Pistachio Ice Cream

This is so good! Dry it indeed smells like cream and pistachio. Brewed it’s a lovely creamy pale green, and it smells and tastes like its namesake (and pistachios are my favorite nut!). I’ve been having a hard time tasting the nuances in tea the past week or so—hence my lack of logging—I think because I’m getting over a really bad bout of spring allergies that makes everything taste salty and vaguely snot-like (I know, ewww). But this shines through anyhow. Butiki’s flavored greens and whites are in a class of their own.

Yum. Sample sipdown from Butiki! This one smells absolutely amazing. Dry, it smells like sweet, rich ice cream with a hint of nuttiness/pistachio. I seriously have never wanted to eat tea so bad before.
Once brewed, it smells more like pistachio (grassy, nutty, sweet), with the ice cream (creamy, buttery, sweet) notes in the background. Didn’t add sugar to this one because I can tell I’m not going to need it for my tastes.
Now onto the taste:
Interesting, and in a very good way! The pistachio is the most noticable, with the ice cream notes and creaminess lingering at the end of the sip. The pistachio lends this cuppa a sweet, nutty, and slightly grassy flavor, while the cream balances this out and adds a bit of smoothness/sweetness to the brew. I’ve never had a tea flavored like pistachio before, but this one has to be at the top of the list. The pistachio flavor is really well done (it’s practically like drinking the nut!). The sweetness of the brew isn’t cloying. A really nice flavored tea!

This is pistachio ice cream. It’s creamy and nutty and delicious. I’m always impressed by how Butiki flavours taste exactly as they are named.

This tea was also a gift from A.C and I don’t now what to say. The scent of this tea is nuts, but at first I couldn’t smell pistachio. I smelled a scent of CHESTNUTS surprisingly. How. Don’t ask, I have no clue, maybe because I like chestnuts so much.

While drinking it, the pistachio came through. I liked it but I need some more sips of this one. To be continued…

Not sure I’m quite enjoying this as much as I would have had it been fresh. I’m not getting much pistachio, mostly just green tea with a hint of…something. It’s a decent green tea though, grassy but mild, the way I like it. I just need to power through all this old tea in order to actually buy some new stuff.

Sipdown! The rest of this is being packaged up and sent off to Inkling, so I’m having one last cup before it goes. I do enjoy this one quite a bit – Mao Jian is my favourite green tea by a long shot, I adore pistachios, and they work really well together – but it’s never reached that next level ‘wow’ factor for me. Inkling described this to me as an all-time favourite, so I know she’s going to appreciate it so much more than I did, and I’m happy it’s going to spend its remaining days in a loving home.

205/399

Could have sworn that I had a tasting note for this one. This is one of the teas that has been in my cupboard for too long, so I’m making efforts to drink all of it down before new orders come in. It’s a pleasant enough green tea. Light, mellow, and vegetal without being overly grassy. The tea base is slightly buttery. The flavors of gently roasted nuts and cream are light and accompany the natural flavors of the tea nicely. There’s vanilla at the end of every sip. It tastes more like whipped cream than ice cream. Perhaps because ice cream is a heavy, dairy/buttermilk flavor, and whipped cream is more light and airy.

I’ll get through the rest of this bag because it’s blended very nicely, but it’s definitely not something I’ll crave. (Green tea. Eh.)

Cooking TTB

The creamy-nutty goodness of this tea is crazy! And to boot- its green tea. . my fav! I really don’t know what more I can add to what everybody else has said about this tea. I’m so glad I was able to try it.

I’m not usually a green tea drinker, so for me a 75 for a green is a pretty good rating. I had this over thanksgiving weekend, and decided to really drive home the pistachio taste by eating this with a bowl of pistachios, I know overkill right? In a way I thought that eating them together almost hid the pistachio flavor of the tea allowing a sweetness to come through. Maybe it was becasue the actaul pistachios were so strong that they were ‘cancelled out’ in the tea? I didn’t necessarily get an ‘ice cream’ taste from this, but there was a richness to the mouthfeel that gave it more body than regular green tea. Overall I would recommend this tea to green tea lovers, but the flavors were a little delicate for me to appreciate fully. Will try again with sugar and possibly milk to bring out the creaminess more.

Oh boy. This is weird.

I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it. I’m not actually quite sure how I feel about it. It threw me way off, that’s for sure. It smells and tastes very green and vegetal. I can’t place which vegetable I’m tasting. I do get some of the nuttiness at the end of the sip, but I wish there were more of it. I don’t get creamy ice cream at all. I tried sweetening with honey (because that was all I had at the moment) and didn’t find it to be any more creamy or pistachio-y, unfortunately.

I’ll try this with some rock sugar and maybe even a bit of almond milk to see if I can coax the ice cream part out. I feel like that might help. I’ll reserve my rating for later after I’ve tinkered with the preparation a bit. So glad I got to try it after hearing so much about it, though!