These are my kind of green...purchased from my kind of place, Amanzi Tea.
For starters, can I just say, I love, love, LOVE Amanzi's attention to detail, customer service, website, and now I find, their tea is no exception to their other high standards! Good quality at a fair price with some amazing blends I'll be sharing with you over the next few weeks.
AND for those, like me, with a weakness for tea and a budget to follow, Amanzi Tea offers the greatest little 1 oz tester packages for 3-4 dollars each. A great value for DUEing (discovering, uncovering, exploring) Tea anytime!
One last plug, Amanzi Tea's packaging is, hands down, the best I've seen yet. Color coded {white, green, black, herbal is a light lemonade pink, Rooibos is warm red/orange} with clear, concise instructions, pictorial and written, on the back, a description of the tea, caffeine content measurement bar and symbols of the type of health the tea promotes! All with out crowding. No small feat! (Check back later for some lovely pictures...I plan to download a bunch and you'll see what I mean!)
On to the teas...
Jasmine Pearl
There may be different ways of contriving the Jasmine ingredient in Jasmine Pearl, such as oils and and extracts, but I love the way this particular tea's flavor came about. The green tea is placed over a bed of Jasmine flowers for 3 days to absorb the aroma.
This is a fun tea that, while I don't care for any perfumes with Jasmine, the aroma and flavor in tea is a lovely duo! The color is quite light, palest of greens. So be careful not to over steep in hopes for a brighter color...it's not coming and the tea will be ruined. I did let it steep for 1.5 minutes, rather than a minute alone, more than that could be pushing it :) The 'green' flavor, some say grassy which is often true, is delightfully paired with the Jasmine. Which is why Jasmine Pearl, in general, is a best seller, no matter where you purchase yours.
Also, the leaves are so tightly rolled, and look much like beautiful dark green pearls, that the water, at a lower temperature, has a harder time unfurling the leaves....so I help it out a bit by poking it here and there. (I feel awfully guilty every time, does that make it better?) I got two good quality 8oz steeps out of one tsp and probably could have gotten more, but, not being a green person, I was nicely done with it after the 2 cups. My 6 year old even liked the smell!
Gojiberry Infusion
Another great green! I posted about a sencha (Japanese Green tea) I had which I mixed with an Acai green I purchased from Rebecca's Natural Foods in Charlottesville. That was nice...until I had this tea! I LOVE it!
Gojiberry Infusion has just the right amount of fruit flavor to balance the sencha, a truly grassy taste. And the Gojiberry (go on, you know you want to say it, Go-G-Berry!) has a unique, almost mellow flavor. Now there are only about 1 or 2 of these bright berries in a tsp, so, the taste may intensify if there are more than that, but in that case it might disturb the delightful balance.
The one exception is something you can't get away from because the "perfect green" steeped color of the sencha is influenced by the bright berry, so the color is muted. Even so, I can say without hesitation, a more well matched green tea taste, I've yet to find! A true gem.
I have other green teas I'll be DUEing in time, but I'm thrilled to have found these "keepers" as those I'm planning on including in my distant future dream at a "Tipping the Kettle Tastings: Green Tea" gathering! Even so, Lord Jesus come! :)
*aside, I wrote a piece on Gojiberries recently~ until then, I hadn't even heard about it before, so let me just say, a more healthy berry, you'd be hard pressed to find! Just google Gojiberry, and you'll find a ton of information! Happy hunting!*
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