Tea #2 from teaswap with Mastress Alita.
I’ve never brewed sencha, so I have no idea what I’m doing. Lupicia says 2.5-3 grams, boiling water, 1.5-2 minutes. Boiling water seemed like an unfair treatment to green tea, so I’m a Woman Going My Own Way. Whole 6 gram sample in uncovered 150mL glass gaiwan, 170F, 1min.
Dry leaf smells floral, cherry, with an earthy basic (as opposed to acidic) pungency and finally some grass. Lots of activity going on in the gaiwan. Saponins, bunch of leaves sitting on the bottom and a layer floating on top with lots of movement of leaf up and down in between. Never seen such a stratified brew. Almost neon green-yellow in color and cloudy with a chance of butt. Smells like some weird medicinal red/orange/green butt. Oh, it smells like chewable vitamins and butt. HA! Tastes repulsive going across my tongue. Weird lightly salty thickslick with soapy floral cherry green butt. Persistent aftertaste. The smell wafting from the empty glass a foot away makes my stomach retch. What tea got on my hands from pouring through a strainer made my fingers smell like butt. Smell my finger!
This is literally the first tea ever that has left me incapable of doing a second steep.
I’m glad I got to try something so offensive! Gotta set the low bar somewhere.
Thanks Mastress Alita :)
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Heh, sakura leaves is one of my favorites (with jasmine and chamomile being my meh florals) though they get the “seasonal” treatment so I always have to stock up around March-ish. It is a strong floral cherry-ish flavor, but the stuff passing as sakura tea here in America always has that artificial cherry flavor added with rose petals instead of actual sakura petals or leaves that really does taste just like cough syrup to me; I never get that from actual sakura petals or leaves. I hardly ever do gong fu but I think even then I’d be hesitant to go very leaf heavy on greens; seems these days I go with what the OCTea app recommends for the water amount and it turns out aight. Good call on the water temp, though. Boiling?! I wonder if something got lost in translation on Lupicia’s part, because that’s just shear craziness!
I hardly ever gong fu green tea but I’ll do white and yellow. For some reason I decided to go with an uncovered gaiwan today. I could definitely taste a difference between cherry flavored green tea and this, and granted it’s a pickled leaf and not cherry blossom, it still tasted like natural cherry blossom.
If I ever find myself in San Jose in the spring, I’ll stop by Lupicia and ask them for a sample tasting if they do that.
Ya, I think I tried gong fu of a green tea once and my leaf to water ratio ended up too high and it was soooo bitter… I had to dump the whole thing, and start over with half the leaf. Felt like such a waste at that point. I’ve only gone western since then! I’m sure I’ll make another attempt at some point, it’s lack of time that keeps me from getting more practice at gong fu more than anything, since the sessions take so long (and I’m typically just not down to drink that much tea in a sitting). I do have a 50ml gaiwan coming, which I’m hoping will help at least with the “too much tea” problem… I’m only ever preparing tea just for myself, so I only need a little amount per infusion if I’m going to be going for 5-10 steeps…
I’m not sure if Lupicia does in-store sampling since the storefront in Mitsuwa appears a bit small on Google/Yelp (I haven’t had a chance to visit them in person yet, though I think my BFF has, I’ll have to ask him), but I bet anything they probably would offer sampler take home teabags around then if asked, because I always get a free teabag of one of their teas included in any order I place with them. Those teas seem to come out right at the beginning of March, and they also offer the sakura leaves mixed with black tea and houjicha, too.
175 for 1:30 works for sencha for me. I use the Breville for green tea. It does its thing while I’m doing other things in the morning. Then I transfer to the Timolino and run off to work. Seems to work well.
Mastress Alita: I don’t know why I dumped all 6 grams in when I vaguely remember reading about some bad experience you had with high leaf to water ratio.
Morgana : Breville, as in a French press?
Breville as in the 1.0 version of this: https://www.breville.com/us/en/products/tea/btm800.html
I got it as a Mother’s Day present a number of years ago and I adore it.
Heh, sakura leaves is one of my favorites (with jasmine and chamomile being my meh florals) though they get the “seasonal” treatment so I always have to stock up around March-ish. It is a strong floral cherry-ish flavor, but the stuff passing as sakura tea here in America always has that artificial cherry flavor added with rose petals instead of actual sakura petals or leaves that really does taste just like cough syrup to me; I never get that from actual sakura petals or leaves. I hardly ever do gong fu but I think even then I’d be hesitant to go very leaf heavy on greens; seems these days I go with what the OCTea app recommends for the water amount and it turns out aight. Good call on the water temp, though. Boiling?! I wonder if something got lost in translation on Lupicia’s part, because that’s just shear craziness!
I hardly ever gong fu green tea but I’ll do white and yellow. For some reason I decided to go with an uncovered gaiwan today. I could definitely taste a difference between cherry flavored green tea and this, and granted it’s a pickled leaf and not cherry blossom, it still tasted like natural cherry blossom.
If I ever find myself in San Jose in the spring, I’ll stop by Lupicia and ask them for a sample tasting if they do that.
Ya, I think I tried gong fu of a green tea once and my leaf to water ratio ended up too high and it was soooo bitter… I had to dump the whole thing, and start over with half the leaf. Felt like such a waste at that point. I’ve only gone western since then! I’m sure I’ll make another attempt at some point, it’s lack of time that keeps me from getting more practice at gong fu more than anything, since the sessions take so long (and I’m typically just not down to drink that much tea in a sitting). I do have a 50ml gaiwan coming, which I’m hoping will help at least with the “too much tea” problem… I’m only ever preparing tea just for myself, so I only need a little amount per infusion if I’m going to be going for 5-10 steeps…
I’m not sure if Lupicia does in-store sampling since the storefront in Mitsuwa appears a bit small on Google/Yelp (I haven’t had a chance to visit them in person yet, though I think my BFF has, I’ll have to ask him), but I bet anything they probably would offer sampler take home teabags around then if asked, because I always get a free teabag of one of their teas included in any order I place with them. Those teas seem to come out right at the beginning of March, and they also offer the sakura leaves mixed with black tea and houjicha, too.
175 for 1:30 works for sencha for me. I use the Breville for green tea. It does its thing while I’m doing other things in the morning. Then I transfer to the Timolino and run off to work. Seems to work well.
Mastress Alita: I don’t know why I dumped all 6 grams in when I vaguely remember reading about some bad experience you had with high leaf to water ratio.
Morgana : Breville, as in a French press?
Breville as in the 1.0 version of this: https://www.breville.com/us/en/products/tea/btm800.html
I got it as a Mother’s Day present a number of years ago and I adore it.