lemon. The acid and sweetness of the grapefruit with the smooth creamy avacado were perfect compliments to each other. (It was an 1980’s popular California salad.)

This tea embraced that idea of combining crisp grapefruit and the creamy savory tea in a similar way. It worked really well!

There was that Umami thing happening in my mouth when I added some sugar (but without the bitterness, and the sour was just the normal grapefruit tang).

Yes, this was/is the best flavored tea in my Butiki book! It hits all the marks for me! Bravo Stacy!!!

Hmm, perhaps I should have saved that lapsang souchong for last…

Anyways, brewed this sample from Stacy at Butiki up tonight for fear that it would lose its grapefruity flavour… WOW! Definitely not! This tastes like straight up grapefruit juice, alongside a delicious and delicate green. Dragonwell is the perfect base here! Funnily enough, this is making my tongue tingle just like sour grapefruit juice does! Neat!

Grapefruit isn’t reeaaallly my thing, but this is a fabulously done grapefruit green, in my opinion! Another bang on tea!

ETA: So, the second infusion (same parameters, less water) was pretty darn delicious. So much real grapefruit flavour; I can’t get over it! Third infusion, today, still is grapefruity (which is crazy for most flavoured teas, but typical of Butiki’s!), but there’s a bit of a weird flavour lurking in the background. I suspect that that’s more likely due to the length of time the leaves have been sitting than the tea itself… so even though there was still a grapefruity aroma to the leaves, I threw them out. So, so glad I got to sample this one! IMO this would be a perfect substitute for a grapefruit juice addict trying to cut down on calorie-laden juice.

Backlog:

Another tea from the W-O-D.

I am so glad that I decided to order this tea. It is so good. I often mentioned in my grapefruit green tea tasting notes that I was on a quest to find the right grapefruit green to rival my experience at Tohono Chul Park in Tucson, I had actually found that ACTUAL tea but somehow it just didn’t taste the same when I got it home. Maybe it’s the water temperature, maybe it’s the water itself … or the amount of leaf they used in the teapot … Who knows? All I know is that somehow, that grapefruit green tasted amazing at Tohono Chul Park but only tasted good, even really good, but not amazing when I brewed it at home.

A couple of months ago, I found a grapefruit tea that finally satisfied me enough to declare the search for the grapefruit green over, but, as I tasted this tea, I realized that it may have been premature to declare the search over … or at least, that I had found another grapefruit tea that was just as good if not BETTER than the grapefruit green – and yes, I think that this one IS better than the grapefruit green – at Tohono Chul Park.

The grapefruit flavor is so true to the fruit, but it has a sweeter flavor. There is definitely the tangy bitterness from the grapefruit too. After I sip this tea, the flavor that is left, tingling in my mouth in the aftertaste, is similar to the sensation I’d experience if I were to have taken a bite of real grapefruit. Amazing!

The Dragon Well works great with the flavor of the grapefruit, it imparts a slight sweetness and vegetative tone that works quite harmoniously with the flavor. Very enjoyable, this is one I’m really glad that I have in my stash now.

Ooh. Very nice. It really really tastes like grapefruit. All fresh!

I bet this would be great in the summer. Also if it were iced. I’ll have to get this again sometime.

Because seriously, it really tastes like grapefruit!

Last sipdown for tonight.