Uji no tsuyu

Maybe I steeped this all wrong or maybe it was old, but I found it very unpleasant as did my roommate.

I’ll admit this is way past its expiry, so I decided it was a great candidate for my tea soup experiment tonight. Steeped this at 3x strength and added rice, pork, mushrooms for flavour, and broccoli to make a soup. It turned out a bit on the light side still, so maybe next time I should use a heartier green tea.

Sipdown (145/153)!

Welcome sipdown. This is one tea I definitely don’t need taking up cupboard space.

Anyway, I “flash” cold brewed this (three hours) after learning last time that this one gets really awful really quickly. And I mean really awful. But this time around it was drinkable, even if it definitely WAS NOT good. Basically it tasted like really, really, REALLY low quality coffee grounds.

I’m thinking I’m just not a “Roasted Barley Tea” kinda girl.

So this one came way of MissB about half a year ago in the 12 Days of Christmas exchange. At the time I held off on making it because I was intimidated by the quantity you have to make at one time for a bag of this. But yesterday I just sorta went “nope, fuck it” and set one of the bags up to cold brew overnight.

What a mistake that was.

After an eleven hour steep this was the same intense dark brown colour as Rootbeer or Coke, but without the fun bubbles and carbonation. I feel like it was at that point I knew I had made a terrible mistake. I really did make an effort to drink and like this one, but honestly all I got from it was the taste of really, really burnt toast. Like, black charcoal toast.

By some miracle I convinced Bobbi to try some at work and she made the biggest face I’ve ever seen her make in regard to any tea I’ve had her try. She was maybe a little nicer about describing it though; she called it “burnt coffee”. Either way, we agree it tastes very burnt.

I have one more pouch of this left – I will probably cold brew it just to get rid of it (I debated passing it on to VariaTEA but I really feel like she would not enjoy it) but with a significantly shorter brew time.

Ew.

Love love love this tea. There’s something about roasted rice green tea that’s comforting and uplifting at the same time. The aroma of Japan.