Houjicha Sarsaparilla

Thanks so much to Roswell Strange and VariaTea for organizing this TTB! I had a lovely time with it, and it will be moving on to AJRimmer tomorrow. I made this hojicha from the Strange VariaTea TTB a few times and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I can say that the sarsaparilla’s root beer note is very strong when this is cold, in a nice and almost tingly way. Hot, I just really struggled to describe the flavor or even decide whether I actively liked it. Jury very much still out. I ended up keeping it because I couldn’t get the box closed without taking out another tea, so I chose this one because a) I like hojicha a lot, b) I definitely like it when it’s cold, and c) I’m intrigued by how difficult it is for me to describe it when it’s hot.

I want to like this tea very badly. It’s such a simple, straight forward blend and in theory I can see the warm, toasty notes of hojicha being quite lovely with the sweetness of sarsaparilla. However, there’s something about the hojicha itself that seems just a little bit off to me. It almost tastes like burnt bread? But not in that kind of way where a hint of intentional char actually highlights the sweet golden notes of grains. No, this kind of burnt note feels a little bit like an accident. It kind of sucks down the flavours of the hojicha in a way that makes them feels a little one dimensional, and then on top of that the sarsaparilla is adding a coating sweetness that feels cacophonous to me.

I’m not writing this one off yet because I just feel in my bones that there’s something more to this that I’m not understanding or that I haven’t “unlocked” with how I initially steeped it, but I just don’t feel quite right about this first tasting. The notes didn’t click together for me how I expected them to at all.