Happy World Milk Day! Today the prompt is “add a milk (non-dairy is fine!) to a tea.”
This is my final tea from Lupicia’s sakura line-up all the way back in 2018, when they still had a US base in California. I also like it much more than the other Lupicia sakura offerings, which waned too salty/salinic in flavor for my personal tastes due to the salt-preserves Lupicia uses on the sakura leaf. This tea, which has added strawberry flavoring, comes off sweeter and fruitier and I don’t taste the salt. I get a strawberry and sakura mochi feel, which is very pleasant! It’s probably the one sakura tea from Lupicia I’d happily restock sometime.
The only downside to it is that the base is a CTC that wanes on the strong/brisk/overly tannic side. I use a shorter steep for my black teas in general (3 minutes) and even with that, it is almost too bitey for me. I drank their other sakura teas as lattes just to combat the saltiness with the sweeter milk, but I thought this one would do well as a latte too, just because of the strength of the black base.
I prepared 12 oz. of tea to 4 oz. of vanilla almond milk (my favorite kind of non-milk to use because of its natural sweetness/creaminess and it froths nicely in my milk warmer/frother). I used extra leaf for the tea to accomodate the milk, but kept my steep to three minutes. I can still taste a bready/leafy quality from the base, but the milk does help temper that astringent bite at the end of the sip, and the strawberry and sakura flavors are still present and tasty, and perhaps even a bit more candy-like with the addition of the creamy vanilla-flavored milk.
A very satisfying latte!
Flavors: Astringent, Bread, Cocoa, Floral, Malt, Sakura, Strawberry, Sweet, Tannin