Lupicia

I got this as a free sample with my Happy Bag order… And WOW, holy shmoly, it’s COOKIE alright! I am not able to say more about it :O

I did not want to get up this morning. Between slight headache pressure and morning news that makes me want to dig a bomb shelter under my house to hide from all the massive ego in the world… I just want to go back to bed, sleep for 200 years and see if humanity has sorted it all out by then. In the mean time, I’ll have a nice cup of tea.

This tea has a very Lupica flavor to it. I notice it in a lot of their teas, flavored green and blacks, but I don’t know that I can put words to exactly what it is that I’m noticing. A slight maltiness? I get chestnuts for sure which balance out well with the green base. I feel like a black base would be too heavy for the rich, yet subtle taste of chestnut. I went to the Dickens Fair a few months back and overpaid for a small bag of roasted chestnuts. After such a recent refresher in chestnut I can say this tea nails the flavor pretty well. I do wonder what other flavors could be paired with chestnut to make a more complex and adventurous tea. Maybe I’ll have to do a little cupboard mixing and find out.

The more I mention this tea, the more I want this tea. The more I want this tea, the more I drink this tea. The more I drink this tea, the more I like this tea. I really like this tea.
It is a lot lighter than most teas I favor, but it has a really nice buttery chestnut taste that pairs well with the green base. The flavor is a little subtle on the sip, but you get a long nice after taste that is really great. If I leave my cup too long and it cools, the taste isn’t nearly as great which makes me wonder if it would be good cold steeped. Anyway, I love the bright chestnut flavor in this tea!

Thank you Mercuryhime for this sample!
At first, I didn’t get this tea. It just tasted like green tea with a little bit of flavor that I couldn’t put my finger on. As it started to cool, I could pick up on the chestnut taste. The more it cooled, the more I tasted. I do love chestnuts and the flavor seems pretty dead on with this tea. This might have to go on my shopping list to try some more!

I’m not so sure about this tea. Muscat is an odd flavor for a tea. It tastes just like the muscat gummy candy, but not as sweet. It is just one of those flavors that my head has a hard time wrapping around in a hot drink. It is a little bitter, I may have over leafed it. I might try it once more before giving up on it.

Bocha is literally “stem tea” and refers to the fact that this tea is made from stems of the tea plant rather than the leaves. Kaga is a place in Japan (near Kanazawa) known for producing this particular style of tea.

The tea is roasted like houjicha, and is similarly very aromatic and produces a light brown or golden color liquid. My local Lupicia store advertises this tea as “the taste of autumn” and for some reason the smell of Kaga Bocha does somehow make me think of cool crisp air and fallen leaves.

Currently this is my favorite tea to drink in the afternoon. Like houjicha in general, it is pleasantly sweet, and has less caffeine that other Japanese green teas. Compared to most other houjicha I’ve tried, this Kaga Bocha is lighter and smoother. I much prefer it. And it’s cheap!

I find that water at a full boil can add some bitterness, so let it cool for a bit first. Otherwise this is a very easy tea to brew. A spoonful of leaves in a mug full of 208°F water for 30 seconds comes out great.

I was afraid to try this tea. I’ve smelled a green Sakura of a lesser quality and thought it smelled really bizarre and intense. So after a failed cuppa this morning ( I only usually allow myself one cup of caffeine a day, as doctors have said NONE) I decided to tempt fate and go with something I probably wouldn’t like and wouldn’t drink the whole cup.

Foiled again.

This is a tea that you probably want to steep exactly as directed on the package. I was lucky to get the tea bags in my 2014 Happy Bag, so I didn’t have to worry about the perfect scoop. When reading the instructions, the ingredients were listed: Black tea (vietnam, china, india) pink pepper, rosemary, flavorings. Now I add milk and honey to all tea….it’s the only way I can move my hypersensitivity to bitter (aka tannins) away from my tongue. I was sure that adding milk and honey to something with pepper and rosemary would be a complete fail. wrong. surprisingly wrong! I am really quite surprised by the PLEASANTNESS of this tea!! The cherry is tart, not like a life saver/cough syrup/gummy bear. It it not sour. The rosemary and pepper lay behind the cherry to give it depth and complexity. The black tea blend is perfect to float the above flavors on. This is the first tea that I’ve actually felt had a complexity to it similar to wine. The mug is almost gone and I still can’t believe I like it. It probably won’t be an every day tea for me, but I’ll have to keep it around as I can already tell I’m going to have cravings for it on the odd day when the world just isn’t complex enough for me already.

This has been an interesting tea experiment.
A spicy, savory tea, its got a lot of pop. Very complex, layered and nuanced, but its just not the flavor profile for me.
Fun to try, but off it goes!
Sipdown!

Spicy and bright today. Yet another tea that I seem to have one cups quantity left. Damn! Come on tea, lets sip down.
This is nice, though I doubt I shall buy it again.

For some reason, I’ve been thinking of spicy things to get rid of my cough. Madness? Regardless, thats what I’m doing.
Started off with a lunch of mushrooms and asparagus sauteed with a truly hillarious amount of garlic. Pretty good.
And now this, slightly sweet, slightly spicy tea.
In other Lupicia news, I saw that the Hawaii teas are avalible online, and I moved so fast to get myself some Loke Lani. Ha. You win, Lupicia.
This is never going to be a favorite, and I doubt very much that I will ever get more, when I am done, but for now its hitting the right spot. Strong, so I can taste it through the gunk, and a little bit spicy, which makes me feel like it could be helping to clear out the gunk.
So much tea to be consumed.

Yesterday I thought I should have a wide open day, to drink tea and relax. Ha! Nope.
Boyfriends car was in the shop, so there was much running about and errands and car parts and waiting for mechanics and it was all rather tedious and tea free.
Then I got talked into watching the Wolf of Wall St, which no one warned me was three hours long, and so I got home to bed at 1:30 in the morning.
Then, today, up at 6:30, to stagger onto my day.
So I am knackered, and wiped out, and am ready for more tea and possibly a nap.
This savory/sweet/spicy tea is an interesting wake up in my sleepy afternoon.

Woah. This is an interesting cup.
Its a savory tea, with a little aftertaste of spicy pepper. The downside to this is that there is a little bitter undercurrent, but its not overwhelming.
This is going to be an interesting tea to have.

I have a problem with black tea and vanilla combined. I have the problem with this tea and also with Café Moto’s Vanilla black tea blend. When I drink them I get this taste…well.. (hold onto your hats, folks) that isn’t really a taste… it’s more like a smell….the smell of the inside of a car repair place…kind of petrol-ish. I’m sure it’s a product of my wonky palate, but all the same, that’s what my mouth gets. I read someone’s else’s review that said they got a “smoky” note from this tea….hmmmm… perhaps the smoky and the vanilla combine to make petrol….but all the same, I won’t be buying this again. For me it’s like teatime down at the local oil change place….and I only need that every 3000 miles.

I seem to have problems with teas that are black with vanilla… I when I taste/smell them my brain assign a label to them that is not far off from a smell you might encounter in a car mechanic’s garage. A bit “petrol”-ish. Can anyone explain this to me? Is there a note that my nose is reading wrong?

Anyhow, on to this tea. There was obviously a hint of that smell here, but then there’s the after note of vanilla that is over-riding the petrol thing. I take milk and honey in all tea, and the vanilla stands up quite well to the tea. I liked it better as it cooled as it tempered the Assam and became less bold. Definitely worth another try, but will I buy again? Probably not til the combo of black tea and vanilla becomes a better friend to me!

I am un-skipping a few teas today. Like this one (#35)! I got this in my happy bag from last year and thought I would never drink it because I am not a fan of assams, but I do love Hong Kong Milk Tea, and a robust assam is great for that. You really need something to stand up to the milk. I’ve used this almost exclusively for milk teas, and I am actually almost out of this tea now!

Lupicia’s monthly newsletter also came with a milk tea recipe. This tea was actually one of their recommended teas for milk tea, so I decided to follow their recipe and have a “real” milk tea.

The main difference is a higher milk to water ratio, with milk making up the bulk of the liquid, and a relatively large amount of tea steeping in a small amount of water first. I have to say, it turned out really nicely. I could get behind this. This tea definitely has the strength to stand up to a milk tea. It didn’t really need sugar (it wasn’t bitter at that point) but I added a touch anyway because I like milk teas slightly sweetened. I will definitely do this again!

Recipe:
Steep 3 tsp of tea in 1/2 cup of boiling water for 3 minutes.
Heat 1 cup of milk to close to boiling.
Strain tea into milk, sweetened if desired.

I was originally planning to just sell/trade this tea unopened as I am not much on assams and even less on plain assams. However, this evening I really wanted to have hot cocoa with tea steeped in it and I realized that I didn’t have anything really suitable. So I popped this open… I am thinking I might keep it around for when I need a really robust tea (to have with milk and sugar), for steeping in hot chocolate, and perhaps for cold brewing occasionally.

For the record I tasted this a little bit under the chocolate, and it was assamy. Haha.

After far too long away from Steepster, I am back! This is actually the last of my container of Palekaiko, and it was a delicious several cups. Coincidentally, I also just posted a review of this tea to my website, here: http://www.createwritedrink.com/2014/10/tea-review-tuesday-review-of-lupicias.html

Tea with breakfast!

I am a fan of ginger and fruit, so the first try of this was pleasant.

I used too much tea. I will be using my husbands razor to shave my chest soon. JAYZUS was this tea strong! Re-do needed. I still drank it. I’m such a tea whore.