Green Zoubrovka

This came as another swap item with oOTeaOo. I’m excited that I finally am getting to try some of these Kusmi teas I’ve had my eye on.

This one is nice and mellow and earthy. I steeped it at 180F for around 2 1/2 minutes. Like most other folks I’ve no idea what buffalo grass is supposed to taste like. I found it to be slightly minty, herby, sweet and kinda funky but in a good way. I can’t quite place the taste but I am finding I like this one a lot. I did a quick Google search on it and found out that it has been widely used for healing coughs and native americans believed it had meditative properties.

Regardless I am finding this to be some pretty interesting stuff although I can see how it might not ring everyone’s bell. It’s a bit strong. I have too much green tea in my Stash already but I’m tempted to go place an order with Kusmi!

yummy! this smells like a Kusmi…its interesting how their teas have a similar underlying scent to it. This one smells grassy and sweet. The taste is not bitter at all. It is smooth and sweet. Great tea!

Looks like Gunpowder. Smells like mint. (Of course, that could be the mint from the sampler tube, not this particular tea.) Tastes… like green tea (tastes like the same one from their Almond Green) with an astringent chaser of… something, then followed by a grassy/hay-like aftertaste.

I can’t figure out what that astringency is but it’s pretty surprising. Almost like I overbrewed the tea but I used the same parameters that worked well with their Almond Green. So I’m guessing that buffalo grass is somewhat bitter/astringent?

I’m desperately trying to figure out what that bitterness is from. Fortunately, it seems to be fading as the tea cools. The cooler it gets, the more I can pick out. At first, slurping brings out some smoke? Have you ever driven through the smoke from a massive grass fire (like the controlled burns they do near highways that you drive on for miles and miles without seeing another car)? Yeah, slurping makes it taste that that.

More cooling and then there is a flash of flowers. Not so much garden flowers (highly fragrant sweet roses and the like) but more subtle, smaller flowers that you’d almost ignore the scent of as you walked by, but if you noticed you’d smell them everywhere.

More cooling and now I can pick out a savory herb taste. I actually went to sniff around in my spice cabinet to see if I could figure out what herb. Oregano. (Thyme was the second runner up but it was too sweet.)

And now that it is almost room temperature, I taste green tea and oregano. Oh, it’s not exactly like oregano. It doesn’t have quite the same high note. Perhaps like old oregano? But yeah. Oregano tea.

Not sure how I feel about that.
10g/20oz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_Grass
For info on different kinds of Buffalo Grass.

This caught my eye and HAD to try!

These leaves sure like to boogie! Neat to watch!
Liquid has some floaties tho…like particles, that’s all.

Yup! Smells like Grass.

Ummm…I don’t think I like this…

It has a refreshing quality to it after you get passed the grass and green tea…
Well, maybe it’s not awful…

It might grow on me…it might have potential…will have to revisit but for now…I’ll give it a little above 50

Backlog:

This has a very strong vegetal aroma. I can definitely taste the sweet grass flavor. Very grassy in taste.

It’s also sweet, honey-like, and it has hints of mint. This tea has less of a buttery quality and more of a vegetable brothy sort of quality to it. It’s invigorating to drink.

I enjoyed it. I liked the contrast between sweet and bitter (a savory bitter). It is an uplifting drink.

I picked this tea out because it was something I’d never heard of before, and smelled heavenly in the shop. The scent of the dry tea doesn’t translate as well into the taste once brewed.

I believe aug3zimm described this tea perfectly. My tasting experience matches quite closely with what he described. His review is very well written, but if you’ll forgive me for paraphrasing:
It tastes like green tea mixed with something bitter and hard to describe. If you slurp, it tastes like driving through a grass fire on the side of a deserted highway. As it cools off it tastes like stale oregano.

I also found heterodoxia did an excellent job of describing why I don’t love Kusmi teas as much. For green teas especially, I prefer 100% pure tea, without any “flavorings” added.

This one is a little too weird for me. The buffalo grass is too grassy and bitter, somewhat overwhelming.

Kusmi, as I should have guessed, does European style tea. When I ordered their green tea sampler (Almond, Green Bouquet, Ginger-Lemon, Spearmint, Green Zoubrovka), the romance in my mind envisioned leaves dried and infused with almond blossoms (if that’s possible) or accompanied with shards of ginger and lemon peel, etc. In reality, we get gunpowder tea spritzed with various essential oils. This doesn’t necessarily sound unpleasant, but the liquor invariably turns out murky and monotone. I’ve chosen to log this review under Green Zoubrovka because it is the one tea in the collection that somehow lends itself well to this murkiness. It’s a sort of rhapsody in dubious qualities that strangely works for me; before brewing, this buffalo grass flavored tea looks admittedly like tiny cow pies, and once infused, it has the smoky scent of oregano, or more candidly, cannabis. It’s all rather bizarre, and it’s this novelty that saves the tea.

The rest of the collection varies in palatability, though most of the teas, as most likely intended by Kusmi, could be improved with the addition of milk and/or sugar. The very notion turns me off, because for me, tea is a revitalizing brew that ought not to be adulterated. And yet the flat mustiness of these teas really does beg for some covering up. (The most offending tea, I think, is Green Bouquet, which smells of dead flowers and old age—a funeral in a cup.)

I am quite willing to believe that Kusmi makes some very nice teas, though their greens leave so much to be desired. I would much rather have a pure, high quality leaf whose complexities naturally emulate the flavors and aromas that Kusmi achieves with additional, and unnecessary, ingredients.