Hojicha Cypress Organic

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Okay, so this was obviously a must-try in my recent Camellia Sinensis order. Any tea with evergreen elements, I’m here for it. And this is hojicha, which sounds even better.

To be honest, the first couple of cups of this left me wanting a bit more of the cypress. I could taste it, especially at the tail end of the sip, but the hojicha was overpowering it a little bit. This last cup seems much more evergreen-forward, maybe there was extra cypress hiding at the bottom of the bag? Either way, I can taste more of those refreshing piney notes, and also a lovely resinous sap-like flavor that I don’t think I’ve tasted before in a tea. Not sure if that’s down to the cypress compared to more common evergreen ingredients like fir, cedar, and juniper. Actually it’s reminding me a bit of cardamom, which feels like an odd thing to say. Regardless, it’s lovely. The hojicha adds a lovely sweet, roasty-toasty, woody, autumn leafy foundation that really brings home that feeling of sipping tea in an evergreen forest.

What a perfect winter tea! I’ll definitely have to order more of this at some point.

Left the tea in to steep the entire time I was drinking this cup and it ended up not being my favourite version of it. Still not bad because the hojicha itself is delicious and has a really nutty and earthy kind of complexity to it, but letting this keep steeping allowed it to get a little too strong and the dark roast engulfed the cypres notes a little too much – so it wasn’t the ethereal camphorous magic forest in a cup that I was looking for.