Now that I’m back to taking green tea to work with me every morning, I have a bunch of sample packets that are poised to be sipped down this next week. To ease my burden of recording sipdowns on days when I’m too rushed to do them, I opened a larger packet today. This.
The tea in the packet smells like kale chips! A salty/savory note on the one hand with a sweet green note on the other. Mixed together, I get kale chips! The dry leaves are long and spear-like, not dusty fine like a lot of sencha leaves.
Steeped, the aroma is savory and nutty. Strangely, the nut I get is closest to peanut, and there’s that hint of sweetness that makes it an almost peanut-brittle smell. It’s pale gold in color and clear.
The flavor has a hint of nuttiness, but mostly what I taste is a vegetal flavor with a slightly bitter finish. The closest I can come to naming the vegetable is spinach. I find this pretty un-grassy as Japanese green teas go. I have never been entirely sure I understood what was meant by the word umami, but I think it’s this.
I’m looking forward to drinking it again (next time not on the heels of eating orange flavored chewable vitamin C pills; who knows what that did to my taste buds).
Flavors: Kale, Peanut, Spinach, Umami