Tried this in bag form at a Starbucks-supplied bookstore cafe downtown. I was on my way elsewhere, but luckily the campus has lots of structures/seats/trash cans scattered around this particular area, so I was able to stop after two minutes or so of walking and dispose of the tea bag without too much problem. (I didn’t want this to get bitter!) As it turns out, it does have some bitterness on first taste, which I’m attributing to the too-hot water. It was “too hot for your hands even with the java jacket on the cup” hot. The smell as it’s brewing is classic fresh grassy green, with a curious sweet honey-like note. On tasting (once it cooled off sufficiently), no honey is in evidence, but the aforementioned bitterness clears off quickly and the rest is full-bodied and vegetal. Perhaps a little bit of a roasted taste, but not much. Other people have mentioned a spinach flavor; I can totally taste that now that I read it. If this is Chinese green tea, then that’s what I like, not Japanese, though there seem to be many more kinds of Japanese green tea than Chinese, and I’ve only tried a few.
If I were up to having caffeine every day, I might buy a box (or a tin—others seem to prefer it in loose form), but my low caffeine tolerance won’t let me adopt this one for my daily tea ritual. So I’ll save my box-sized purchases for low- or no-caffeine items, and I’ll savor this one occasionally at Starbucks. (Or maybe I’ll just buy a tea bag from them and bring it home so I can control the water temperature!)
