Green Tea

This one remains a mystery and I have been too lazy to take and post a picture. It is in a lovely white tin with blue roses and a medallion that looks like a Blue Willow china plate.
The only English on the tin and the inner pouch is a very awkwardly spelled description (lovely “flayour” and “tenderraw” leaves) that provides no further description of its provenance. The lid of the tin was sealed with a very prominent green “2014” sticker and it came to me via a friend’s hubby who was in China very early this year.

Anyway, it steeps to the color of champagne/honeysuckle and is heavy, satiny, and tastes like sweet hay. Made a whole pot so I could enjoy a regular cuppa and try chilling a jar as well. At the rate I’m going, there may not be any left to chill.

Edit after I Googled “2014 green tea blue and white tin” (sometimes you find stuff!) It appears to be a Bi Luo Chun: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/150g-Top-Grade-biluochun-Spring-2013-green-Tea-Chinese-health-Care-Weight-loss-Bi-Luo-Chun/1412979198.html

I’ve been gathering courage for this. After dropping a certain package off at the post office I was attacked by sudden drowsiness. Initially I thought, “bad time for tasting a new tea”, but then I thought, “half unconscious is probably a pretty good time for tasting a new and intimidating tea, actually…”

For Christmas I got this great big mug with the word ‘tea’ on it (which btw isn’t very good to drink from. Too large and unwieldy), some biscuits, a tea measuring spoon and a tin with these bags in it. I can’t find anything about which brand it supposedly is or which type of green tea it supposedly is.

It looks like dust and fannings in the bag, so I’m not getting my hopes up about the quality. Also, it smells rather a lot of salt water and seaweed. Like, when I smell it, I can almost hear the seagulls. It smells like something you ought to drink on a blustery day while standing in the dunes and looking out towards the sea.

Oh look, it’s radioactive green tea again! That must mean there’s a good chance for it being a japanese green, but then it quickly turned a much less amusing sunny yellow, so now I don’t know.

It still smells pretty salt waterish, but not as blustery-day-in-the-dunes-ish. It’s more like after you’ve gone home again and you’re feeling all blown through, so you need something warm so you can feel like a person again, while waiting for dinner to be ready. The dinner bit comes from a buttery note in the aroma.

Okay, there’s no way out, so I’m taking a sip. Aaaaaaaaand we’re back on the beach. Very strong note of seaweed in the flavour here. To continue with the blustery-day-at-the-beach scenario, a fricking seagull just flew off with my dinner so now I have to make do with seaweed in a cup! And not that fancy sushi stuff either. I’m actually finding myself wondering what it would have tasted like if it had been brewed on lightly salted water instead of just tap water. (I’m not even remotely dumb enough to actually test that particular theory out, though)

All that said, I’m not actually completely disliking it, it’s just different. It’s a pleasant enough sort of taste once you’ve reconciled yourself with it. If you expected something sweet and grassy, you would be hugely unhappy with this. But if something like this was what you were expecting, it’d probably be quite nice. Having remembered to take a good sniff at the bags before steeping, I had a fairly good idea of what I was in for, so I’d probably give it around 65 or so.

This isn’t the first unknown green tea I’ve had and others might need it too, so I’ll refrain from using the rating slider.

So yesterday I was at a cafe and ordered some rose green tea, thinking that it would be the perfect choice for Valentine’s Day. There were tea leaves scooped into some sort of disposable t-sac-like pouch and dumped into some hot water. It smelled deliciously rosy, but tasted like rose-flavored soap. Oh, well, at least it kept my hands warm for a bit. I have yet to find a convenient cafe to go to that actually cares about their tea a little more than just offering it on the menu as an alternative to coffee.

G is for …. Green Tea! (Ode to Tea)
This one’s a mystery!! I have a had a couple mystery green teas gifted to me a little bit ago now that I have just stuffed away and slowly picked at. Well today’s the day I will be drinking the last of that back and all I know is that this blend is made by Harney and Sons. Love crossing empties off my list and being able to add physical items into my discard basket, this time its a baggie that use to hold some miscellaneous green tea bags!