Coconut green

(backlog from 5/29/14)

The sencha base of Zen Tea Coconut Green is very neutral—not at all vegetal. The cloudy gold liquor has a very strong coconut aroma and taste. There are literal chunks of coconut amidst the dried leaves, but there must be some coconut essence as well.

This coconut green tastes different from Harney & Sons Bangkok Blend (aka Green Tea with Thai flavors), not only because the base tea is different (sencha rather than bancha), but also because there is neither lemon grass nor vanilla here.

Coconut, all coconut! For coconut nuts only!

second infusion: coconut flavor still going strong!

(Blazing New Rating #9)

I love coconut, and I love green tea. So I knew this would be good. And it sure is! Kind of creamy and a vegetal, and very coconutty. I just want to make a giant pitcher of this and dive in. I finished my cup much too fast. I need to try it iced!

I had this tea a few days ago when I couldn’t quite log it (or even write it down), so my impressions are somewhat hazed and dazed.

The tea arrived to me among others in a mystery pack I got from MissB. Thank you, MissB, for including it :)

I love coconut in everything (my husband just recently brewed a lime & coconut belgian wit beer… It’s not ready yet but it’s going to be AWESOME!) and I absolutely loved the smell of this one. The taste disappointed me a little, however, since the base tea turned out to be a rather pungent sencha. It turns out, the more and more tea I drink, that I am not so huge on sencha. I can see myself craving this seaweedy flavor from time to time, but when I think yummy green, I think dragonwell, gunpowder, or some other Chinese green. So… yeah, the sencha was pretty strong and it spoiled coconut for me a bit. I also detected some matcha bitterness in it. It could’ve been that some of the sencha powdered up a bit and stuck to the coconut pieces and then imitated matcha.

It’s a pretty unique tea, I will definitely have more of it, too. Perhaps I will like it more next time :)

I got a couple of coconut teas from MissB in our Tea and Yarn swap, and this is one of them! I love coconut pouchongs so I am interested to try out some coconut greens.

This is certainly extremely coconutty! Sweet, creamy, and yet still light and fresh. I guess coconut works with green tea for me! The combo of coconut and green tea can result in a kind of fruity note as well, and I’m getting that a bit here. Definitely a tasty tea. Thanks MissB!

Argh I oversteeped it. It was still nicely sweet with the coconut, but the green was sad and unhappy.

We have this weird thing happening in the lab where the hotter the external temperature of the building, the more the A/C blasts inside. This is pretty OK for the main areas/cubes, but in the labs where we should be at 19-25*C it’s been a chilly 17-18*C at times. For the moment I’ve been bringing both cold and hot tea with me everyday.

So a tsp of this for a bullet thermos worked out well last time, but I kept getting coconut bits stuck in the top. This time I put maybe 1.5 tsp into a cup travel thermos with a few cubes of ice and 195*C water on top. It was still good at 3 hrs. At 4 hrs it was a bit oversteeped, and because the weather was so miserably hot today I didn’t finish it and it was ridiculously oversteeped by the time I brought it home from work. Lesson to be learned: don’t thermos steep for more than 3 hrs?

I’ve really enjoyed coconut green teas in the past and this one is pretty tasty as well. I’m surprised by how smooth and polite the green tea is – it sits nicely in the background and exists solely to provide a comfortable base for the oily, savoury coconut notes.

If you’re really interested in your green teas tasting grassy and vegetal and green then this may not be the tea for you…but if you just want a coconut cup of deliciousness that’ll linger in your mouth long after each sip, well, this one is perfect.

Tasty, wonderful and I’d happily drink it again.