Green Tea - They may be healthy but!

We had the dubious pleasure of tasting our green tea offering yesterday. I profess at the start of this blog of not being a great fan of straight green tea, however I know there are a lot of you out there who love the stuff, and the Chinese and Japanese having been producing it for centuries, so it's probably me.

Of course Green tea has become known in the west for its health giving properties, it helps protect against Cancer, high cholesterol levels and many other nasties found in our society today. It does however contain caffeine, a fact not always that well known.

First of all a brief resume of why green tea is green and not black.

The tea is what is known as "unfermented tea". To stop the fermentation process, the tea has to be what is termed "fixed". This is done by steaming the leaves for a very short period of time. This has the effect of killing the enzymes that cause the oxidization process to take place. The result is that the chlorophyll still remains in the leaves and is why green tea is green.

Next the tea is kneaded, then dried for around ten hours during which time it is constantly turned and finally rolled according to the grade required. It never ceases to amaze me how much effort is expended in producing this simple beverage, and also for such little reward.

I start with our China Gunpowder Green Tea. It is so called because it is rolled into small balls, which is what (so I'm told) old fashioned gunpowder looks like.

From out tasting session, the amount of tea you use and length of time you brew it for are very critical in ones overall enjoyment.

We experimented first using a regular amount of tea and brewing for about 4 minutes. This we found was totally excessive. It led to a powerful pungent taste and smell, almost undrinkable. The infusion itself looked quite muddy.

The next thing we did was to pour away the liquid and reinfuse the leaves with freshly boiled water, this gave us a much improved brew. A much clearer infusion and quite palletable.

Finally we used a much smaller quantity of leaves, and infused for only a couple of minutes, what a difference. Although I have to say I don't find the taste of green tea particularly pleasant, flavoured with a slice of lemon, or Egyptian mint does help in its enjoyment.

The next tea we tasted was our Young Hyson offering. As suggested by its name it is made from young to medium leaves. Visually the leaves are short and fine and slightly twisted.

There are many types of Young Hyson, we carry the Chun Mee variety.

When infused this tea has a bright clear green liquor. Having learnt from our previous tasting experience, we kept the quantity of leaves down as well as the infusion time.

It still produced a pungent brew, however I felt that overall it was a much smoother and more pleasant taste than the Gunpowder. (I now see Gunpowder sales plummeting! - sorry, please don't be too hasty in your judgement!)

If you, like me aren't really a green tea drinker, but feel the need to try something cleansing, I would suggest trying our Lemon Sencha green tea. The lemon has a wonderful fragrance and is delivered into the cup. I find this combination of flavours much more enjoyable, however do take on board my comments above about the issues of quantity of tea used and the time needed for infusion.