Strawberry Mao Feng

I have SO MUCH TEA! Not of this one in particular. Just in general. I felt like a green tea so I pulled this one out of my never ending stash. The dry leaf aroma is that sickeningly sweet strawberry flavoring that they put in medicine. Yuck. I hope it doesn’t taste like that. The brewed tea aroma is a lovely green tea marred by that medicinal strawberry again. Uh oh. I’m not so sure about this one.

Oh thank, God! Luckily, the flavor is not medicinal at all. First there’s a lovely green tea with a nice grassiness. Next the strawberry flavor comes in and it’s not bad. It is surprisingly sweet sans additions. Then the green tea comes back in to make the aftertaste light and grassy.

This is okay after all! Maybe not a favorite but I like it better as it cools. This tea definitely benefits from the high quality base. I like it much better than the Chinese sencha that Frank usually uses for his green tea blends. This is a good one. I think it would make a great iced tea. Maybe I’ll try it that way next time!

I just read the other notes and I have to add my two cents. There is nothing in here that is even slightly like banana, mouthfeel or flavor. I’m not sure why others tasted that. I’m very sensitive to banana-flavored things because I pretty much hate them (with Butiki Teas’ Hello Sweetie being the only exception). I can confidently say that this is a high quality green tea with strawberry flavoring and nothing else.

I really enjoyed this. I always steep my greens pretty low temp, so it wasn’t bitter at all and the strawberry had time to take center stage. With a little sweetener, this makes a good iced tea.

Not totally strawberry…has a mouthfeel like marshmallow root was in it. I’m still fairly undecided on this…I mean, I don’t dis-like the tea, but I’m not sure what it’s doing.

I read the other review of this tea…it is like a strawberry banana, but not the banana taste…the banana feel.

This tea is confusing the hell out of me. To the point where I had to re-read the ingredients just to make sure I maybe hadn’t overlooked something vital. But no, this tea definitely aims to taste like strawberry. What flavor am I getting? Banana. Yup, that’s right, and it’s strong enough to prompt a little Gwen Stefani-style humming under my breath as I keep sipping. Honestly, the strawberry is detectable beneath that, but it’s the same story you’d get if you had a strawberry-banana smoothie – banana steals the show. It isn’t quite an artificial banana, either, though there is a noticeable sweetness to it that might tip the nostalgia scales for some people. I have no idea if I screwed up steeping it or if the green base warped the flavor somehow. The dry leaf itself presents as very strawberry-oriented to my nose. So what exactly am I tasting? It’s by no means a bad tea, not particularly astringent or harsh on the senses, but it’s not what I expected in the least. I’ve never had a straight Mao Feng before, so it’s possible that the nuances of the flavor are lost on me. I’ll have to give this another shot to see if I can’t coax a little more strawberry out of the mix.