Sakura Tea is a floral herbal tea via Yunomi.us, an online seller of Japanese teas and supplies.
Yunomi.us has a large selection of Japanese teas – including Japanese black teas, gyokuro, and matchas!
My package came from Japan – sweeet! I received my Sakura tea to review.
This Sakura tea is from Kyoto Obubu Tea Plantations, and is made from whole, salt-pickled sakura blossoms. This tea is also a herbal. I wanted to review this tea as I’ve never seen a straight up sakura blossom tea before!
I was warned this tea was very Japanese. Ehhh – they said that about some video games I loved like the Fire Emblem and Persona series, and I liked them!
DRY LEAF: I carefully snipped open the package. Inside is 3 sakura blossoms.
Smells like… pickles? O__O Okay, I’m kind of scared now.
The sakura blossom is covered in what appears to be a coarse salt. The out-of-the-package blossom reminds me of candy in a way.
STEEPED: I followed the Sakura Tea Steeping Instructions on yunomi’s site.
I added the blossom to a cup.
I soaked the blossom in hot water for 5 minutes.
WOW!
Freaking gorgeous! The blossom is lovely, delicate and erethral! /SWOOOON
I love taking pictures of this tea! I went a little crazy with pictures!
After that, I transferred the blossom to my tea cup, and poured 165F water over it.
Man, this tea would be amazing to serve at a wedding or tea party! Looks so gorgeous! Imagine if I filled my blooming glass tea pot with this tea? Wow! <3
TASTE: The moment of truth. Please don’t taste like pickles!
Quite a light tea – I get a cute kiss of a sweet cherry taste that is floral. The sakura tea’s flavor flutters softly towards a more savory flavor that’s a little salty. The more I sip away, the more stronger and floral this tea gets.
I gotta say, I quite like the floral here. I’m so used to jasmine and rose florals – sakura floral is on another planet. A cute planet, with fairies, white chocolate, tiny tea cups, big pink dresses and cuddly white owls. The floral is sweet and fluffy.
The soaking water – I’m apparently supposed to keep this and add it to taste. I took a sip…!@#$%^&*!!! SALTY! Not a fan of this water!
IN GENMAICHA: It was suggested in the product description that the blossoms are very good in sencha or genmaicha. I have some regular genmaicha on hand, so lets try this!
I added a soaked blossom to my genmaicha. The sakura blossom added a nice light sweet cherry floral to the genmaicha – with the light saltyness combining well with the savory toasty rice flavors.
I can see the sakura blossoms would be really tasty in Sencha! Too bad I don’t have any unflavored sencha on hand. A fabulous buttery green would go into amazing accented by this lovely sweet and slightly savory floral!
COMMENTS: Yunomi’s Sakura Tea is very interesting tea and nothing I’ve ever had before! I’ve most my life so far in Vancouver Canada, and I’ve had a couple mornings walking to school or work in the spring rain + crazy wind and eating wads of sakuras that flew into my face, and this tea tastes nothing like that!
On it’s own, this Sakura tea has great floral flavor, but I’m not too big on the savory salty taste at the end, that is too weird for my tastes, unfortunately. However, this tea was a fun experience! With the blossom added to genmaicha – very tasty!
There’s much more I can do with these blossoms. You can make a latte, or add to sake, cookies and cakes. I described this tea’s flavor to a friend and he thinks it would be really good in sake. I’m not big on alcohol so that’ll be something one of you tea peeps need to try for me and report back.
Yunomi also has a sakura blossom latte recipe, but I did not have enough blossoms in my sample to try this out.
I have another blossom left – and I’m going to save it for an interesting idea – if it turns out, I’ll post it!
My fellow tea readers – you like floral? Want an adventurous tea? How about a traditional japanese tea flavor? Want a breathtaking pink tea to impress others? Yunomi’s Sakura Tea is very lovely and one of the most fun tea experiences I’ve had!
