Kotobuki

Backlog + Sipdown

Back from my vacation to Utah! Ate lots of food, hiked around Zion national park and went to the Brazilian Jiujitsu school there a couple times (to blow steam off from being stuck with my inlaw family!) Utah is HOT! like 105f / 41c oven dry hot. I thought SoCal was bad!

I took a bunch of tea with me, all friendly to boiling water. Lupicia has lots of boiling water teas, despite being greens, whites and oolongs. I had a number of good rounds of tea and finished off the bag. Very good floral with a plum flavor. The oolong seems too grassy for the combination, but resteeps toned it down.

Uggg, hopefully Oolong Owl blog stuff will resume tomorrow. I’m trying to get my crochet work in order and all post travel stuff done.

I’ve been wanting to try this one for a while. Of course, it’s also been chilling in my cupboard for a while. Today is the day to break the cycle and finally try it out!

Part of the reason I wanted to try this is because it sounds good. But the larger reason is because Lupicia sells this tea and one called Wedding in individual packets for wedding favors. Since I love tea so much, I thought it might be fun to give out tea as favors! So I bought one favor as a test run to see how nice the packaging is and to see if I even like the tea I’d give to other people.

The packaging is nice and very appropriate for a wedding. It’s a white mesh, drawstring bag with one tea bag each of the Kotobuki and Wedding, individually sealed in opaque, cream plastic with gold lettering. So far so good.

The Kotobuki dry leaves smell very plum-y. The brewed tea aroma is still plum-y but with the added scent of green oolong. Wow! This tastes very wine-like. It reminds me of a sweet red wine I had at Olive Garden. It also has lovely floral notes that I don’t think I’ve tasted before. Maybe it’s the rose. I know rose teas are common, but I haven’t tried any yet.

This is sweet and delicious and possesses no astringent qualities! I’m confident that this would make a good favor because I think it would appeal to people with varying tastes. It’s also unique enough that most people probably haven’t experienced anything like it.

I’ll keep this in my mind as a possibility. But now I have to try the Wedding tea that comes with it. And before I try that one, I think I’m going to re-steep this. It’s just too yummy to throw the bag away after one cup!

I got to sample this thanks to Amy oh! :) I somehow decided to try this first. I have an idea. We need a campaign against crappy tea bags. This is an example of what tea bags should be like. It smells wonderful, it is easy to use, and the leaf is great quality. It smells sweet, fruity, tart, and almost like a relaxing spring afternoon to me. The oolong looks perfect. I don’t think I’d be able to resist buying this if I had smelled it in the store. I’m now addicted to smelling the pouch this came in. drool face It reminds me of a Japanese plum gum I used to purchase. I’m going to do multiple steepings of this one just to see how the flavor holds up.
1st sip? ahhhhh. Total spa tea. It is very sweet and the plum comes through nicely. I have to admit that I love this tea. I think I love more teas than ones I hate. This has some really lovely undertones. It has a very vanilla base flavor coming through that I’m really enjoying. The plum itself is not too tart (I think some companies would have added hibiscus..which would have ruined it). Knowing such amazing teas out there is going to kill my budget! :p Overall I thought this was really nice. It has a slight floral-ness to it that is quite relaxing. Oh! This is also my first tea from Lupicia! Congrats Lupicia for being another temptation on my list! wink

I spent the morning editing a loooooong document and just as I stopped for a break my latest order from Lupicia turned up at the door, so I decided to take that as a hint and went to make some tea.

The flavour of this oolong is elusive. Generally, I prefer the fruit flavour of a fruit tea to be more definite, but for some reason the delicacy of this one is really working for me. The plum is mostly in the aroma, but it lurks around the edges of the taste, too, and it somehow puts me in mind of the texture of a plum – and yeah, I have no clue how it’s doing that. The tea itself is smooth and feels a little viscous in the mouth, and now it’s cooling the taste of the Taiwan oolong is really coming through.

Time for another cup, before I start on the next fifty pages of this document.

Thanks, Greenteafairy, for this tea!!

I’ve been on a plum tea kick lately. The oolong base is light and vegetal. The flavoring is more floral than fruity. It is too heavy with the sweet rose, but never gets to the point where it is cloying. I don’t get very much plum flavor. If anywhere I detect the plum in the depth of the flavor, preventing the rose from becoming to bright, but it is not independent at all.

Thanks for sharing this, Ian!

This smells like flower candy when it’s brewed. I think I have had some kind of flower flavored hard candies before, but I don’t recall the flower. I want to say violet. This tea reminds me of them, but with the bonus of oolong.

It’s nice and sweet, but I don’t get plum at all. The flowers create a way more prominent flavor. It’s still good despite that. I think I’ll make a cup of it coldbrewed for lunch tomorrow, maybe that will help bring out the plum more!

This is a naturally sweet oolong, like really sweet! The plum flavor is definitley there with a little extra something…possibly a slight floral hint? I had this hot, but I think it would be pretty amazing iced. I had family over this weekend so my time was spent trying to entertain guests and keep the house clean from the kids toys everywhere, so I am backlogging and didn’t get to really enjoy my tea during my “down time”, but it was still a nice pick me up but almost a tad too sweet for my taste… like I said, I need to try it iced (I tend to like my iced tea a bit sweet versus my hot tea) hehe. Oh and before I forget, I thought it was really cool how the tea unfurls into huge, fat tea leaves!

I am really glad that this tea came along with January’s newsletter, because it is one that I have not yet tried but have been wanting to.

It’s really quite nice. The plum flavor is mild, and the Oolong flavor is the prominent taste in the cup: buttery, sweet, and slightly vegetal. I can taste a hint of rose – but just a hint.

A really lovely flavored Oolong, I like it.

Listening to: Crass- Bloody Revolutions

So I had this tea again today, aboout a week since my initial tasting. It is a tea I went halfsies on with History Laced, but she didn’t like it and gave me the entire packet.

It was prepared by my boyfriend again. This time we were at home, so we used an infuser. He also let the kettle cool a few minutes before steeping as usual.

Wow! What a big difference. I think the water was too hot during our initial test, which made the tea a bit astringent. This time it was very smooth with fruity and floral at the same time, I am in love. I’m not sure quite what I think about it as an oolong yet; I am still learning about oolongs, but definitely a very yummy tea. I will definitely be buying this again, but I have a good 50 g of it to myself so it may be a while! <3

This is my first plum tea! Unfortunately, it’s a bit of a disappointment. It’s quite sweet and rather floral. There’s a bit of plum, but only a bit—and it’s more plum candy than fresh plum. I’m not sure I’d even have been able to identify it as plum if I hadn’t known—it’s got that generic fruit candy Lupicia flavoring going on. The oolong’s not as flavourful as it could be either, and what flavor it does have is a bit more vegetal than I’d like here. The aftertaste, though, is vibrant, natural plum. I’d love to get more of that—I think I’ll try this again with more leaf and a shorter steeping time. Maybe also as a cold steep.