Hello friends! It has been a while since my last Lupicia quick tea review post and I was distracted due to Easter and falling sick (again). This time whatever I got was pretty powerful because I got dizzy and breathless and basically was completely unable to work for two days.
So let me think back to happier times when I could enjoy a cup of tea almost every morning.
The first tea I want to talk about is called Sky and Sea and it’s a black tea flavoured with citrus and was inspired by the blue skies of Setouchi. The citrus here is supposed to be a green mikan, which I’m actually not too familiar with; I was reminded instead of bergamot. This isn’t too sweet and there’s an additional peppery note that made me think of this tea as verging on the savoury side. It’s interesting but not quite to my taste.
The next tea is a non-caffeinated blend called Olivier. It’s a rooibos that reminds me of a fruit, kind of a cross between peach and grape. It’s supposed to be inspired by olives which I’ve always thought of as savoury so this was a surprise. I quite liked this one, the sweetness wasn’t too much and it reminded me a bit of grape candy as well.
The third tea is Ours Blanc, a limited edition tea from Kagoshima which is inspired by their famous shirokuma dessert. Shirokuma is a dessert consisting of shaved ice, milk syrup, fruit, and azuki beans, decorated to look like a white bear. As you might imagine from this, the tea version is both very sweet and milky, even when drunk straight. The milky notes made me think of chocolate, and as someone who isn’t a huge fan of chocolate-flavoured teas, this wasn’t my favourite.
Finally, I also tried the Yume loose-leaf tea sample. I’m actually quite sure I’ve had the Yume before, or have at least tried a sample in stores because it’s one of their more popular teas (from my understanding, anyway). The tea liquor was a deep dark brown and it smelled and tasted sweet and fruity, and somewhat reminded me of Rose Royale, another flavoured tea by Lupicia.
A note on the Yume Lupicia page mentioned that it could be drunk as milk tea. So of course, I tried a cup with a splash of milk. Initially, the milk was all I could taste but after a while, I could once again taste the sweet and fruity notes. It was a decent cup of milk tea, though I wouldn’t say that I would automatically make it with milk in the future.
Overall, these were four interesting teas! I wasn’t as fond of this batch as I was the teas in the previous post, but I am enjoying the variety and I’ll be back soon with more quick reviews.