With Open Eyes

Mmmm. Dragonwell! Strawberry dragonwell even! This is a very light and beautiful tea – buttery green notes, strawberry juice and a touch of sweetness. I’m going to resteep it and brown sugar…

Lovely sample! (156)

Delicious, and I’ve generally had bad luck with strawberry teas (though I do love ATR’s Nirvana…green tea bases seem to help). I need to add more to this note later, but I wanted to at least have this placeholder because I’m quite sleepy tonight but really enjoyed it…

As always with Butiki blends I’m amazed at how evocative and accurate the flavors are, particularly the buttery toffee element. I’m pretty sure I’d never have thought to combine strawberry jam with toffee, but it’s delightful. The ginger seems to somehow keep it from being cloying, warming things up just enough to round the sweetness out. What a treat.

I think I may have finally found the strawberry tea I’ve been looking for and as an added bonus it happens to be dragonwell, I love dragonwell! There were huge strawberry pieces in the sample that JustJames kindly send me in our swap. They were sweet and tart and there wasn’t an aftificial taste that I normally get from strawberry teas. The ginger and toffee are a great combination with the strawberries, they’re subtle, let the strawberry shine and are perfectly paired with the dragonwell base. I see many orders of this in my future, this is a great summer tea.

My glass gaiwan arrived in the mail today! I christened it with this blend.

It’s taken me only about forever to finally get this stuff right. I really enjoy the ginger and the strawberry together- perfect springtime tea.

Now if I could only figure out how to pour it from the gaiwan into my teacup without burning the hell out of my fingers…

0.5 tbsp for 200ml

Extremely mineral tasting- I felt like I was drinking a carbonated beverage. The strawberry is mild in flavour, more apparent in the aroma. The ginger is very faint. There is a baked-goods note; like a pastry on the roof of my mouth in the aftertaste. As the tea cools the strawberry flavour becomes a bit more punchy.

Thanks to Sil for letting me try some!

Hooray! My order arrived! :) This is the first of the samples I received that I’m breaking into.

The leaves are just as pretty in real life as the preview photo on Facebook a little while ago. :) Steeped up, the liquor is very pale, almost translucent. I find the main thing I smell is strawberries, but when I take a sip, while the strawberries are very present, I find the predominate taste is the toffee! Which is fabulous, because it was the toffee that intrigued me the most about this tea. :)

I love toffee. I love how it’s buttery, nutty, sweet in that ‘gooey’ way, and also salty. I get all of that in this tea, as well as the strawberry.

I find while in most cases with Butiki Teas, the flavors don’t usually come so strong that you can’t taste the tea anymore, but I actually do have that with this one. It might be because I’m pretty uncultured when it comes to green teas, but for once I’m not complaining about that because the taste of the toffee is so delectable I just want to keep tasting it. :D Ha.

This tea is a very interesting combination of flavors (I never would’ve thought strawberry and toffee would be a good pairing, but I trusted Stacy and sure enough she was right!) and it’s super good. Really enjoying this cup. :)

Thanks for packing this into my box! :D

I was hesitant to try this sample. It’s no secret that I don’t like ginger, but I do love strawberries! The dry leaf smelled more of strawberry than ginger, so I decided it was safe enough.

Im so sad that the ginger comes through much stronger than the strawberry (I’m not picking up the toffee except slightly in the aroma). Strangely though, the ginger isn’t putting me off as much as I would expect. I still don’t like it, but it’s not making me sick (ginger has caused me more gag reflexes than I’d like to remember).

I would have liked to share this sample with my parents as I usually do with the 1-serving Butiki samples (serving in tiny sample cups), but my family is away this week. The are moving a U-haul of stuff up to their storage facility in Bozeman, MT. This is only the beginning. They never sold the house there and have been renting it out (the house that I lived in for 7 years before getting married; the longest I’ve ever lived in one house). My father’s original crazy business plans here never panned out and he’s been telecommuting for the same company he worked for in Bozeman. Needless to say, there’s no reason to stay here and they’ve been wanting to move back for some time. I don’t blame them. I wish I was going back to Bozeman too. I was really hoping they’d stay here another year as my husband and I will be here another year before our plans take us to Seattle. They won’t officially move until late August sometime, but that’s too soon! I hate major changes like this. I know it has to happen sooner or later, but later is always preferred. :(

Thanks to Sil for the swap.

This one is ok. The strawberry flavor is a little on the artificial side. There’s a nice toffee flavor that comes out mid-sip. I’m not getting the ginger at all. I am picking up a grassy/mossy flavor from the base, which I quite like. Overall, though, it’s kind of meh. BUT. It is a sipdown. Whee!

This tea sounded so good, but I didn’t order this with my last Butiki order because I am not the biggest green tea fan. If it is vegetal at all, I don’t want it, and I haven’t had the best luck with Butiki green teas. So I asked for a sample of this instead so I could try it.

I am IMPRESSED. I am thinking Stacey was running out of this as my sample was tiny and she gave me almond indulgence as a third sample. I only made about a half cup which I think might have been too much water because it is quite weak but I am still getting all of the flavours. Strawberry is the main flavour and it is very candy like, but I am also getting a hint of ginger. The green tea doesn’t seem to be vegetal at all and I’m hoping that’s not because of how weak this is. Either way, I will be ordering this with my next Butiki order.

This is one tea where you will want to try adjusting brew temperatures and times with. Given the wonderful layers in this tea, subtle adjustments changed the character of the brew and experience. After a bit of steep time experimentation I found that nearly doubling the recommended time was perfect for me. The green tea base is light in nature and as such the extended steep allowed me to appreciate and bring out more of the subtle notes. This also results in a stronger, more dominate ginger flavor that is followed by the sweet strawberry notes at the back of the palate. Overall, this is more of a delicate tea that I found which made it perfect for unwinding with in the afternoon or evening.