in cambridge, the undergraduates who filtered through minz’s apartment know that being asked to tea meant strawberry sencha and french yoghurt cake. so it was that the young historian, stopping by singapore from japan last week, brought me a gift tin of lupicia’s tochiotome green, which i finally opened up and brewed side by side with the teaxlue strawberry sencha for a comparison.

the lupicia brews a brighter, livelier cup, a very pale green-tinged yellow that dances in the mouth, a little more vegetal than i expected, a little sweet, and the strawberry is heady. the leaves are also aesthetically very pleasing, the tea leaves themselves are of far higher quality than tealuxe’s (the tealuxe leaves are always tattered and lifeless, the strawberry pieces faded, not the searing rose and forest palette of the lupicia in the tin.) also, the tealuxe brews a darker, less attractive brown-tinged gold.)

and yet… i think i still prefer the tealuxe. the lupicia tastes more forward and more synthetic — this could partly be because of the particular strawberry cultivar — the way some kinds of grapes naturally smell more like our idea of grape flavoring than fruit — more creamily candied to my nose, but also, vaughn was saying, this is a problem shared by all of lupicia’s flavoured teas — there’s always a slightly artificial smell and aftertaste. then there is also the question of body. i like that the tealuxe is feels fuller and rounder and heavier on the tongue (i could be getting old). i also think the tealuxe smells more balanced and mellow — in the lupicia the aroma of tea and strawberries are not only sharp but easily differentiated. (i think the lupicia might be better as an iced tea, where the denseness wouldn’t matter much and the aroma would be less pronounced, and the tealuxe, if iced, would be too flat.)

i also have to say that the strawberry sencha i served back in cambridge was sometimes not the stuff straight from tealuxe –- on occasion if i happened to have good quality sencha from japan i would blend that with the tealuxe so that the strawberry would be slightly downplayed and the base tea would taste more green and more full, and so that my brews came out a little livelier green in colour than the tealuxe alone would have brewed.

i wonder if this is my “personality test” tea — how to read the guests and to decide which to serve to whom at tea parties.