Review: Art of Tea Eisai’s Choice Sencha
Art of Tea, Green Tea, Japanese Tea, Sencha Tea Add comments | "More floral-tasting, instead of the vegetal taste most sencha fans will be looking for... these leaves didn't hold up well for multiple infusions."
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Eisai’s Choice Sencha is a Japanese tea from the Uji gardens. According to their website, Art of Tea says that “The dark leaves mean the Sencha was shade grown and that an artisan spent considerable effort to make a great green tea. It has a fresh grass cut flavor and brews a green cup.” This is quite interesting though because sencha is not shade grown; only Gyokuro is. In fact this is the determining factor between the two types of teas. So either Art of Tea is selling Gyokuro as Sencha, or they are mislabeling their sencha. After trying the tea I would say the latter.
If you have had good sencha before you will notice when brewing this tea that it doesn’t nearly get the nice green color that you could expect from sencha. The color is not that much different than a green or oolong tea. The flavor is also a surprise. Generally sencha has a very fresh vegetal taste; however this one is more floral. In fact I probably would not even know that this was sencha if I didn’t know. Of course there is always the matter of freshness when it comes to Japanese teas and I’m always saying the only proper place to buy Japanese tea is straight from the source, or as close as you can get. This is an above average tea although not what you’re looking for in a sencha at all.
Also another point that should be made is that this tea only held up to one infusion, where most Japanese tea should get you at the very least 2 infusions. This is also probably due to the tea not being very fresh or not a very good quality tea to begin with. Either way I give tea merchants credit for offering Japanese teas to broaden their product range.
— To purchase Art of Tea Eisai’s Choice Sencha, or for more specific information on ingredients or the story behind this particular blend, click here to go directly to the manufacturer's web site.
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Shane Teaviews.com Reviewer » Read more about this reviewer on Shane's profile page. » Find a list of recent posts by Shane. |
February 12th, 2008 at 7:55 am
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