Honey & Pear

Tea: Honey & Pear 8500
Vendor: Lupicia USA
Price: $5.50 / 50g
Vendor Description: Flavored with juicy Japanese pear and delicately sweet honey, this tea offers a refreshing fruity taste and faint natural sweetness.

Leaf: The leaf for this tea rather surprised me. I had not read the description when I first saw this tea and was surprised when I saw that it was a roasted tea. The leaf was smaller than it would be for a pure roasted tea, i'm guessing a somewhat lower grade was used to than would be used for pure hojicha.

1st Infusion: The tea had a surprisingly dark color to it. It was dark even by a hojicha standard. This unsurprisingly paired with a heavy roasted aroma. I could detect a definite sweetness to the tea, but it was masked by the hojicha flavor. Behind this hojicha flavor is a light pear flavor. It is hard to pick out from the hojicha flavor, but it is there. I couldn't really find any particular honey flavor in this tea though.

Rating: 2/10

Conclusion: This tea was little more than a low grade hojicha. It was supposed to be a flavored tea, but I couldn't find the flavoring. If you like hojicha you're better off getting just hojicha.