Strawberry Justice

Sad sipdown :(

Talking about this with Courtney made me want a cup. Unfortunately, there was not as much left as I thought and so my cup used up all the leaf. Now it is gone and I already miss it delicious strawberry milkshake flavor. At least I still have my strawberries and cream matcha to hold me over until I can get more.

A tasty tea with a kickass name. STRAWBERRY. JUSTICE.

Movie proposal:

Strawberry Shortcake grows up and moves to some grungy post-apocalyptic city (Baltimore?). She sees tragedy befall the good people around her, and has to transform herself. She has to become something better. FOR THE GOOD OF THE WORLD.

So Strawberry Justice is born. She trades in her whisk for tranq darts and handcuffs. Her Mary Janes become combat boots. She blends into the shadows at night and runs a soup kitchen with delicious desserts during the day.

If they can make a Tetris movie, they can make this movie.

Oh, and the tea’s wonderful.

This tea has a very nice ripe to over ripe strawberry taste, with a touch of cream. Simple and well balanced flavouring. As others have noted it could use a different base. After 3 minutes at about 93°C the base is a little bitter, and vegetal. It has a slight astringency to it. It could be corrected with a touch of sugar but I dislike adding sugar to my teas. As it stands, the tannins and mild astringency in the base subtract from the cream in the flavouring. A sweeter fruitier base might have complimented the delicious flavouring more.

As it cools the strawberry scent and taste intensify. I like it because in this tea the strawberry flavour is allowed to shine instead of being drowned in sweet vanilla cream notes as is often done in this style of tea. With some tweaks this tea could really shine!

Thanks for the example Dexter I’ve enjoyed them all so far!

SIGH. This is the strawberry tea I’ve been looking for.

Only it’s not. Because no black tea should require 185F water and a less than 2 minute steep to be drinkable.

So. Amazing flavour, terrible base. I guess I’ll keep looking.

Backlog from this morning. Thanks are owed to courtney, who sent me this sample!

Honestly, I would have written a review for this sooner, only I just wasn’t feeling inspired to write. There isn’t anything wrong with this tea; it’s a light combination of a creamy strawberry flavour and a thin black tea, and not much else. It tastes good, but compared with ruby pie (my gold standard for strawberry tea), it just didn’t measure up.

Thanks again, Courtney! I still have enough left for another cup, and certainly enjoyed it enough to keep it in my sipdown pile :)

Sipdown (190/194)!

From VariaTEA. I know she’s a fan so I was really hoping to like this one but I’m finding myself kind of fighting to finish off the cup. It smelled really yummy too, so that just kind of adds to the disappointment.

I’m getting a lot of bitterness in the cup and it’s really hard to push through it, though when I do I get fleeting notes of strawberry. The one redeeming quality is that the bitterness doesn’t hang around in the aftertaste but there is a faint vanilla creaminess sort of like a Campino that does linger and that makes fighting through the cup at least somewhat worth it.

Oh well; one less in my cupboard and I’m thankful to VariaTEA for sharing and for the chance to try something I likely wouldn’t not have picked out for myself.

EDIT: Hmm, I seem to be the only one to have experienced such extreme bitterness. I’m confidant I didn’t oversteep though – I was very diligent about the time after how long I let Checkmate sit unattended today…

This smells more like Strawberry than it tastes. Nice black base with just a hint of strawberry. I wanted more based on the scent of the dry leaf.
This was just ok for me. There are other HI teas that I prefer.

And we have another glorious sip down. Good stuff, but not 50g-worthy. I’m coming to the end of my HI samples and so far, it seems like the cacao teas are the only ones I’d repurchase.

I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I don’t usually like flavoured black teas. It has pieces of strawberry in it. The strawberry taste was nice and strong, plus a smoothness from the vanilla. A milder tea than a straight black, but nice even with a bit of milk in the evening.