30 Tasting Notes
This makes an excellent iced tea. I find many fruit teas to be overly sweet or artificial tasting, but this one is very nicely balanced. “Black tea” is still the strongest flavor, but there’s enough of a tropical fruit note that it’s distinguished from unflavored tea.
Flavors: Mango, Passion Fruits, Tea, Tropical
I love Genmai-cha, but this is not my favorite version of the tea. I find it quite watery, requiring a lot of extra tea to get any flavor in my cup at all. It also doesn’t have much of that lovely “popcorn” genmai-cha scent. On the other hand, it’s a nice price for quite a big bag of loose leaf tea, and it doesn’t taste bad or off.
Flavors: Grass, Nutty, Toast, Toasted Rice
A good chai, more authentic than many of those sold in the US. However, you need to be careful with steeping it, as it’s easy to end up with a drink that’s excessively astringent. I recommended using only a simmer, rather than the full boil on the package directions.
Flavors: Cinnamon, Clove, Ginger
Mmm, I just love this tea so much. It is the pure epitome of green tea. It’s creamy and smooth, and sooo frothy if you whisk it. It tastes of rich summer grass, but with a sweet tang that renders sugar or milk redundant. It’s expensive, yes, but you can definitely taste the difference between this and lesser matchas.
Flavors: Bamboo, Creamy, Grass, Sweet
This tea is, you know, fine. Nothing very exciting about it, but no real problems either. The cherry flavor is a bit artificial tasting, but not too much so. The tea is a perfectly pleasant, mild green. I don’t really pick up the rose flavor at all.
Flavors: Cherry
What a great idea: matcha + genmaicha! Two of my favorite teas, together at last. Unfortunately, the reality is nowhere near the fantasy. This tea is watery and bland, without any flavor at all. There’s not enough matcha in it to give flavor, and for some reason the genmaicha is completely insipid, with no toasted rice taste. Most teas I can get two cups out of, but not this tea. On the second cup, all the matcha is gone and the genmaicha isn’t enough to flavor the water on its own. That wouldn’t be too much of a problem if at least the first cup had tasted good, but alas, such is not the case. A real disappointment.
I really disliked this tea the first few times I drank it (why keep drinking it, then? Well, I’d already purchased a big bag of it). The apple flavor is very artificial, and there’s a bitter, astringent quality to it that I didn’t like at all.
On the other hand, I recently tried it as iced tea, and wow! It works really well that way. It’s crisp and refreshing, with a very subtle but nice apple flavor. Much better than the hot tea.
Flavors: Apple