Strawberry Oolong

Many thanks to Stacy for this wonderful sample! I am glad that I decided to go with this sample.

Dry leaf: smells similar to strawberry green tea ice cream

This is a wonderful tea, light strawberry flavour with lots of green buttery oolong goodness.
It is slightly sweet, very smooth, and slightly floral.
The strawberry taste lingers in the aftertaste.

2nd steep: 90degrees, 4.5minutes, the strawberry flavour is a lot lighter, but the buttery oolong now shines.
The strawberry is still there, especially in the aftertaste.

The 3rd steep will have to wait until later in the day because I have lots of errands to run.

Edit: 3rd steep at 90degrees, 5minutes, still wonderfully sweet, with lots of lovely buttery oolong flavour left. This tea just goes on and on!

So Incendiare had this tea and called it minty. Since I have some left, I thought I’d see if I could analyze a tea through my cold!

The tea is almost overwhelmingly floral oolong. I have quite a few lavender petals in my tea, but the flavour isn’t coming off as strong lavender. More green garden and flowers with some – almost – lemon balm in the background.

As it cools I see where I could get strawberry from it – the leaves and hints of sweet fruit. But it isn’t at all overwhelmingly strawberry. I’ve managed to pick out other flavours of teas – H&S Fruits D’Alsace, Kusmi St. Petersburg – so I know I can taste and smell some.

As it cools even more, yes, there is more lavender. But it’s still more “English Country Garden” than POW!lavender.

I do like it the way it is (this tea is on my re-order list!), but I’m wondering if we did indeed get the lavender-y batch.

Backlogging:
Still had some left from a free sample, but this is one I’ve got on my order list for later in December. I love oolong and strawberry so it’s no surprise I love this one.
The strawberry flavor is very natural-tasting, no artificial stuff here. YUMS!

I think my mind is playing tricks on me! I decided to brew up a mug of this instead of using a gaiwan and drinking out of my pretty teacup. I don’t think it tastes as great (even though this is a GREAT tea!) this way. Still yummy and full of strawberry goodness. I’ll have to brew it the old way next time!

Four minutes seemed a bit long so I went with 3.5 min.
Either way, I think it would have worked. The strawberry is very light and refreshing.
Second steep was more of the same only a tad creamier. It all works very well with a green oolong base. Yep, this is good tea! thank you Stacy!!
The base seems to be of exceptional quality, as it lends alot to the flavouring as opposed to so many other types that just add flavouring to cover up any base notes.
I feel as if the strawberry here is more of an enhancement to the already present, natural fruity notes.
If only I could afford to stock this in my cupboard always :)

I must have had this maybe six or seven times by now but still haven’t written a note on it because it’s been mind-numbingly baffling to my taste buds.

How is this strawberry? Even the dry leaf doesn’t smell anything like this. It took me a long time to figure it out, but finally I realized that this reminds me of a mint plant my mom has in her garden. Not your usual peppermint or spearmint, but some sort of other mint plant. And it doesn’t smell like mint, but rather the distinctive green scent that the plant has.

Also, it tastes like it too. I’ve chewed on those mint leaves a couple times and they have a green-like taste to them too. This is what this tea tastes like. Every single infusion. I’ve done up to three and never have I come across a strawberry flavour. Weird, eh?

Thank you Stacy for sending me this sample!

This has some interesting little “pellets” in it, I’m not sure what those are… strawberry seeds? flower seeds?

Anyhoo this was steeped for around 3 minutes at 180F. First I tried it plain and it really has the traditional flavors of a Taiwan high mountain oolong. lightly floral, buttery and very delicate. The strawberry is mild and delicate, which I quite like. I then decided to add about 1 tsp. of turbinado sugar to see if I could make this more dessert-like. I felt like this small addition really helped bring out the strawberry flavor. Really good for an afternoon treat. ;)

I opened the ½ ounce packet and was surprised to find tightly rolled, green oolong leaves. For some reason, I thought this would be a roasted brown oolong like in Butiki’s Maple Pecan Oolong. But this is a pleasant surprise for me because I adore green oolongs. :)

The dry leaves give off a lovely strawberry aroma, and yet there doesn’t appear to be anything in the pouch except oolong leaves. I wonder how this was flavored…hmm, that remains a mystery even after tasting it. But I’m jumping ahead.

The brewed tea aroma is much like the dry leaf. The taste is a beautiful, floral, green oolong with juicy strawberry flavoring. It tastes of both strawberry fruit and strawberry seeds. Yum! It’s a wonderful flavor with a natural sweetness.

OMG, this is divine!!! It has all the wonderful characteristics of floral green oolongs that I love. But it also has one of the tastiest and truest strawberry flavors I’ve ever had. This is one yummy cup of tea! I honestly can’t do it justice with words. I feel like any time I wanted a green oolong, I could just drink this instead. It’s a perfectly balanced, perfectly flavored, natural tasting, fruity tea. I am in love! *Swoon!

This smells so beautiful steeped; very light, floral and perfumey – it took me a while to figure out what it reminded me of, but then I realized it’s those floral wreaths that are on sale from carts all over Bangkok. I get absolutely nothing resembling strawberry.

In the cup, the flavour is very subtle, but the aftertaste matches the scent perfectly. I’m enjoying this tea a whole lot, party as the base tea is a gorgeous, buttery oolong, and partly as I love those wreaths and it’s such a treat getting to drink one.

As has gotten to be the case with Butiki teas for me, the flavour isn’t what I expected, and much less present than I generally prefer; I tend to like those punchy, in-your-face Mariage Frères and Lupicia greens best.

But, as always, I’m surprised by how much I’m getting to enjoy the high-quality base teas and the clean feel of the steeped liquid. These are true artisan teas, and I feel really privileged to have a chance to try them out and expand my horizons. (Happy new year, Stacy!)

[From my Butiki order to Santa Clara, October 2013.]

Feeling mercurial; change is afoot. Or at least it feels that way right now. As Dexter3657 so helpfully pointed out to me, I seem to have gone from hating oolongs to loving them. Right now for me they’re what pu erh seems to be for many here—not an everyday unthinkingly enjoyed while a ravenous zombie-type staple tea, or even the comforting early evening sweet soothing flavored treats (still looooove those, don’t get me wrong), but when enjoyed pure, when I can carve out a chunk of me time to focus on them, completely mind-blowing. I remember looking at spots like Red Blossom and Silk Road and Yunnan Sourcing nearly a year ago and figuring it was all way over my straightforwardly-flavored-black-tea-loving head (and it was). Now I’m contemplating in a few months venturing into that wild world. Nuts. I love how there’s an approach to tea for every mindset and development and craving one can imagine.

Anyway, this vaguely connects to trying this wonderfully generous sample Stacy threw in with one of my recent orders because I found myself wanting to try it tonight for the hope of oolong taste more than the fruit flavor. Sea change! And I was not let down—this delivers that now beloved floral greenish delicately sweet oolong flavor for sure, and the strawberry flavor is light, natural, fresh, and floral; it matches the oolong profile beautifully, syncing up with it instead of competing or masking the tea. It’s not the tart supermarket berry kind at all, but the small wild floral sort of strawberry (which I vastly prefer). I enjoyed this one a lot more than I thought I would (I vaguely recall it being deemed ok but not one of Stacy’s top favorite offerings in some “recommend some Butiki” thread a while back, but I could be remembering wrong…it was one of the fruit oolongs…). Really tasty.

(Also, why do I love flowers all of the sudden?! Or at least floral fragrance naturally occurring in tea…I loathe girly perfumes but I can’t seem to get enough of light green oolongs and have even found a bunch of rose scented/flavored teas and loved them this year. And don’t even get me started on the whole “heavily perfumed French tea” craze Fauchon lit in me. Eek!)

I keep a master file of all my favorite tea vendors with lists under each one’s heading for things I’d happily restock, so when I place an order with one I can check it and be reminded if I want to throw in something else I’ve loved. The list for Butiki is, like the Harney one, getting ridiculously unwieldy. And on this goes anyway.