Genmaicha - Green tea with rice

Sooooo, not bad for a bulk barn tea!!
I’m sufficiently awake, there was no scratchiness, and the rice is nice and toasted.
I oversteeped, so I’m forgiving the bitterness this time.
This is lovely, I will definitely have to buy more!!! but not until I try the tea dynasty version :)
I may up this later…

So lately I have been thinking about making some iced tea, but I have a dilemma. Making iced tea uses up a lot of tea leaf, and it steeps for so long that I don’t usually try to resteep it overnight. So I’d rather not waste money and quality tea all the time.
I’d looked at some cheap options and then I visited bulk barn for some other stuff when I saw this genmaicha. It is about $4.50 (?)/100g! With a price like that I could really care less how old the tea is or how big the leaves are. ;)

After purchasing some I brewed it hot at home. It didn’t taste bad, but it wasn’t really knocking my socks off either. Mostly I taste the rice, but at least there was no bitterness. (I used a gaiwan and steeped 45s, 45s, 1m)

So next naturally I scooped some into my ice tea pitcher, gave it a bit of hot water to help the rice steep, then added a lot more iced water to fill it up.

Now I’m getting to taste it for the first time (about 18 hours later). As I expected there is a nice toasted smell to the iced tea. Drinking it, the rice and green tea taste good together, and again there is no bitterness. I would like to taste more of the green tea, but knowing how cheap this is I can’t complain.

Overall a good iced tea, I will probably buy more when I run out of tea leaves.

I’ve had this in my cupboard forever, in an unsealed bag. It’s picked up a bit of fruitiness from from other teas but it’s still pretty good. Lots of toasted rice and a pretty smooth green tea. Very easy to drink.