Soba - Roasted Buckwheat

In a recent note by Kawaii for another tea, she mentioned some teas tasting like paint thinner. I can’t recall what paint thinner smells like. Maybe this smells like acetone? It’s a note both Kiki and I can get in teas with roasted buckwheat or roasted rice. I don’t mean to imply there is a chemical in this tea, but I do think that processing can produce the chemical aroma. Beyond that, it has those sweet, nutty, grainy notes that I like with a clean tone I want to call grassy. This isn’t something I want to drink but I do want to eat it. So, on top of my next rice bowl it goes!

classic soba, tastes fairly similar to the big barley 1L tea bags imo. toasty and grainy. Sometimes leaves a bit of an odd drying out feeling in the throat, but good for times when you’re avoiding caffeine but don’t want water. Not much else to say about it; this is not particularly interesting, but something I have been drinking often.

The dry aroma is toasted grains and roasted nuts. When brewed, I get more of a popcorn or ricecake scent. There is a nice toasty flavour, with nutty notes.

I wonder how it would be with toast.

From JK7ray’s stash sale. I really like roasted barley, so I was excited to try this. Unfortunately, I don’t think this is for me. It has a roasted flavor and a slight sweetness, but it’s quite a bit lighter in flavor than roasted barley. There’s also something weird about the flavor that I don’t know how to describe, but I don’t particularly like. I’ll stick to roasted barley in the future, then.

This was a very interesting tea. I’ve tried Genmai Cha before, and it’s similar to that. I can’t quite put my finger on what specifically was different, but I think I actually like this better than the Genmai Chas I’ve tasted before.

Backlog from last week, and sipdown!

Many thanks to VariaTEA for sending me part of her dwindling supply of this tea. The buckwheat grains were much darker and larger than those of the other buckwheat teas I’ve tried. I think I might have used a mug that was too large for the sample that VariaTEA sent, but that’s okay.

It was roasty and nutty, but since H&S doesn’t do free shipping to Canada and since I have a whole bunch of sobacha from Yunomi, this was really just a chance to hear what the fuss was about.

One less tea in the cupboard!

It’s almost like soup broth! A very malted taste! I could see this being really tasty with salt and pepper added in the winter.

This one came from Dexter. I’ve found myself very interested in this and other similar soba cha teas for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve actually tried one. Dexter was sweet enough to send me a sample of this one and the Yunnan Sourcing version. The kernels (?) are a warm medium tan in color and only a couple millimeters in diameter. I didn’t get much of a smell from the dry grains.

As soon as I poured the water, I could smell roasted peanuts. Yum… The steeped tea itself also smells like roasted nuts or a toasted grain cereal. This is delicious! It’s hard for me to describe it because it reminds me of something specific, but I can’t think of what it is… I’ll just say it’s quite roasty but not in a strong way like mugicha, it’s more mellow and nutty. It tastes somewhat similar to that “Honey Smacks” puffed wheat cereal that I had as a kid. There’s the same lingering sweetness that I noticed in my mugicha earlier. Yummy!

It’s been an unusually cold fall here, with the temperature falling close to freezing at night and a bitingly cold wind during the day. Often we’ll have warm weather up until mid-October, but not this year apparently. I guess I should consider myself lucky – Calgary was hit by a blizzard.

I’ve heard of soba-cha from time to time but I’ve never had the chance to try it myself until I got a sample via the Traveling Teabox. The flavour is quite distinctive – very roasted-malty with undertones of raw, slightly bitter cocoa and something that’s a bit like coffee. It’s a warm, pleasant brew that’s perfect for warming me up on a chill evening like this.

Toasty cereal tea, Its simple and comforting. I was so close to buying more the other day when they had free shipping and donated 30% to the Marine Scholarship Fund in memory of John Harney. Toward the end of the day things happened in life that I knew I could not get more just yet.