Tsugaru Green (Apple Green Tea)

I cold brewed this for 12 hours, although the sun went away and it is now cold and foggy in San Francisco again…

this one makes a delightful cold beverage, I think I like it even better this way than hot. At least I know what I can do now to make myself drink all this flavored green tea!

see previous notes!

I made this one cold-brewed last night for lunch today. Cold brewing is one of the only ways I still enjoy flavored greens, but I’ve still been having issues with them being too strong or grassy after only 8 hours of steeping in the fridge. This time I tried cold brewing this tea with the same leaf:water ratio I would use for hot brewing, and leaving it for 8 hours.

At first this morning when I pulled it out I was unsure; the liquid was colored lightly on the bottom but was pretty much clear on top. However, pouring it into my bottle to take to work mixed everything up and resulted in a lovely yellow-green, non-cloudy liquid. It also seems to have worked well for the taste as well; this was light and refreshing, with a crisp green apple flavor that really suited the tea. No grassiness or bitterness. I think this will be my go-to for green teas (though with black I still prefer double the amount of leaf), and expect I will be drinking down a lot of the flavored greens I have this summer.

I wasn’t going to drink this until tomorrow, but it was so appley and all-around tasty already that I couldn’t resist. Great tea for a cold steep – light, fresh, and crisp, like drinking a liquefied apple cloud. (Which, I guess, would technically be an apple rain, but nevermind.)

Perfection.

Thanks a million for the sample Amy Oh! this is a great tea!
Not something I’d want everyday, but unique enough that it stands apart from your average green fruity tea. At first sip I was reminded of sour tamarind. It has that puckery sort of green apple flavouring, with a citric acidy twist. (not in a bad way, I love sour candies!)
Most fruity green teas, I find, end up generally tasting “fruity” with very little distinction. Mind you, this is a little heavy on the flavouring. Not much green tea to be found in the first steep… but also not a “juice” tea either, like so many flavoured teas are!
Anyhow, sorry for the ramble. I am ready to drop. Been getting stuff done this week in preparation for my vacation next week. I really will need it by the time we leave on Saturday!! phew. We rented a cottage, so I fully expect to read a few books and get plenty of sleep, finally!
And… because I’m feeling silly, check out this adorable video of a dog perplexed by half a lemon. So cute! http://jezebel.com/5925001/beagle-adorably-loses-its-shit-over-a-lemon

Because my bestie is the best bestie ever in the whole world, she gave me her free sample of Lupicia tea that came in her newsletter, even though she had already given me my birthday gifts of matcha and Lupicia Chocolate and Strawberry Puerh early!

I sniffed this one and knew it was reminding me of something very specific, not just generic apples. Youngest loves apples and eats them whole….seeds, stem, and core. LOL! At first I thought this was reminding me of Honeycrisp apples, and indeed it is close. It also reminds me of the smell of super sweet apple turnovers, the kind with the crispy outer pastry dusted with sugar and cinnamon. My son says it smells like hot apple juice, and finally I settled on some kind of green apple gum that I have a very vague memory of from my childhood.

The tea really tastes excellent to me. It tastes like fresh green apple without the puckers. My son thought this would be great iced and I agree. I may have to order just for that purpose.

The green base is very smooth, not sour or astringent. It also is not hidden under the apple flavor. Noticing that the newsletter said you could use hotter water to enjoy the astringency and boldness of green tea or use cooler water for a more smooth experience, I assumed that their steeping recommendation was on the hot side. I set my Krups to 194F but then let the water sit and cool for a few minutes before steeping. I don’t ever recall seeing a teabag, especially a nice sized one like this, say to use a five ounce cup, but that is what I did. It did not make the tea too strong.

Excellent and calming.

Edited to add: second steep is lighter on the apple but really delicious. The green base gets to show off a little more now and it is really good. Probably ordering this one.

So much tea, so little time! I’ve been the lucky recipient of tons of tea samples from generous Steepsterites. In addition, the boyfriend finally gave the sign off that tea can be part of the food budget!! SQUEEEE!!!!

So of course I had to stockpile some tea (as if I needed any more)! I ordered some tea from Lupicia about two months ago when my tea stock was running low and only just now received it.

Lupicia’s customer service kept calling me to say the tea I wanted was out of stock. So, I’d pick a new one, and then get a phone call the next day that that one was out of stock too. Eventually, I just asked for my money back on the one that we couldn’t seem to replace, and they said they’d ship the rest out right away.

Then the package wasn’t delivered by Fedex and got lost in limbo in some warehouse in Maryland for another month. I FINALLY received the package last week and it was chock FULL of free tea samples!! Now I kind of feel bad that I was silently cursing them in my head for two months. They really are a great company.

Thus we are in my current predicament. Which tea to drink first? I opted for a long time favorite: this Tsugaru Green. I specifically bought these as tea bags for ease of use at the office.

The dry leaf aroma is strong, sour, green apple! It’s even more ambrosial than I remember. I can’t wait to brew this! The brewed liquor is a yellow-ish green, and the aroma is now more like tea.

And the taste? Heavenly! I get a very easy-going apple flavor with a fantastic green tea aftertaste. I wonder if they improved the quality of the base? ‘Cause this has much less green apple jolly rancher flavor and more vegetal green tea taste. The apple is calmer and more natural.

This is to die for!!! It still remains one of my favorite flavored greens, but you do have to drink it all up while it’s still fresh. Otherwise, the flavor fades fast.

Finally getting to one of my samples from CHAroma! Sorry for taking so long! (It will continue to be this way, haha.)

This is an individually-wrapped teabag, and when I opened the package, I got a wonderful aroma of crispy green apples. It reminded me a lot of Ume Vert, which is strange… I would have thought that they’d be two totally different things. The big difference though? This one actually tastes like green apple!! In fact, this is the best green apple tea that I’ve ever encountered! It could stand to be a little more tart, IMO, but… this is good. The base tea is also pretty good – very smooth and not too… “sencha-y” or generic-gross-flavoured-green-base-tasting. I also think that a bit of sweetener would really make this one tasty, as apple are meant to have some sweetness, and there isn’t any here at all. The one negative here is that I’m getting just the slightest hint of play-dough aroma/flavour just at the beginning of the sip, but that’s something I’ve begun to associate with tea age, so that may be all it is.

This is one tea that I may look at picking up at some point, because this was quite enjoyable! Thanks so much for sharing this with me, CHAroma :)

(I’m drinking the bagged version of this tea)

All of those bad things I’ve said about “flavors”? I’m not sure if it’s because it’s green tea or because it’s Lupicia, but they don’t apply to this cup (or the other Lupicia green flavored teas I’ve had). The ingredients list on this one is “green tea, flavors”. I still like it.

Their brewing instructions are also NOT BRILLIANT and say to use boiling water. Haha, NO. Also “put the lid on while brewing for better tasting tea” which I’ve never heard before. My mug does have a lid (somewhere?) but in the office I usually just take small sips until I think it’s ready. I don’t have a timer.

I’m trying to break myself of the sweetener habit, at least with the greens, because I know it’s WRONG, so there’s less apple flavor and more grass flavor than what I generally get with this tea. The first taste (and scent) is grassy green flavor and the after taste is of mild apples. The longer it brews the more the apple disappears.

Opening it up, this smells like green apple. But not like an apple. Like pretend apple. Like green apple candy. Not a huge fan of that flavoring so things aren’t looking good. It smells better in my cup, though. Still like candy green apple but with a little real green apple juicy to it.

The taste is not happy making. It’s like green apple schnapps but without the sweetness and the alcohol that makes it worthwhile. It’s not horrible but I’m not a fan. Not only is it green apple flavored (a mark against it in my book), it’s lacking the sweetness I’d need to get through the green apple. It doesn’t taste as strong as the smell (thankfully) and there is an obvious tea taste to it (which is good) but I would rather see this paired with a sweeter green. Maybe as a sencha it would be tasty.

On the other hand, the husband approves of the tea. I could finish it, but I don’t really want to so the rest of the cup goes to him. And he’s okay with the fact that it tastes like an unsweetened apple gummy.

1 teabag (3.2g – go Lupicia!)/6oz

I thought that this would be a good tea as Lupicia does fruit blends so well. I had wished for a stronger apple flavor.. but this one was so mellow. Even though the apple flavor is so soft, I can detect all of the different parts of the apple: tart skin and sweet center. The green tea base is smooth and just a little bit grassy. It seems to have all of the components for a delicious tea, but each one is so weak. Disappointing… I’m left wanting a lot more flavor!