Happiness

Meh. Lupicia says this is “Japanese green tea blended with green rooibos from South Africa, flavored with luscious white peach and energizing grapefruit.”

Lupicia does a very nice green rooibos, but I’m puzzled as to why you’d mix green rooibos and green tea? I can’t taste the green tea much, it’s more rooibos-forward, a general green vegetal taste topped with a generic “fruity” citrus taste. I get more grapefruit than peach.

Overall, the taste was weak even when steeped as instructed. I let it go another minute to no noticable effect.

If you’d like a more distinct citrus-based Japanese green, try a Yuzu blend. This was just meh. Not undrinkable by any means, but I wouldn’t bother to repurchase.

Sipdown! (16 | 52)

I bought this one at the Honolulu store, mostly because of the pretty tin. It’s one of their decorative tins that’s not made for a specific tea. At least, I didn’t think they were made for specific teas, but this one reads「よろこび」(yorokobi), which apparently means joy, so maybe it was for this tea lol. The design is a pretty yellow-green background with an unrolled scroll, branches with pink and white plum blossoms, and a small green birb. Very spring-y and cute.

Sadly, the tea is just not doing it for me. I’ve been similarly underwhelmed by some of Lupicia’s other core fruity blend sort of green teas, like Paradise. This one mostly tastes of generic peach, but it’s quite bland and lacks the juicy quality of some of their other white peach teas. There’s supposedly grapefruit as well, and I suppose I do get a hint of grapefruit zestiness. But I end up tasting a whole lot of the generically dry grassy sencha base.

I do enjoy a lot of Lupicia’s other green teas though, like Momo Vert, Sakurambo, and Tsugaru. Can’t love them all I guess, even from my favorite tea company! Still happy to have the pretty tin. :)

Super fruity. I got a free sample, and was just happy. It compared favorably to other ones, and I really liked the grapefruit and peach combo, though not too sure about the apricot or other elements. This one could get a little bitter if I oversteeped it. It’s mostly a friendly easy going tea for the summer. I know, boring. I might rate it higher if I had it more often, but my oolong preference might supercede it.

Mmm, the bag and the brewed tea smell fruity.

I taste fruit punch! And apricot. It’s a little sweet and rather fun. I can see why they call it Happiness!

I had to look up what kind of tea it was, cause this is another Lupicia sample bag, and all it said was 8508 Happiness, lol.

This would probably be lovely iced as well.

Found this single-serve sachet teabag sample in my stash from a long ago order back when there were still Lupicias in California (ah, those were the days…) Made this cuppa to have with my sandwich for lunch.

The dry leaf has a strong apricot aroma. Steeped, I still smell the strong apricot note, but it is coming across crisp and dry and effervescent, like a fruity wine. And I’m sort of getting that from the flavor, as well; a sweet and bright apricot note with this sort of white wine/champagne note. I see now this is a white peach and grapefruit flavored tea, and I think it’s something about those two notes together that is reading that way to me, and I’m really digging it. I’m not a big fan of grapefruit, and I’m not really tasting grapefruit, but I am getting the sort of “crispness” I expect from citrusy teas and its very refreshing, and melds so well with that stonefruit flavor. There is a very mild, sweet grassiness under the flavoring from the base. This is lovely warm, but I imagine I’d love it cold brewed as well.

This one smells like booze to me. lol I tried alcohol once when I was 14 yrs. old and got so sick that it was ingrained in my memory forever. I still feel a little sick thinking about it. I can have a cup of milk or cream, with a splash of Kahlua or a lime flavored margarita with an ungodly amount of lime and lots of salt (no other kind for some reason). Other than that, I’m super sensitive to the aroma/taste. In that way, I have almost superpowers in detecting booze. lol I digress.

Smelled alcoholic, even taste a little alcoholic, especially in the finish, like a fruit wine. I can taste stonefruits as I sip, lots of peaches, specifically white peaches, not the ripe yellow peaches… And some tart cherry. The grapefruit, not so much, but I taste the grapefruit rind, the delightful bitterness of a good grapefruit. About the only bitterness that I have embraced is the fruit rind.

Sipdown 155/397

The first tea made with my new temperature-variable kettle! I don’t know how I made it this long without one. I raised the temperature, not to boiling but higher than typical for the way I brew green teas, and left it steeping much longer this time and got a lot more flavour out of it this way. Still indistinctly ‘fruity’ but far less underwhelming. Upping my rating a little from 59 to reflect this.

I have tried this, Lupicia number 8508 from Lupicia France, under the name Belle Journée.

And it´s such an interesting idea, a green tea with rooibos. It was a sample, so worth risking, I was quite unsure if I was going to like it, but indeed it works and it´s oddly refreshing.

I am usually not a fan of grapefruit flavours, and it´s noticeable here, though the peach is more prevalent. I will probably not buy it because of the grapefruit, I might tire of it, but it´s certainly interesting on its own.

Brewed the way Lupicia insists, boiling water 2 minutes, it works (have given up doubting them on how to brew their teas).

I received a bag of this tea in the GCTTB. It was a welcome hot drink today as I’ve been out in the cold and rain digging up invasive weeds at a local park. The scent of the tea is surprisingly alcoholic, like some sort of fruit wine or liqueur. I taste a bit of booziness in the flavour as well, though it gradually mellows into a honeydew melon flavour as it cools. The odd thing is that according to the description this tea is supposed to be flavoured with peach and grapefruit, neither of which I really taste – it’s rather strange.

No, definitely not my cup of tea.

It’s an artificial peach flavour. Kind of like a the cheap peach wine coolers from the 70’s.