Butiki Teas

Sipdown!

A fantastic final cup of this one. Sweet and full of flavour, good for at least 2 resteeps. One of the nicest white teas I’ve had.

I was really craving lavender tea tonight, and remembered I dried a bunch of lavender flowers this past summer. Sooooo, tried an experiment, mixing lavender with this tea! I was a little heavy-handed on the lavender though… so that’s really all I taste, but it’s not too bad. Now I want to add cream and lemon and vanilla flavours :D (I debated putting some lemon zest, a drop of vanilla extract, and whipping cream in the cup, but held off for now. But I might try that tomorrow for curiousity if nothing else! I of course don’t have flavouring oils, so those are my available options.)

Another tea where I’m annoyed to find that I failed to write a note about while it was fresh. Oh well. This tea is still excellent. I’m getting tired so all I can say is that it’s nice and flavourful, malty, delicious.

Wow, even after 3 years or however long it’s been out of business, my remaining Butiki teas are still good! I’ve just realized that I didn’t review them. Oops. I guess it doesn’t matter so much now, but I’m just that kind of person.

Anyway, still very chocolate and raspberry. I didn’t get a waffle flavor (or anything pastry-ish or vanilla-ish) but very nice. And somehow, it has a slight floral quality, probably most rose-like if I had to pin it down. If memory serves, this is pretty much how I felt about it when it was new and fresh, lol, but I won’t give this a numerical rating because I’m not sure that would be fair.

Peach, malt, and honey make up the flavors of this smooth and mellow tea, which ends will a vanilla-like creaminess.

A bit of sugar makes it delicious chilled. Add a drop of milk when drinking it hot to accentuate the vanilla.

The opening taste matches that scent perfectly, with chocolate and raisin dominating.

Lovely tasting tea I have recently been using this tea before bed! Love the taste and always wanting more!

Thank you to Ost for letting me buy this from her. I couldn’t wait any longer and drank this in the morning as soon as I got back from the store where I bought milk. This has a lot of maple flavour, and lots of tasty toasted pecan flavour. The base tastes more like a black, but it might just be a highly oxidized unroasted oolong. It hasn’t lost any flavour with age, since it made my entire house smell like maple pecan. The reason I had to have this particular tea this morning was because I could smell the mapley dry leaf across the room. I’m the future I plan to make this with a touch of sweetener to bring out the maple.

This is what happens when you go ‘home’ (where my stuff is kept in storage), and find tea that you’d completely forgotten about. I swear, this is five-year-old tea. Jeepers. Butiki! This stuff is pure gold, considering Stacey doesn’t (to my knowledge?) run Butiki anymore, and hasn’t for a while.

So, I grabbed the tea, and brought it with me on my travels.

I remember this being my first guayusa tea, and I can’t rememeber why. Perhaps it’s not that common (it’s not), and I’m not the biggest mate fan (which this reminds me of).

Drinking the tea, is fun, and surprisingly good considering how old it is. It still looks stunning – the leaves are flat and multicolored, almost like green, grey and brown confetti. The calendula leaves are still long, orangey-yellow and twisted like a good yoga pose. The smell is still strongly of apricot/peaches, and a hint of metallic earth.

The flavor is exactly how I remember it: a first hit of sweetness from a stone fruit, a middle layer of green… I can’t describe it any better than that… and final notes of a sort of cardboard sweetness. The last bit is likely from the age of the tea.

Do I love it? Nope. Do I like it? Definitely. I think I’ll finish this more because it’s bittersweet to drink this than because I really want the hit of energy, or the flavor.

Although, I could be convinced to send this along to someone else, if they really loved it and want some more. There’s maybe a mug-sized amount left.

obviously tea is LIFE

So it’s tasting note 2,500 for me! Not a big a deal, as another Steepsterer hit 4,000 just the other day. But I keep truckin along with my tasting notes. :D But how about a special tea for #2,500? How about a new to me Butiki tea?! That gets a very high Steepster rating?! Thanks for including this in the awesome tea package, StarFevre! I somehow never tried this one in the Butiki days. And I love the melon teas. I wanted a white tea today so a decent amount of these sickle shaped leaves with cute pink flowers went into the infuser. The dry leaves still smell like melon! More cantaloupe than watermelon, but I certainly prefer that anyway. And both steeps still had a HUGE amount of melon flavor. Awesomely unexpected. I usually don’t think a sickle shaped white tea has enough flavor, but this one had quite the nice sweet mellow base for the melon flavor. Maybe I steeped the right amount of leaves. I can always appreciate when an aging tea is still delicious!
Steep #1 // 20 minutes after boiling // 70 second steep
Steep #2 // 12 minutes after boiling // 3 minute steep

Edited to add: Scratch that. The third steep is very melony too! At least when I used just boiled water. And now I will stop drinking this tonight and save it for tomorrow as it is 11:19 and I don’t need the caffeine! I wonder how the Butiki tea magician is doing these days? Not getting tea flavors to magically last forever, I suppose. :D

A little bit flat now because of age, but still smooth malty and fruity goodness with starchy sweet potato type notes to it. It’s also still an absolutely beautiful tea! I made it yesterday morning, and one of my coworkers surprised everyone for Valentine’s day by leaving flowers on all of our desks so I got to enjoy my tea with a beautiful flower!

Photo: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8jl835Aniv/

From last night!

I wanted a mug of straight black tea, so I made this one up – but as it was steeping I realized it was WAY TOO HOT in the apartment for me to drink it right away; I would have felt like I was melting! So I deliberately let this cool down to room temperature before slurping it up – but it was still good, and tea you’ve let cool down on purpose is 100$ better than tea that has cooled down because you forgot about it.

Midday cuppa yesterday.

I know this one was passed to me from a tea friend, but I can’t remember if it was Starfevre or Kittenna – but thank you to whichever of you sent it my way!

This was really nice; both dry aroma and steeped aroma are very sweet and fruity. I’d say that in taste, this mostly leans towards really rich, bright jammy red fruit or brandy notes but then has undertones a lot more like what’s in the company description; cocoa, malt, pecan/other generic nutty notes, and then a bit of sweet potato sweetness – without the starchiness. Just very sweet overall/in general. I greatly enjoyed it.

I used 2 tsp of leaf in 500mL hot water and a splash of almond milk. Unfortunately overleafing it didn’t really help.

I’m not sure what potato pancakes were supposed to taste like, but I don’t get any pastry or potato flavours. I do taste some great apple and cinnamon notes, however. I actually think this is a nice apple cinnamon tea. I think the flavours have all faded quite a bit. After an hour of steeping it still isn’t very strong and the almond milk (which is already thin and non-intrusive) drowns out the tea quite a lot. I bet this blend would have been fantastic in its prime.

Well this is definitely an oolong, which I generally don’t like, but I treaterd this one very gently and it is not too bad, all things considered. I really don’t love it though and it is a bit of a mystery why it didn’t go out during the great tea purge of 2017.