Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Tencha

I received this as part of a tasting from Eric of Me And My Tea.


The leaf is a deep green and looks more suited to a kitchen's chopped herb jar. The smell is enticing, a deep, sweet gyokuro aroma, and light milky smell resembling matcha. Tencha is the precursor to matcha, so it seems natural that they should smell similar. Tencha is grown similar to gyokuro, with a period of shade before harvest to develop higher chlorophyll levels, which among other things, produces a sweeter, grassier tea. After harvest, tencha is ground for many hours into a fine powder, matcha. Matcha is then whisked in hot water and drunk with a slight foamy head. Matcha is the tea used in the Japanese Tea Ceremony.


Knowing that this tea had been shade-grown like gyokuro, I decided to steep it at a lower temperature of 150°, a good temperature for matcha as well. Due to its fluffy nature, I also used 3.5 tsp leaf in 180ml, as opposed to my usual 2 tap/180ml I use for sencha, and it took some convincing to get the leaf underneath the waters surface. In my attempt to brew this tea using gyokuro parameters, I upped the time to around 2.5 minutes.


The resulting tea: clear, quite grassy, and a little sour in aroma. The taste surprised me with how similar it was to gyokuro. No bitterness at all, abundance of grassiness, sweet, the slightest tang, and pleasant vapors reaching the nose. I was expecting the buttery, milkiness of matcha, but that is definitely not what I got. As I look at the spent leaf, I see that I could have used twice as much, 7 tsp. Shocking.


I enjoyed this one quite a bit. The flavor is light enough that I find myself downing cups much quicker than I normally would. Although it is light, there are still prominent tastes, the grass, and a pungent sour. The sour develops after many cups, and could seem nasty if one doesn't enjoy the taste. I do, somewhat, so I did like this tea. At $50 for 4oz at Harney & Sons... I wouldn't say it's worth it. Very nice to have as a sample, but I feel that the money would be better spent on a good quality gyokuro. Tencha is a great novelty for the matcha drinker, or any green tea enthusiast, for that matter. It lets the enthusiast become more intimate with matcha's path to powder.

Thanks Eric, for letting me try this exclusive tea.

Other reviews of this same tea can be found at TeaNerd, Me And My Tea, and perhaps elsewhere.

3 comments:

Salsero said...

Nice review. Really love the photo of the spent leaves.

Wes Crosswhite said...

Thanks, Salsero. I like it too. No setup, I noticed I really liked it as I was looking at the LCD, so I took a few with different settings, and liked this one the most.

Unfortunately, Blogger looks to be washing the color saturation out of my photos. Even with photobucket's largest file size upload option (1mb), the color is sucked out too.

I'm liking flickr, but to use it any more than I already am, I'll have to pay the annual $25.

Aaaaand it turns out that when I juxtapose them on my 22" LCD monitor, they look the same. Hmm. But when juxtaposed on my 13" laptop LCD, the contrast is shown. So this is all rather confusing, and I don't know how anyone else is seeing it.

Can I email you the original (2mb) photo and get your input? PM on teachat.

Anonymous said...

nice post...