Manju Matcha

I tried this tea back to back with Red Leaf’s Emperor Matcha. Both are some of their highest quality matches you can order. This is a warm green powder, velvety smooth and richly fragrant. It mixes up into a dark green liquid, and frothed well with my bamboo wisk. I really loved Red Leaf’s Emperor Matcha for it smooth creaminess. This one, the Manju Matcha, is the savory brother to that tea. This is much more vegetal, with mellow tones of kale and seaweed. It was a bit too strong at my usual mixing proportions, and found it to be preferable with a bit more water to matcha. I want to emphasize, this tea is FAR from sour or bitter, but definitely savory on the scale of matchas. If you prefer your matcha to be leafier, this will be a divine tea for you. I personally, prefer the Emperor Matcha, but both of these are high quality and well worth a try.

Back from my little break only to discover, it is Memorial Day, huh, time really seems to fly! Memorial Day to many is the official start of summer, to me the start has always been ‘when it is warm enough to swim in mountain creeks’ so some years in Pennsylvania did not have a summer. It is a beautiful day for a holiday (even if the lack of mail will throw my whole week off) and Ben and I spent it mostly painting, lounging, and partaking of a few fancy sales. I hit the thrift and got a new dress and a pair of really beautiful cups (one is Japanese and the other is possibly Korean celadon, yay for half off sales) and went to Michael’s for new paint brushes, because I always need more.

Today marks the first ever Matcha Monday! A showcase of all things Matcha, usually just straight up Matcha but possible also food and of course various lattes. The first one to be showcased is Red Leaf Tea’s Manju Matcha, they are currently doing this neat promotion where you pay what you want for, a good old Name Your Own Price kinda thing, which is pretty cool. Manju Matcha is from glorious Shizuoka Prefecture, home to Fujiyama and famous for its teas. For a fun bit of trivia, Manju is a Japanese sweet, similar to Mochi, and often filled and made with Matcha. The color of this Matcha is lovely, I do not feel my photography does it justice, it is the vibrant green of spring growth, like someone distilled the season into a fine powder. The aroma of the Matcha is very sweet, almost fruity (like bananas, but very faint, I kept thinking I was just imagining things) with strong notes of sweetgrass, freshly mown hay, a touch of nuttiness and a tiny hint of distant flowers.

After sifting and then whisking the Matcha, the fruity notes have vanished, what is left is sweet hay, sweetgrass, a bit of robust grassiness, and a finish of distant flowers. It is pleasantly sweet to the nose.

Ok, tasting time! I did my first session with this Usucha or thin style, this is the more familiar whisked into a foam style that Matcha is well known for. It is both sweet and brisk, with a thick and smooth mouthfeel. It starts out sweet like sweetgrass, hay, and a touch of flower nectar. The taste then transitions to slightly bitter green like a blend of spinach and kale, adding a bit of an umami element to the Matcha. The finish moves around to sweet again with a blend of honey and flowers. It is a really good Matcha for everyday drinking, blending sweetness and umami in a very perfect balance.

I decided to have another session with this Matcha, but this time I went for Koicha or thick style, this is the hardcore stuff, usually only specific teas are reserved for Koicha, usually this Matcha is extremely costly as it is made from older plants and is usually hand picked. Manju Matcha is not really suited for Koicha, but I wanted to experiment, so, why not? The taste is…intense, both intensely umami and intensely bitter. Like having a mouthful of kale, grass, and sauteed spinach. This slowly fades to a gentle sweetness and and aftertaste of distant flowers long after the sipping experience is over. How does it compare to actual Koicha? No idea, I have never had it…way too poor for that stuff!

For blog and photos: http://ramblingbutterflythoughts.blogspot.com/2015/05/red-leaf-tea-manju-matcha-matcha-monday.html

So I’m about a week or two into my newfound exploration of matcha. I am learning little-by-little, and if someone has a great resource about learning to prepare and drink matcha, please feel free to leave it in a comment or message me. Anyway, what I learned with the last bowl I made is that there is definitely a right way and a wrong way to whisk it for the right foamy texture. Lots of sites give a basic instruction for how to do this but I’ve found a couple of key points that really would have helped me more if only someone had mentioned them. They weren’t pointed out on any sites and I picked them up through observation of videos and through trial and error. More on that later. I will probably make a Youtube video to show the tricks, as it is easier to show than tell. What I learned this time is that the way you drink it is just as important as the way you prepare it.

I tend to close my lips quite a bit when I drink tea, and suck a little stream of it in so as not to dribble or slurp. With whisked usucha matcha, if you do this you are likely to sip at the liquid and leave behind a lot of the foam till after the liquid is gone. This is a mistake. Drink with your mouth open more and suck in the foam and water evenly. Not only will the texture be more silky and velvety, but the flavor will be MUCH less intense/bitter and more sweet and complex.

This was probably my second favorite of the matchas I’ve tried from Red Leaf tea. The dry powder had little hints of sweet lime scent like the one that was my favorite (Tanabata Matcha), but the flavor of this one was more like sweet grass and not much of a fruity taste. In fact, after adding water to the matcha it mostly smelled grassy and the little fruity hints in the scent were pretty much gone. There’s a touch of bitterness in the finish of this matcha, but as I mentioned, if you drink the foam and liquid evenly it really cuts this down to an enjoyable balance.

The more and more I experiment with matcha, the more I think most people who say they’ve tried it and don’t enjoy it just aren’t preparing it right, or haven’t had a good quality one. If you get it right the flavors can be even more sweet and forgiving than a lot of sencha out there, and I’ve met at least a few who like sencha but not matcha.

This was a fun matcha. A little sweet and not overly vegetal or umami-rich. I am finding I prefer my matcha this way. On the other hand, this one wasn’t remarkable. It was sort of an “everyday” kind of tea to me.