Hello friends! As promised, here is a report of what I’ve been enjoying in the first week of the Lupicia advent calendar (albeit, a bit late).

Lupicia Advent – Day 1: White Christmas Tea

The first day revealed a beautiful tin of White Christmas Tea. I love the design of the tin here, but was slightly less enthusiastic about the description: inspired by baked goods, this is a black tea with nutty and chocolate notes. 

Let’s be honest, there are tea flavours that I am not very fond of.

Tea Flavours I don’t do well with: chocolate, nuts, caramel

Tea Flavours I do well with: florals and fruits (except coconut) 

But even though this wasn’t a description that appealed to me, I found this tea quite enjoyable. The chocolate note is more of a sweetness rather than an actual chocolate note and the nutty note was pleasant. I tried this straight and with a drop of milk, as suggested by the tea description. Adding milk enhanced the nutty flavour (though the tea colour still looked a bit weak), but in general, I think I would prefer this straight.

Lupicia Advent: Day 2 – Marshmallow White Chocolate 

Day two brought a change as there wasn’t a tea but a snack! The snack is a marshmallow white chocolate, which is a regular marshmallow covered in white chocolate. There isn’t too much to say about this except that the white chocolate really melts in the mouth, and this small packet might have felt too decadent for 5:50am if not for the fact that the marshmallow lightens it greatly, which didn’t make it feel too rich for the early morning.

Lupicia Advent – Day 3: Bonne Chance Tea

Today’s tea is a single teabag tea, which is a bit of a pity because I liked this a lot! Bonne Chance is a green rooibos (aka caffeine free!!) flavoured with white peach and raspberries and this is exactly the kind of flavour that turned me into a Lupicia, and by extension, a tea fan. The fruity notes hit the spot and the tea tastes great without tasting artificial – I really enjoyed this one and would definitely buy a tin to have as a night time drink! 

I can see this working very well as a cold brew tea as well!

Lupicia Advent Calendar – Day 4: Carol Tea

There’s just something about the red packet for their advent design that I really loved. I might or might not have saved it to use as a bookmark, since I am reading a book by Lupicia anyway! The book is お茶を楽しむ (Enjoying Tea) and I got it from the Lupicia Marché many years ago – I don’t think I’ve properly read it from cover to cover so I’m enjoying myself a lot.

The tea is Carol, which is a tea I’ve tried before (and even reviewed it here). It’s a strawberry and vanilla black tea enhanced with rose, and it was flavourful but not too heavy. It smelled great too, and I can see this being very good as a cold brew as well.

Lupicia Advent Calendar – Day 5: White Peach Oolong 

I was a bit surprised to see yet another tea but I also wasn’t going to complain because I enjoyed this one very much too! This is a white peach oolong and the peach notes here are very good. They go very well with the lightly roasted green oolong notes and overall, the tea reminded me of one of the Antea Social ones.

But, I have to say that I don’t think a teabag is the best option for this tea; I would have preferred it to be a loose leaf tea sample, which I know Lupicia has (had?). The reason is because I could see the oolong leaves were very fine, and I think they were crushed for the teabag or during the tea bag process. It’s a bit of a pity, in my opinion, because oolong deserves to have the space to unfurl and develop its flavour.

By the way, I saw this tea mentioned in the Lupicia tea book that I was reading. It’s called お茶を楽しむ (Enjoy Tea) and this peach oolong was mentioned as one of the teas that they will recommend to everything. Honestly, I can see why, but I would recommend this as loose leaf!

Lupicia Advent Calendar – Day 6

Today’s item is neither tea nor food but a very cute teacup ornament for a Christmas tree! If only I had a Christmas tree, so this will have to be kept safely away until I have one (maybe next year?)

Lupicia Advent Calendar – Day 7: Yawoo

So… I actually had really high hopes for day 7 because it’s in a long thin box and I thought it might be merch, but it turned out to be tea! And not even loose leaf tea but teabag tea, so it could have been more compact.

Yawoo is a Hokkaido exclusive black tea inspired by notes of milk and yoghurt. There is a tangy yogurt smell once you open the packet, but the actual taste is a bit milder and harder to describe. It definitely has something that I would say is tangy like yoghurt but it doesn’t really make me think of a milk tea! Very intriguing and I’m actually looking forward to drinking more of this!

Craft Update

I feel like there was significant progress made for my cross stitch, but that’s also we had a Saturday that unexpectedly opened up and I just spent the whole time cross stitching. I’m going to give this until Wednesday, and then I might want to switch to a few of the advent crochet patterns that I found before it’s too late.

See you next week!