Lupicia

It’s 9pm and I have an 8am class tomorrow. Done with midterms and I wanna sleeeeep.
Chamomile tonight! Oh dang. Haven’t had this in a while.
Not the biggest fan of chamomile, but it is a good sleepy time tea so chamomile it is!

It says “refreshing yet warm taste” on the package and it’s true. Not the biggest fan on Chamomile, but the Elderflower does help. Slightly minty taste.

I really wanted white tea tonight but there’s something wrong with my teacup with the filter. It’s making things taste all wonky and I figured that since white teas have a very light and delicate flavour, it’d be safe to just stick with the sachets that I have.
I had to choose between Jasmine and the black teas that I had and since it’s half past 10 already, Jasmine it is!
Okay yeah. The usual. I like Jasmine and Jasmine is good.
Gosh, I can’t wait to go home so I can have my mom’s teas. She has so many back home. I’m in need of variety!

This is the only Jasmin they have at the Lupica in SF. I haven’t seen like the regular, non-special grade Jasmin teas there?
Well, I always make sure to grab a bag of this whenever I visit the city because it’s definitely one of my favourites! It re-steeps really well also. I think I’m on my third or fourth cup? I like my green teas with a very veeeery light flavour so I guess that’s why..

Always always ALWAYS my Jasmine tea!
Calming and just so good.

Oh Jasmine, I love you so much <33
Lupicia never fails. Lupicia will always and forever be my little tea shoppe and every time I go, I make sure to get a packet of this Jasmine tea.
One of my favourites, I’ll always need at least a sachet in my cupboard to survive.

I’m still not quite fully moved in to my new place, so I’m drinking whichever teas I can find… ok, that’s most of them. Haha. At least now I have a shelf to house my teas! Tea stash photo coming soon :P Anyways, I happened across the Lupicia box, which is the reason for these two teas. This one’s in a plastic baggie, so best to drink up if possible.

Anyhow, the aroma is actually rather peachy – I was surprised! I wasn’t expecting too much, to be honest. It also smells a bit floral, which is not surprising given the rose petals. Flavourwise it’s unmistakably a rooibos, though not too bad as they come. If I use a bit of imagination, I can imagine this to be a cup of hot peaches.

However, I think this will be destined for the swap pile. Someone who likes rooibos blends and/or floral blends would probably appreciate it more than me!

Thanks Sil for the sample!

I tried it side by side with Bluebird’s Terry’s Tea to see which was the best chocolate orange tea. The answer: Not this one.

I steeped it for 3 minutes and the result was very bitter. Each sip left a tacky aftertaste, and it felt like my teeth were coated in… something? Not pleasant. It was simliar to that feeling you get when you eat super cheap chocolate and it’s waxy.

After the first few sips it got a bit better, but not enough for me to bother finishing the cup. Guess I’m not the only one indifferent to this one, so no hard feelings!

I picked up his sample tonight among all the samples kindly sent by Devilish

To me, this mysterious tea has mango and probably tropical fruits.
It’s really very mellow and sweet, just like having a kind of smoothie sirup with water.

The point is for my taste the tea base is really weak to welcome the flavours.This is the kind of tea I would let my daughter have without problem.Pleasant, sweet and not strong at all !

It may be a nice iced tea perhaps.

Thanks Devilish for sahring it with me :)

not a bad cup of tea…but i vastly prefer stacy’s. Not sorry to finish this one up, since i find that this one loses it’s flavours once opened…though that’s in part because of me heh. An enjoyable cup of pineapple tea…but man, i really am going to miss stacy’s version :(

having a cup of this tonight as i want to finish this up before i get the last of my pineapple oolong from Butiki. Sad part is, i for sure prefer Stacy’s version to this one. It’s juicier and way more delicious :( This one isn’t bad, but it’s just not as fresh as i want it to be.

this is the note that i did write…. it just goes on and on and on….and i’ll keep writing it, not knowing if it’ll post…because this is the note that never ends…. it just goes on and on and on….

best part about finishing up 109821309821039812 samples? i can drink any tea i want, whenever! and not feel guilty about it hahaha. I pulled this one out today since i was craving a cup of delicious pineapple goodness and i’m out of stacy’s pineapple oolong. While i also enjoy this one from lupicia, stacy’s version will be my go to version from now on. It’s just way more pineappl-y AND yay for pineapple chunks that i can eat!

So i finally got my order of this one in from Lupicia and figured i could do my mini comparison against the last of the flowery pineapple oolong that i have from stacy. Though i was fairly certain which one would end up being my favourite, i wanted to try again because my taste HAVE changed over the course of the year or so since i last had this one AND because what the hell :)

This oolong is recommended brewing at boiling temperature – SO I DID I T ANNA! it also has coconut added to it, which i generally don’t like, but don’t recall it being a weird note in this tea the last time i had it.

Brewed up, this is a very light, pineapple tea. I can detect the coconut under ths pineapple notes in this one, but rather than screaming COCONUT! they just sort of give this tea a creamy sort of flavour to it. On the whole, i am bumping my rating up on this one as it’s a much more tasty treat since i last had it.

SIPDOWN!

I figured i should give this a try before i sent it off in a swap. As i suspected it’s a little too oolongy for me. BUT this is does have a nice pineapple flavour to it that i can get behind. It’s almost a creamy pineapple oolong. It’s similar to a few milk oolong i’ve tried but with the added citrus pineapple thing going on. overall, i think a lot of people would love this, as long as oolongs are their thing :)

Have just brewed a proper cup of this – 2 days ago I got distracted during the brewing process so it was seriously oversteeped… :(

This smells really sweet and creamy! Just like the strawberry milk beverage that I had when I was small. Frankly speaking the strawberry flavour seems quite artificial, but I am ok with it because it tastes pretty nice. Despite having the flavour of candy, this is hardly a tea for children because the black tea base is quite strong!

This is my first Lupicia tea. I had no idea where to buy this brand in France and sent an email to the Lupicia USA customer service two weeks ago. Still awaiting an answer :) – Maybe I should have wrote to Lupicia Japan but I felt more confident with my English rather than trying to read the Japanese writings.
Anyway I am very lucky because while discussing with the lovely Devilish she proposed me to send me out her Lupicia’s samples !
So my samples arrived from Hong Kong yesterday and I am now sipping Arabian Nights.
I wanted to try this one first because Devilish rated it with a 100 and mentioned in her post it reminds her Morocco.

I have too a beautiful teapot from Morocco and beautiful Moroccan tea glasses but didn’t use them neither :)

I am so grateful to have the opportunity to taste these Lupicia teas ! I should say I am not disappointed at all with this first tea, I love it !

The taste definitively is pomegranate and rose to me.The tea base is so mellow, this is fantastic.I am happy there is not mint inside – I love mint but almost each time a tea gets an oriental name, we have mint inside – Oriental teas are not just mint teas – this one probes it in a yummy way !
I am also happy it is a black tea base, often to mention Orient, a green tea is used – and I prefer black teas :)

I am definitively in Morocco tonight thanks to Devilish thank you so much :)

Hmm this is the least likable tea that I’ve had this week. I don’t know what exactly is a “cute-looking tea”… the tea leaves look pretty normal to me. It has the sweet smell of candies though! Yet when brewed the sweet aroma is largely gone. I wonder if I have used too much tea leaves because the liquor smells really strong, almost like it’s roasted. The tea is fruit-flavoured (though I really can’t tell which fruits. The packet says there are mango, cranberries, raisins, etc.) but it has a tart and slightly bitter finish… :( The reason? I have just got the answer from the list of ingredients – hibiscus!!!!! No wonder…

Lupicia has lots of fruit-flavoured blends, and a fair proportion of them re flavoured with grapes, muscat and the like. I think they are enjoyable, but sometimes they do remind me of Fanta Grape… This tea is yet another flavoured tea in the “grape spectrum”. When dried the leaves smelled intensely of Fanta Grape (hmm it should be mountain grapes, they said). I was expecting another cup that tasted like grape candy, but I was wrong this time! The grape flavour was so subtle that the sweetness and floral fragrance of the Taiwanese oolong tea base was able to stand out. To me this was a better balance between flavouring and tea base. :)

I have been pretty lucky these days. I have had several delicious teas in a row! I guess this shows that I have been more selective in buying teas, and I begin to focus more on the quality of tea leaves rather than packaging :P

This deep-steamed sensha is amazing. Fulled-bodied, smooth, a little bit of grassy flavour that gives it a refreshing taste, and has a sweet finish. I haven’t had sencha as good as this one for so long. This is unfortunately a single tea bag from The Book of Tea (Autumn Version), which means I probably won’t be able to have this tea in the months to come after I have finished this cup…

Another one from the Lucky Bag.

I went through this one pretty quickly! The curled-up little leaves smell delicious and tip so nicely into the steeper. The scent matches up with the promised ripe pineapple and coconut. My first instinct was to cold-brew this, but I believe I left it too long at 5 hours, as I found the underlying flavor of the oolong too floral and a bit bitter. Turns out I like this a lot better when it is steeped for a few minutes at about 160-170 and let cool to drinking temperature. The fruity pineapple really shines then and makes a delicious and sweet cup.

I made this and I drank some and it’s a sipdown but I really can’t be fair to it because I feel so very terrible right now, physically and emotionally. I’m going to plead sick and go home from work after I wash out my pot, whether or not I can take sick time. I’ll make it up later if I can’t. I just can’t be here right now. I promised people to do QA database stuff today but I just can’t.

Tasty, definitely cherry and quite sweet. I’m glad this is a black tea because I was honestly expecting the only Japanese cherry flavours to be green tea. Thanks to ToiToi for this sample