Budou Green (Grape Green Tea)

Ugh… I was so grateful the PT went easy on me today due to the amount of muscle pain I am feeling in my arm. I got a light regime and a bit of a massage which was nice.

It is COLD outside and when I got home I just wanted something warm and satisfying. When it comes to flavored green teas, Lupicia has quite a few nice ones, there is no doubt about that. Sometimes the extra flavoring will inspire me to drink more green tea than I would otherwise and this is such a nice and juicy grape flavor. I did not think I would like this but it’s tasty!

Another randomly found Lupicia sample. I’m not sure if it qualifies as a sipdown since it’s only this one tea bag. I guess since I have so many one sample tea bags floating around, I won’t count them as sipdowns. Anywho, on to the tea!

The dry leaf aroma is grape and green tea. The brewed tea aroma is the same and yet different. It smells sweeter now. Mmm, the flavor here is lovely! It’s a nice mixture of grassy green tea with grape candy. The end of the sip is slightly bitter, but that’s counteracted nicely by the grape flavor which lingers long after the sip.

I’m content with this one. It’s definitely more enjoyable to me than Lupicia’s Happiness tea I just tried. Still, it’s probably not something I would re-stock. But I do feel confident in recommending it to others!

Well, it tastes like grapes. Big, purple grapes.
In fact, I feel like I’m in church, drinking the communion grape juice.

The tea’s pretty perfumey, and the grape flavoring tastes pretty fake. I can barely taste the sencha, save for a slight bitterness. Too bad. The tea is completely overwhelmed by whatever they used to to pump up the grape flavoring.

The brew itself is the yellow-green of green grapes, which would be thematically appropriate if the ‘sweet andmellow Kyoho grape’ that flavors this drink wasn’t a deep purple-black. But hey, props for trying!

So the other day I made a firm decision not to buy any more tea before I go travelling in just over a month. Mere hours later, Lupicia sent me a 20% discount coupon.

And that’s why I’m in the position to write this review today. Oops. g

Actually, after trying this, I don’t regret taking the plunge with a few more new teas. I’m pretty sure I’ve never tried a grape-flavoured tea before and I wasn’t completely sure what to expect. A little surprisingly, grape – or at least this sort of grape – works very well with sencha. The scent of the dry leaves is clearly, but not overpoweringly, grape-like, and this translates into a very similar aroma from the brewed tea. The liquor is, appropriately, pretty close to the colour of a green grape. The flavour is a little lacking, and I think I’d really love this tea if a little more of the grape from the aroma showed up in the drinking. Even so, I do like this one quite a lot. One caveat: I’ve been drinking this for the first time while also testing a quite heavy jasmine perfume and I’d like to revisit the aroma of this tea sans perfume sometime soon.

This is a great tea! I love grapes so of course I was drawen in immediately. It has a wonderful grape aroma that reminds me of the Japanese grape flavored candies :D The taste is just as awesome! The green tea and the sweetness of the grape blend nicely, each not overpowering the other. It’s extremely yummy XD

omg love. It tastes like tea with a hint of grape juice…in a good way

Sipdown! (25 | 38)

Another one from Lupicia. This is nice enough, but not even close to being as tasty as Jingle Bells. I think that one has some extra sparkling wine something something flavor though. The grape here is nice – juicy and sweet, like my favorite Japanese jelly pouches. I think I just don’t love it as much with a grassy green base. Luckily, I also still have Jingle Bells around here somewhere. :)

I’ve found this to be far superior iced over hot, and heavily sweetened. Last time I cold brewed it over night and it was pretty bitter, so this time around I cold brewed for just a couple hours. It’s not bitter, but it’s lacking the grape popsicle flavor I was looking for. I’ve found this tea is just a bit too finicky for the end result, so I don’t think I’ll repurchase when I run out.

When I was little I used to eat those Japanese jelly gel-cup candies. You know, the kind that they have warnings on them now, that you can choke on them if you swallow it whole. Luckily I didn’t choke on any of them. lol The two types I liked were the grape flavored ones and the other the ever-popular mango ones. This tea kind of sort of reminds me of the grape ones.

It doesn’t taste nearly as artificial as the Muscat which tasted a lot like grape soda. This one has a good sencha base, and it doesn’t have quite the candy-soda-like taste but more of a realistic grape flavor. This one and the Yamabudo (Mountain grape) oolong are both pretty good. The Muscat would be good to those who like Fanta grape soda. It has a slight bitterness to it that mimics the slip-skin part of the Budou (humongous almost black grapes). It’s super aromatic like the others but the flavor is mild.

So I finished going through all the “grape” Lupicias. I think I like the Yamabudou over the Bodou Green over the Muscat.

Random grab from the Lupicia box. Smells really grape like, and you can definitely taste it. Nice fresh grape taste, not like cough syrup or anything like that. I’m just not feeling the green tea lately I think…