Sweet Sakura Green Tea

Not a lot of cherry blossom flavor, which is subtle as-is. Tried this both hot and cold and it is better hot with a little honey. I thought this was just pretty lackluster overall.

Water: 8oz

Leaves: Tea Bag

Steep: 1m, 2m

Aroma: Sweet

Color: medium yellow

Taste: I’m sooo excited to have a few samples of this tea in my collection! Sakura is something I’ve been wanting to try for a little while now. The packet is made of foil with a green backdrop & a cherry blossom in the middle. The aroma of this tea was more so lightly sweet than the usual vegetable scent i get from green teas. When removing it from the pack & looking closely at the tea bag I could see tiny pink bits of the sakura flower. When brewing I followed my regular tea technique allowing the water to cool before use. In the past i never thought about letting my water cool before using a tea bag but now that I know more, the results have been better than before. I first let this tea steep for 1 minute taking my fist sip the aroma was quite faint & the tea was very lightly flavored. The great thing about this tea there was no bitterness as i experienced with other bagged greens & it felt quite smooth when drinking. Clarity wise it was great clearly being able to see the bottom of my cup. The second 2m steep was also good.Overall I found this to be a nice light green tea bag.

Special thanks to my friend for this sample

YES! This is the stuff dreams are made of. I mean that in a “the kind of dreams that come out of a tea bag” kind of way. I am so into loose teas these days that I rarely buy bagged ones. This tea is amazing though. I picked it up at a local Asian grocer on a whim. When you open up a pouch, it smells really heavily of sakura, a scent and flavor I’ve become very familiar with lately from drinking pickled sakura tea from Japan, which is made from only the cherry blossoms; they’ve been preserved in salt and plum vinegar, but you rinse the salt off before brewing. I also purchased a kanzan varietal sakura tree that I found at Lowe’s for $25 on some lucky day. I preserved the flowers it had on it and have been drinking them too.

The aroma and flavor of this sweet sakura tea is a lot stronger than actual sakura flowers, because it has an added essence/extract of sakura leaves (which have just as much of a cherry/floral taste and scent as the flowers do). The ingredients list green tea, pickled sakura flowers and leaves, and essence of sakura leaves. If you brew this too strong it has a bit of an alcohol flavor to it from the extract. If that happens, just add some more water.

The green tea flavor is light and savory. It accompanies the sakura flavor well without overpowering it. The taste and aroma of the sakura are really abundant, and if you aren’t familiar with sakura, the taste is a lot more like cherries than you might expect from a tree that doesn’t actually produce cherries, just cherry flowers. It has a hint of creamy floral tones to it that make it lighter than the taste of a cherry fruit, and some similarities with the aroma and taste of plum as well.

I will be buying this stuff for years to come… I can tell. It really fills in the gap on lazy days when I don’t want to bust out a teapot or gongfu set but want to sit down and drink some tasty tea. I would highly recommend pairing this with sushi or Japanese cuisine, or drink it as a dessert. Of course, it’s even better on its own.

Teabrat sweetly sent this succulent sample to savor (OK, enough alliteration) and it was (well, maybe just one more) superb.

I carefully stuck to low temp and short time and in return, got a sensory road trip down memory lane: I was responsible for helping pick and pit the cherries from my favorite reading tree. (What? You didn’t climb up to the first V-branch with a book you’d memorized because you’d read it so many times you could recite it?) Anyway, this tea tastes like what those fresh pitted cherries smelled like. Cherry perfection.

This morning I was walking through Japantown on an errand and decided to stop in a little shop that had Japanese tea and candy. This sounded really nice to me. It comes in a paper cube with 10 individually wrapped paper teabags. I would prefer mesh for obvious reasons but beggars can’t be choosers. :-P

I steeped this for 1.5 minutes using the green tea setting on my variable temp water kettle. This is a ryokucha tea. The aroma is slightly flowery and the tea has a mild vegetal flavor. I’d say the cherry blossom flavor is fairly subtle and natural. I don’t think I’ve had another cherry blossom tea so I’m not sure what to compare this with. It is a very pleasant cuppa however, fresh and elegant are two words that come to mind. There’s an underlying sweetness in the finish of the tea but I don’t think any sugar was added to this. I’m not disappointed I bought this and the teabags will be good for travel or at the office.

Nice discovery for a Monday…