06.12.05

How to pick a good green tea

Posted in Green Tea in General at 4:04 am by site admin

So you’ve decided to try green tea. The next big question that often comes to mind is “which” green tea to select. If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog, you’ll already know that you want a first harvest (first flush) green tea. Since O-Cha.com offers many different types of green tea, we are often asked which green tea will give the maximum health benefits. There really is no straight answer for this. The fact is, most high quality green teas have comparable health benefits. However, the devil is in the details. Before considering which green tea to select, first make sure to consider the following:

  • Harvest - 1st flush, as mentioned, is always the best.
  • When was the tea packaged? Compared to other types of tea, green tea is very sensitive to shelf life. When properly packaged, green tea generally has a short shelf life of about 6 months. This can be stretched to about a year if refrigerated. We’re only talking about unopened, nitrogen filled packages. When you purchase your tea, see if you can find out when it was actually packaged at the factory. The less time, the better. Most of our teas are packaged within one week of the date they are sold. Did it spend 6 weeks in transit on a ship? How long has the tea been sitting on a shelf?

Once you’re confident that your supplier has fresh, first harvest tea, its then time to consider variety. There are really three main choices:

  • Sun Grown green teas (Sencha)
  • Shade Grown green teas (Gyokuro)
  • Powdered Green Teas (Powdered Sencha & Matcha)

For the purpose of this entry, I’ll stick to the first two as matcha has already been covered. From a health benefit point of view, they are very similar. They do vary somewhat in the amount of polyphenols, catechins, and amino acids contained in each, but the fact is - each is high in all three properties. Check out the chart of green tea properties I put together for a comparison. As you will see, it’s a “six of one, half dozen of another” type of situation. In a nutshell, you’ll want to pick the variety of green tea that suites your taste because as long as the quality and freshness is there, you’ll be covered in the health benefits area. The main difference when we get to this level of quality has to do with price and taste.

Shade grown green tea, gyokuro, has a sweeter, less astringent taste than the other green teas. Oh, they are good, but since they can be pricey and tricky to brew correctly, if you are brand new to green tea, I’m going to recommend that you start with the sun grown types. Gyokuro pricing varies widely depending on whether it was hand picked, the location it was picked, etc, and can get quite expensive. Some of the absolute best green teas are hand picked where only the top 2 or 3 leaves are taken. So if you are new, you’ll probably want to cut your teeth on a sun grown green tea like sencha, kabusecha or fukamushi cha.

Sun grown green teas - There are many types, but the basic ones are sencha, kabuscha, and fukamush cha. Any one of these would be a great green tea to start off with. When shopping, remember that price differences will depend on quality.

Like wine tasting, you can develop your ability to judge a good green tea by simply trying many of them, comparing colors, aromas, tastes. By following these tips, hopefully your first try at green tea will not be a bitter disappointment.

06.04.05

Gyokuro Green Tea – What It Is And How To Brew It

Posted in Green Tea in General, Brewing Green Tea at 3:17 pm by site admin

If you consider yourself an “advanced” green tea connoisseur, perhaps you may have considered or have even tried brewing gyokuro. Since good gyokuro is expensive, it’s common for people to try it once, not find it to their liking, and then give up on it. This is often a result of an enthusiast brewing it like they brew their normal sencha green tea. Once you have tried a good gyokuro brewed correctly, however, you will understand what a great green tea it actually is.

In case you are not aware, gyokuro is shade grown green tea. About 3 weeks before the anticipated harvest date, the tea bushes are covered under 90% shade. This is accomplished by building an enclosure around the plants using bamboo poles covered with rice straw. All of this of course means extra labor, which has a lot to do with why gyokuro is so expensive in the first place. Obviously, there is a reason why growers go to all of this trouble – gyokuro is delicious!

Probably the most important aspect of brewing gyokuro is temperature. Gyokuro needs to be brewed at a lower temperature than other green teas, about 155 Fahrenheit (68 Celsius.) Since water boils at 212F, obviously the temperature needs to be reduced somehow. Even when cooled, however, one can’t really start the process with water that is 155F for numerous reasons. If one pours 155F water into a teapot that has been sitting at room temperature, expect that the water will no longer remain at 155F, but will instead drop about 15 degrees. Great, now we’re at 140F – too cool for brewing. If in turn one pours that tea into two teacups sitting at room temperature, expect another 15 degree temperature drop. Now we’re at 125 F, and two cold, boring cups of improperly brewed gyokuro. So the devil is in the details, and to brew a good cup of gyokuro, these things need to be taken into consideration.

To brew a good cup of gyokuro, you will need to use more tea. Where you normally can get away with a teaspoon of loose leaf sencha in an 8 ounce teapot, for gyokuro you will need instead about 1 tablespoons of tea per person, and about 5 or 6 ounces of water for each person served.

One other aspect of brewing gyokuro that is often overlooked is the teapot that one brews it in. Gyokuro, like other green teas, is compact. That means it needs a lot of room to expand when it’s brewed. You will never be able to brew good gyokuro (or really, any other good green tea) in a paper filter, tea ball, or anything ridiculous like that. The preferred teapot here would be the ceramic Japanese type which has a stainless steel screen inside as a filter. I’m not talking about the kind where a steel infuser cup sits inside the lid, but instead where the screen actually is butted up against the inside of the teapot. This gives the tea plenty of room to expand. Additionally, Japanese teapots are usually just the right size for the job. This is not to say you can’t use other types of teapots. Western teapots and the like can be used as long as you know what you are doing and take all of the above into consideration.

To get down to brewing, I think I can best sum this up by saying the traditional Japanese way of brewing their green tea is also probably the best way to do it, no surprises there. So let’s make two cups of gyokuro green tea. You will need three empty teacups, your teapot, and a good gyokuro. Start off by boiling your water in a kettle. When the water “just” starts to boil, immediately turn off the heat and allow the water to cool on it’s own for a few minutes. Pour your hot water directly into the empty teapot, filling it, and allowing the teapot to sit a minute or so and warm up. This not only warms the teapot, it also cools the water some. Next, pour the hot water from the teapot into two of the three cold teacups, and then empty the remaining water from the teapot. At this stage we now have a warm teapot, two teacups with hot water in them, and a cold, still empty third teacup. More likely than not, the hot water in those two teacups is still a bit too hot for gyokuro, so what you will want to do is pass back and forth the water between the three teacups, warming the cups and cooling off the water. You usually only have to do this once or twice. This also has the effect of adding oxygen to the water and will improve the taste of the finished product. All of this does take a little practice to get the hang of, but you’ll soon be able to sense when you have cooled the water enough. Put about one and a half tablespoons of loose leaf gyokuro into the warm teapot, and pour the hot water from the two filled teacups directly into the teapot. Brew for 2 to 3 minutes, not disturbing the teapot. Lastly, pour from the teapot back into the warm teacups, draining all of the tea to the very last drop. If you’ve done that correctly and were patient, you should have one of the finest cups of green tea you’ve ever tasted. For subsequent infusions, simply re-brew for 30 seconds. It’s normal for the second infusion to have a more “green” color than the first. Enjoy your superior cup of green tea!