Creha Tea: Flavored Black Tea, Sakura

The dry leaves smell of muffins and marshmallows. The wet leaves give a nice cherry fragrance to the room. The first couple steeps had little to offer. However it opened up in a big way on the 3rd. Its a very pleasant natural sweetness. Reminds me a lot of marshmallows and baked goods. The black tea taste doesn’t come through much at all. Its all strong sakura flavor here. My brother said it got so strong after a bit it turned his stomach. That didn’t happen to me but something to note.

I do recommend this tea. Nothing else like it.

I recently tried a sakura-flavored green tea, so I decided to sample a sakura-flavored black tea this morning! (What can I say, the spring-like weather has me in the mood, even if we don’t have cherry trees in my area). This tea is made by the Japanese company Creha Tea, but I ordered it through Yunomi.

The first thing to note with this tea is it does use some flavoring, unlike the green tea I sampled recently, so this tea has a much more prominent flavor — having a black tea base, I don’t think there would be any flavor at all without it, given how subtle the sakura taste was on its own when I tasted it in the green tea. But this does give the tea a far more pronounced cherry flavor rather than a subtle floral touch; I imagine for some that will be far more to their liking, and for others, it may be far more disappointing.

The base of the tea is not an extremely strong black, so it isn’t overwhelming to the flavor. More of light-to-medium brew that takes the flavor well, and it’s very smooth. I find no astringencies with the tea, a light maltiness, and a very subtle leafy or woody note. It’s very pleasant. The finish of the sip has this sweet cherry taste, but it isn’t like the cherry flavoring i often find in American blends, that is syrupy, strong, and overbearing. This has a light delicateness to it that really does make me think of cherry-flavored mochi or marshmallows — something soft, fluffy, and sweet, but not overly strong with the flavor. The tea base itself shines through a lot on this, with a softer and more rounded sweet hint of cherry at the end of the sip. It certainly doesn’t have that off-putting “cough-syrup” taste like many cherry teas, and would be a good choice for someone looking for a tea with a subtle and sweet cherry flavor lacking those nasty overbearing medicinal notes.

This is a very tasty tea with little bitterness or astringency. The sakura cherry flavor profile is quite nice, if a little muted. I added sugar to this one and it really brings out the flavors nicely. I see Yunomi is now out of stock on this item. I would definitely buy this one again, I only bought 50g of it. It came in a can marked only in Japanese. There was a plastic bag around the can, that was marked. I wrote on the bottom of the can to identify it in the future. While the Japanese aren’t known for their black teas I have found the black teas I get from them to be excellent.

I brewed this once in a 16oz Teavana Glass Perfect Tea Maker/Gravity Steeper with 3 tsp leaf and 190 degree water for 3 mini.