Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Herbal
Where to Buy: Lupicia USA
Tea Description:
Aromatic six-rowed barley produced in Japan flavored with fresh watermelon. Limited flavor just for summer.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
Tis the season of iced tea and delicious summer fruit! Nothing says ‘summer’ to me quite like mugicha (which is roasted barley tea, traditionally sipped on iced as cold as my heart.) and fresh, sweet, and messy watermelon. Lupicia’s Watermelon Barley tea sounded almost too good to be true on their website, I just had to bite. I’m hoping that the hype I have built up in my brain lives up to this fantasy blend.
The combination of roasted and toasted barley with fresh and juicy watermelon sounds like it could be either really great, or really awful. The only way is to drink this tea and find out!
Upon opening the bag, the sachets inside are large and offer a tiny hint of what I am about to brew. The main scent on first whiff was the roasted grain smell, rich and full. Cloyingly sweet in the background is the fruity watermelon. I didn’t let myself investigate further, I was dying to sink my teeth into the brew. I attempted the cold brew in 2 cups of cold water for 4 hours, simply out of laziness. This resulted in the toasty flavor of the barley becoming a little too overpowering for the watermelon to handle. I could only taste a whisper, it might as well have been regular old mugicha.
The next day I wanted to make it right. I knew it was just a user error on my end, and I needed this tea to taste differently than it had when I brewed it cold. So, I used one pyramid type bag in 16oz. of freshly boiled water. Steeped for 5 minutes then chilled in the refrigerator. When I brought it out the next morning and huffed the liquid, I was met with a satisfyingly sweet smell. The watermelon! Drinking it throughout the day was greatly refreshing. The watermelon was so very melon-y, juicy, thirst quenching. It leans on the side of becoming candy-like in flavor, but stays true to the actual fruit. The barley is still the forefront, but not obnoxiously so. The brew as a whole tastes like grilled watermelon, in a good way. (which is a great thing to try for your next barbeque, by the way!) Probably my new favorite go to easy iced tea for the summer!
Citron Potion Oolong Tea from Tealyra
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Oolong
Where to Buy: Tealyra
Tea Description:
One of our most popular flavored teas, Citron Potion is a special blend of supreme jasmine scented oolong that has been cured with rare jasmine blossoms, a unique blend of herbs and a combination of refreshing citrus fruits. This organic oolong tea will quickly become a favorite with the pick me up natural orange oil, hint of organic lemon myrtle and the unmistakable rare flavor and aroma of the jasmine flower.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
I was a little worried about the tea leaf to ‘other stuff ratio when I opened the package of Citron Potion Oolong from Tealyra. I saw nary a leaf compared to the intense amount of jasmine flowers. The package smelled amazing though, and I made to pick out enough loosely rolled oolong leaves as possible. The style of oolong looked to be a baozhong. Those are among my favorite types of oolong, so I was hopeful about this brew.
Wanting to allow the leaves to do some crazy expansion, I loading 5g of tea into my gravity steeper, and doused it with 190 degree water. To my surprise, I watched the seemingly small amount of tea leaf expand to fill over half of the gravity steeper. The leaves were large and entirely uncut. Huh. Happy to see the expansion of the leaf, I got excited to try the brew. Phew!
The steeped leaf is quite fleshing and light. Tasting the tea, I can easily recognize the bouquet of floral notes that the oolong lays out for me. Roses, peony, and lilies. They are complimented by the sweetness of the orange oil, which probably takes the cake for the topmost note in this tea. I am having a had time finding the jasmine flower essence in this tea. Perhaps the flowers are just a carrier for the orange flavoring. Either way, I am pretty happy with how this tea came out.
I tried this tea two ways, brewed hot, and cold brewed in a large jug. Both methods produce a silky mouthfeel and really great and strong oolong-y flavors and citrus. This is going to be a great summer tea to get me through the dog days of summer! That is, if it ever gets warm again, it’s been so cold and rainy in the Mile High City lately! I’m wearing gloves to type this review, my fingers are freezing. This tea makes me wistful for summer, one day it will come, right? Right??
Imperial Jinggu Yue Gang Bai White Tea from Yunnan Sourcing
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: White
Where to Buy: Yunnan Sourcing
Tea Description:
This is a special tea made from Jinggu Yang Ta Village Large Leaf varietal tea (Camellia Taliensis). The tea is picked in the late autumn, wilted slightly and then dried with warm wind tunneled through the tea until it is dry.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
Jinggu Imperial Yue Guang Bai White Tea from Yunnan Sourcing is one of those teas shrouded in mystery. Moonlight white teas are not well understood in the west. Sometimes mistaken for puerh in the way that it is processed, often air dried the same way as maocha. The name frequently describing Yue Guang Bai, Moonlight White tea alludes to the air dry process. The common lore goes that this tea is only air dried at night, under a full moon. Knowing all this, my only question is: “Am I drinking werewolf tea?”
Regardless of what mythical creature this tea really is trying to be, I am really enjoying it thoroughly. The leaves look like a mix of Bai Mu Dan and Bai Hao Yin Zhen. There are smooth, fuzzy silver noodles of buds, as well as larger, flat leaves with a black backside and a silvery down covering a light golden top leaf. The smell of this dry leaf is like roaming through a wild prairie field; I smell stronger notes of hay, as well as light wildflower hints. I typically use 5 grams when I go gongfu, but 5 grams of this leaf filled up almost all of my 150ml glass gaiwan. This is some big fluffy leaf!
You can extract different flavor profiles from the leaf just by changing the temperature. I started with cool water, about 65C, the result was a sweet and floral brew. The light colored liquor had notes of melon, lilies and wildflowers. Which was nice, but I wanted to punch up the flavor a bit, so I began steeping at 90C, which produced wildly different results. What I got was a much darker brew, a rich amber. Tasting the brew I discovered a strong bread malt note as well as hay. The floral was still there, but much more subdued. It was much different than the cool water method I had used. It was like I was drinking a different tea!
I can highly recommend this white tea for anyone who loves white already, or someone who wants to start treading water of the white tea train. It’s a solid tea worth trying!
Le Grand Bleu Black Tea from Christine Dattner Paris
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Black
Where to Buy: Christine Dattner Paris
Tea Description:
An ocean of Flavors. black Tea of china flavored with blackberry blueberry blackcurrant and strewed with blackberries blue dolphins sugar and flowers of cornflowers.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
Le Grand Bleu, or the Grand Blue from Christine Dattner Paris is a French tea available one more than one place online. I actually got this tea from a company that sells Christine Dattner’s teas, Flaavor . They sell a few different French company’s teas repackaged under their name. They have a great selection of small scale French tea companies. But if you are looking for a specific tea, I would suggest looking for the direct website.
This tea looks And smells live blueberry heaven. I the main attraction, Dolphin Sprinkles. I mean that really could be the whole article. But! Cutesy sprinkles in tea does not make for a standout tea. Luckily, the tea lives up to it’s sprinkles.
There are other flotsam and jetsam in the loose leaf, and to me, they all look good. Blueberries, blackberries, and little corn flowers for the hell of it. The scent of blueberries is strong and rich. I brewed this tea up western style, 5g of leaf to 16oz. The aroma itself was pretty amazing. The fresh blueberry complimented the raisin and malt notes of the black base tea like cheese on potatoes. The black tea is robust and in your face, but still comforting, like hot chocolate in front of a campfire. The little blue dolphins in this tea dissolve slowly, dissipating into the deep dark brown sea of tea.
I tend to shy away from berry and other fruit flavors in black tea, the combinations are either boring to too contrasting to the nuances of the base black tea. But this tea proved me wrong. I liked the combination so much that it may have changed the way I look at fruity blacks forever. And the dolphin sprinkles certainly don’t hurt.
Cha Ginza: Roasted Matcha Green Tea from Yunomi
Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
Where to Buy: Yunomi.us
Tea Description:
Have you ever heard of matcha that is roasted? This extremely rare Roasted Matcha is sold only in the Cha-Ginza store located in Tokyo, but we will be offering this to the Yunomi.us tea lovers!
The unforgettable taste of roasted matcha attracts many people that have tasted this at the Cha-Ginza tea room. The process of making a good-tasting roasted matcha is difficult, but the Uogashi Meicha factory was able to make this into a great tasting matcha. Because it is so rare, roasted matcha is hard to find even in Japan.
Taster’s Review:
After reading about the brick and mortar store in the heart of Tokyo on the Yunomi website, Cha Ginza is now on my bucketlist of tea shops to visit before I keel over in my old age.
This Roasted Matcha from Cha Ginza is the most unique matcha I have ever encountered. The brilliant green powder is the same color as young spring grass. The roasted element is intense. There is still an element of extreme freshness underlying the roasted scent. I was so confused at first, I felt like I was sniffing a high-quality hojicha instead! But no, my nose was simple mistaken.
I whipped this up in my large black chawan to share with my fella. I used 1 and 1/2 scoops using my chashaku, and made a paste using a smidge of warm water. Whisking with my chasen with more water, I made a nice brilliant green froth to share with my mildly impressed boyfriend.
At first sip we were hooked. It had a great full-bodied roasted flavor, and the fresh green marine vegetal notes still very present. It reminds me of wakame or nori. This tea has really got that whole umami thing down. It’s also the smoothest match I have ever encountered. It even has a hint of sweetness that rounds out the intensity of the roast. It’s also a plus that there is virtually no smokiness to this tea. I think that I would not have enjoyed it as much if there was even a small element of smoke.
While this is not a tea to begin your matcha journey with, I would highly recommend this tea for those who have had plenty of good match experiences and wanted to try something unique and high quality.