Gorgeous Geisha

Over 40oC. Bushfires everywhere, the smell is drifting in my windows. General ugh-ness about today. Iced tea is a lifesaver, probably actually. I hope everyone is safe on this horribly dry and hot day.

Oh my this is good.

I am not a fan of green tea in general. There are very few green teas that I like and even fewer than I love so I never expected to like Gorgeous Geisha.

I was at Chadstone’s T2 shopping for my sister’s Christmas present and they had Gorgeous Geisha iced and it was oh my God so good. Iced it reminds me of T2’s Strawberries & Cream but without the sweetness. It smells and tastes like strawberries drizzled in cream with a refreshing after-taste of generic sweet fruit. The green tea element seems to make the tea less sweet and more refreshing without any actual ‘tea’ or ‘grassy’ taste making it a really refreshingly sweet iced tea perfect for a hot summer day. I think I would actually prefer this iced compared to Strawberries & Cream because it is less sweet and more refreshing.

Dry you are greeted by very large green tea leaves and small little freeze dried strawberry pieces – the smell is quite unusual it’s like walking into a strawberry field – very strong aroma of strawberries surrounded by an earthy-grassy scent.

Hot a very sweet (almost sickly sweet) strawberry aroma greets you with only the very slightest hint of a grassy smell. The taste is incredible it’s like drinking a strawberry Martini – a very strong strawberry taste with a coating of creaminess chased by a light bitter-grass after-taste.

Oh so good and oh so surprising.

I highly recommend this for fans of T2’s Strawberries & Cream and for people wanting to edge themselves into the world of green tea. It is yumilicious.

This is the last tea to try from my Nine Green pack from T2. I tend to always save the best for last, and I figured there was a pretty good chance I’d like this one. No worries there! Sniffing the dry leaf, it’s almost all sweet strawberries. There’s not much to notice of the cream, and even less of the sencha itself. After it’s steeped, it becomes almost 50/50 between strawberries and sencha in both the infused leaf and the liquor. It’s very smooth and rather creamy (makes sense, really) in my mouth and a sensation of juicy strawberries really lingers well after the last sip. All that being said, it’s not overly sweet at all; in fact, it has the usual slight bitterness and other normal characteristics of sencha, just with strawberries on top.

In all honesty, since I’m really going gung-ho on tea tasting, I wanted to find an unflavoured green tea in this pack that I would happily choose as a cupboard standard. The best bet for that is the Genmaicha Sencha which I think is fantastic, although maybe it’s not considered “unflavored”. But this Gorgeous Geisha is very good, and my Southern Girl background kind of makes it hard to turn it down! Seriously, I did try to pick a “real” tea for a keeper. But juicy, fruity, creamy tea? Come on. How could I resist?

You can read a separate review I did for this tea and a couple of other T2 greens on my blog: http://hardlysupermom.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/progress-report-card-t2-nine-green-pack-part-3/

I’ll say one thing off the bat – this tea smells mouthwatering. It has a grassy sencha flavour, and the distinct creaminess makes it a good introduction for those uninitiated into the world of green tea. That said, the strawberry serves to make the tea taste rather tart, which I’m not sure I’m a fan of – going from a sweet, soft fragrance to the surprisingly strong flavour was a bit of a shock! I’ll also need to put slightly less tea in next time to minimise bitterness. Even without the bitterness, the flavour is nothing to write home about, which is a shame.

Edit: This tastes much better cold. Still not amazing but much much better.

Now matter how I brew it, I find it to be too bitter for me. Of course, there are days when I crave such bitterness, but more often than not it is a disappointment. Furthermore, the strawberry addition, although fragrant, is negligible – another disappointment.

mmmmm

As much as the idea of strawberry and green tea excites me, this is inferior to the bag of strawberry green tea that i bought from a supermarket at Riga… which is way cheaper than the price that you’d pay for at T2. Otherwise, this tea smells great, but taste very little.

Starting the day with a little mug of green today. This was a welcoming gift from a tea group I joined. Typically I drink greens in the afternoon or on a summer morning but I’m mixing it up a bit today. I found it to be a rather underwhelming. It’s a green tea with a slight strawberry taste. It has pretty good reviews on T2 but I didn’t find it very exciting.

Adventaggedon Day 1: Tea 3/7

I had mixed feelings about this being the first tea in the T2 advent because it’s not very festive at all – plus I think using Geisha in the name of a tea that doesn’t have any link to Geishas is also very weird. However it’s a pretty notorious blend from T2 that I’ve wanted to try for a while!

Overall my thoughts were that it’s fine but kind of unexciting. The green tea base, while always not my favourite, is smooth and I think it works well with the strawberry note because it almost gives it a more natural slightly underripe strawberry kind of taste. Pair that with the cream flavour and it’s just a nice straight forward/no frills strawberries and cream profile which is what it’s trying to be. I just thought it was a little flat overall.

Advent Day…. 13?

Didn’t drink this on the day of and I’m pretty sure it was from yesterday. I cold steeped this, the scent just seemed to be calling for it. It’s a little astringent, but I bet that would go away if I were to have it on ice and dilute it. It does have a tasty strawberry flavor to it that is very bright. Cream would probably be delicious in this as well. As good as this is, it doesn’t seem any different than any other green strawberry tea I’ve had. I think I had a tin from Kusmi and one from Lupicia and maybe somewhere else. Some other flavor combo would have made it stand out to me. Cinnamon, maybe a chocolate, almond… something to make it more dynamic.