Strawberry Green Tea

This is my other Kusmi purchase from yesterday. The caramel being the first one, in case anybody hadn’t noticed. JacquelineM voiced the optimistic hope that the appearance of the Kusmi caramel post meant that the missing package had shown up, but alas. I have, however, found a place where they have a large selection so I went in and bought the bare necessity (caramel) and a curiousity (this one).

I’ve actually seen this one a long time ago when I was looking for a strawberry tea. The problem then was that what I wanted was a plain strawberry black and as I had never had a strawberry green before I had the hardest time imagening that. And even so, you can’t really make that substitution between blacks and greens. Two entirely different beasts.

But then Jillian shared a strawberry green with me from … uh … I can’t actually remember where it was from now, but I found it surprisingly pleasant and it brought me back to the thought of this one and finally made me want to try it.

The green base is a chinese sencha which seems to be a more or less standard green for flavouring. It seems like that’s the one most flavoured greens (that actually reveal the base) are based on. I can’t say I have any complaints there. I’ve come to the conclusion that sencha is my preferred green. I haven’t met my perfect plain sencha yet, but we’ll get to that later.

This one has a very strong strawberry aroma. It doesn’t smell synthetic when you open the tin, it smells very real. It’s got that specific sort of tang to the aroma that you also find when you smell a real strawberry and that little bit of astringency when eating one. (That slight astringency manages to surprise me every single time I have fresh strawberries for some reason)

Some of you will perhaps recall a small discussion we had once regarding the flavouring of brands such as Kusmi or Mariage Freres, and how it seemed like they were generally more subtle in their flavouring compared to similarly flavoured brands. We decided it must be a french thing. Do you remember?

The aroma of these leaves, when dry, do NOT have that frenchness. It’s 100% strawberry and a lot of it.

After steeping the aroma turns a little more complex. I can actually smell the sencha now, and the strawberry is more subdued. It’s still there, but it doesn’t scream ’I’M A STRAWBERRY!!!’ quite so much as it did before. It smells more like sweeties now than actual fruit.

Curious taste! There’s a small disclaimer here in that I didn’t really pay attention while steeping so I actually gave it a whole minute rather than just the 30 seconds I usually start a green on. For those who wonder how I can get anything interesting out of such short intervals, I use a lot of leaf.

Anyway, curious. There are strong sencha flavours here. I can find the spinach-y green note and it does indeed come with that same dark pine green colour association that I’m used to from sencha. I wonder if I might not actually rather like this sencha if I had it plain.

But what about the strawberry? It’s there. It has just regained that frenchness I mentioned before. It’s not overwhelming in the taste, but it’s very easy to find. This doesn’t just taste like sweeties or ‘strawberry tea’. It tastes like tea WITH strawberry, and therein lies an enormous difference.

Imagine the flavour of sencha. Imagine it as a sort of networked structure. A large flat expanse of pine green flavour, but with holes and cavities all over. That’s where the strawberry is. At first glance it’ll look nice and uniform, but when you look closer, there are bright red dots all over the place. That’s what it tastes like.

I’m not sure, however, that this is my perfect strawberry flavoured tea. I think it might be my perfect strawberry green tea, but all in all, I don’t really think my perfect strawberry tea isn’t black. I really wish Kusmi would provide me with a plain strawberry black.

These days I’m trying to put some thought into my ‘standard panel’ of teas. The ones that I’ll always have in my cupboard. A C Perch’s Lapsang Souchon and their raspberry oolong, for example. Kusmi’s caramel, Nothing But Tea’s orange pu-erh, TeaSpring’s Tan Yang Te Ji (♥)… And so on and so forth. In spite of the above, this one might be a candidate there as well, but I haven’t decided on that yet.

This one is just as fiddly and delicate as Kusmi’s almond green, but worth it in the end I think! The dry leaves smell very sweet, and the scent sticks around once brewed, though it’s much lighter. It’s clear the leaves have simply been infused with the strawberry scent, as there are no visible bits of strawberry in the dry leaf. I would have liked some in there for sure, as it is this brews up with way more of a green tea with a whiff of strawberry than what I think of when I hear the phrase “strawberry green tea.”

I will say this is one of the few greens I’ve had good luck resteeping. In fact, my usual method with this tea is to brew and then strain into a bigger cup to catch the little leafy bits, then resteep and strain into the same cup. The lighter second steep cuts any astringency that might have snuck into the first.

I’m really surprised that so far only one person has mentioned the vanilla note in this. To me, it’s undeniable—so much so that when I first tasted it, my immediate thought was of a vanilla green tea made by Lipton that I used to drink sometimes. If anything, I’d call this a strawberry-vanilla green, but I would understand if someone thought that there was no strawberry at all and just a general fruity kind of lightness that’s a bit nondescript. It’s identifiable as strawberry if you know it’s a strawberry green tea, but otherwise, I think it may not be. Before you steep it, though, it’s very strawberry indeed. It smells exactly like strawberry candy or a strawberry lip balm. Upon steeping, that’s pretty much gone. You’ve got some light, fruity sweetness (this was brought out in mine with sweetener, but this is one of a small number of flavoured green teas I’ve tried that I’d say you could be satisfied with unsweetened), but to me, the vanilla note is what’s predominantly there with the green, which is a pretty subtle green. The strawberry taste does come out more when the tea is cool, though, so if you’re having this at room temperature, it may come across as more true to name.

Because vanilla’s pretty much my favourite thing ever, I didn’t have a problem with the fact that this wasn’t strongly berry-flavoured. Someone commented that the flavour may reflect that Kusmi’s claims of using natural flavours may be dubious, but if anything, I’d say that the kind of weak berry aspect could be a reflection of strong-tasting, artificial sweeteners not being used (I have to say, though, the smell before steeping does make it seem a bit fake [but the smell is here no indicator of the flavour]). I thought it was a pleasant tea, but it didn’t really feel original (though that means that it could be a crowd pleaser if you’re having a tea party or something [depending on the attendees, obviously—I wouldn’t serve it to my parents]). I’d probably buy it again, and it might have other uses (I used to blend up the Lipton vanilla tea with fruit and some other things for a smoothie, and that would work well with this, especially if you’re someone who wants something new to do with your tea).

This tea is a bit of an unusual tea from Kusmi, it has an overpowering sweet strawberry scent, that almost smells of cotton candy or something. I don’t think it’s flavored with natural essences at all, but on their website there’s written: “We use natural flavorings in all of our teas”, or something like that, maybe it’s a naural flavoring that is used in this tea, but it doesn’t seems to be. Sniffing to a box of strawberries in the early summer is a natural experience, and this tea is far from that, sorry Kusmi.
It brews to a beautiful, very clear, yellowey green color, which is like almost all senchas look like.
The brewed tea has translated to something than reminds me more of vanilla/caramel than actual strawberry, but it smells delicious.
It’s not the most delicate sencha I have tasted either, it’s very bland, watery and slightly anstringent, but the anstringency is only noticeable on the back/sides of your tongue, and only when steeped for a very long time. Their sencha base used in Imperial Label is much more delicious, I really wished that they used that one instead, cause this one is just not that tasty, but it is okay. The sencha in this tea is the same as the sencha in Detox and Boost, but there are a so small amount of it in them, that the anstringent notes seem nonexistent. The strawberry taste in the brewed product is more natural, and is quite like eating a strawberry, a very sweet one.
Not the best Kusmi, and not the worst either.
Their worst tea is the Ginger-lemon green tea, uff it gives me goosebumps!