This is a tea that Scheherazade shared with me. I have never heard of anything by the name of Yuzu before, so I had to look it up. Initially I thought it was the name of the type of green tea, but it turns out that it’s the fruit it’s flavoured with. Further investigation reveals that it’s a kind of citrus fruit that grows in East Asia. It looks like a mandarin and supposedly tastes like a mix of grapefruit, mandarin and lemon. So I’m left to expect something that can somehow manage to be sweet, bitter and tart at the same time. How is that going to work?
Citrus-y conundrums aside, I tend to find that green tea and citrus go quite well together, so I’m rather looking forward to tasting it now.
It does actually manage to smell like all those three citrus fruits mentioned earlier all at once. Imagine a triangle with grapefruit, lemon and mandarin at the corners. Right there in the middle of the triangle. That’s what it smells like. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible. Now, the danger of lemon-y things is that they might wind up smelling a bit like washing up liquid, but I don’t think this one does. It smells rather like a fruit I would like to taste.
There’s a good deal of bitterness in the flavour. It’s not oversteeping-bitter or too-warm-water-bitter, it’s more like grapefruit-bitter. Like when you get a bit of the peel as well as the fruit. Apart from that the flavour isn’t really reminding me all that much of grapefruit, mandarin or lemon, although it is decidedly citrus-y. More sort of bergamot-ish to me. Like a bergamot that has been tarted up a bit with some lemon. It does go really well with the green tea though.
Hmmm… I’m not sure what I think of this. It seems to be rather refreshing, but I’m not sure I can drink very much of it without getting a bit tired of that bitter note.
