Ramune

Tea: Ramune 8514
Vendor: Lupicia USA
Vendor Description: Green tea with Japanese lemon soda "Ramune" flavor. "Konpeito" (stellar-shaped sugar candy) is blended to give a nostalgic feeling. Try first as iced tea.

Ramune, that very interesting flavored soda from Japan. Unique in it's method of sealing, giving it a nickname of being "that marble drink". I would have to say that when I saw this tea I was very intrigued. What made me even more intrigued was the presence of the "Konpeito", small sugar star crystals that make for a very interesting form of candy.

Leaf: When I first opened the package I was greeted with a very sweet pear like aroma. The leaf had a very dry matte appearance to it, with a slight yellowish green hue to it. This was a bit distant from the very green appearance of the regular senchas I had been drinking recently. The small candies interspersed throughout the tea gave a nice color appearance, but made me leery of a green tea with sugar in the mix.

1st Infusion: This tea is most obviously sweet. The sweetness quickly rises up in the flavor from the beginning and gets progressively stronger. The sweetness has a fruity flavor to it, but it fails to remind me of the taste of ramune. The sugar helps to give the tea some body, but is not a very full bodied tea. The sweetness is paired well with the flavor of the tea, but it makes it a bit difficult to discern the actual taste of the tea.

2nd Infusion: I didn't have much expectation for this infusion as I imagined most of the sugar would have been washed out with the first infusion. The flavor itself was slightly less fruity and as expected the sweetness was gone.

Rating: 3/10

Conclusion: This tea was really only good for one infusion, and at that the first infusion wasn't that good. It failed to live up to its name. The tea flavor came out of the leaves very quickly preventing even regular tea flavored infusions to follow.