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Fresh Green Tea?
- Thread starter benlee
- Start date
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Don't know if it helps
but I get my green tea at the Tea House, Neal Street (Covent Garden).
Although not much use if you're not in London.
Although not much use if you're not in London.
Not sure what you mean by "fresh" vs. "packaged." All tea is packaged in the country of origin, in one way or another. A big package doesn't necessarily equal quality or freshness.
Gong-Fu Tea has amazing stuff they travel the world over to obtain. Their Budding Jasmine is amazing. The shop is in Des Moines, Iowa of all places.
What kind of green tea are you looking for?
Chinese green
japanase
south east asian ?
For good chinese green tea I go to my local Chinatown tea stores.
For Japanese, there are a few tea boutiques are here that carry good to excellent green teas in various grades and prices.
the rest of green tea I dont bother with - usually very low quality, crap.
Most loose leaf green tea is pretty decent. Avoid the stuff in bags.
Chinese green
japanase
south east asian ?
For good chinese green tea I go to my local Chinatown tea stores.
For Japanese, there are a few tea boutiques are here that carry good to excellent green teas in various grades and prices.
the rest of green tea I dont bother with - usually very low quality, crap.
Most loose leaf green tea is pretty decent. Avoid the stuff in bags.
There's an online store called O-Cha.com that has its own green tea forum:
http://greenteaforum.o-cha.com/index.php
http://greenteaforum.o-cha.com/index.php
I'm a tea conneseuir, but I deal mostly with oolong or black tea. Whenever I buy green, however, I stick with Twinings. If you want true quality, go loose leaf and buy a tea strainer.
I don't entirely agree. I prefer loose teas also, but I find you can get lousy loose tea and good bagged tea. The reality is that teas are graded by quality, and you won't know what you're getting unless the grade is disclosed, which is rare. Just because tea comes out of a big jar at a tea shop doesn't make it good. It can be a low grade tea that's been sitting around for months.
I also avoid Twinings. In the US at least, it's really mediocre and over-priced.
I personally use bags because I don't have the time to go through the process of straining. I recommended loose leaf because I know that only purists will use it.
Twinings is rather good. I love their Earl Grey. They're supposedly the first brewer of the original Earl Grey. Bigelow is alright, Celestial Seasonings if I don't see anything else there. I only drink Tazo when at Starbucks. I avoid Lipton at all costs.
I can't recommend the ingenuiTEA enough. It makes loose tea just as convenient as using bags. Cheap, easy to use, easy to clean. They're wonderful. Absolutely worth a shot.
I keep one at home and one at the office.
I base my choices entirely upon results. You don't need to be a purest to drink tea steeped from loose PG Tips or Typhoo, both of which I buy when I can find it (becoming much more difficult). It's a lot less expensive that way, and you can adjust the strength to preference more easily. Personally, I won't touch Twinings, Biglow or Tazo, loose or bagged. All low to mediocre quality tea at premium prices. The American tea-buying market is like that. You can pack crummy tea in a pretty container and people will pay extra, but if you put good tea in a plain tin, hardly anyone one will buy it.
That's an interesting concept, but pouring boiling water into a plastic pot -- I don't know.
What sort of tea do you recommend that I buy then? That's pretty much all I can find at the supermarket.
Don't buy from a supermarket, order it online.
I for one, buy Twinings bags of English Breakfast Tea sometimes because when I drink that kind of tea with milk and honey, I don't really notice how bad or mediocre it is. It's what I grew up with.
Green and White tea, on the other hand, has to be of really fine quality for me or it tastes like dirty dishwater.
There isn't really a difficult *process* for straining tea. Boil some water, pour it in a tea pot, put a little strainer over your cup and pour. Really, its not difficult and I'm really lazy but that is just so simple...
I've had very good luck with specialteas.com. They ship their loose-leaf teas in sealed foil bags.
Also, Adagio.
Have you ever had Mighty Leaf? I've had it in restaurants, and I thought that it was perhaps the best tea I've had, but I can never find it. Perhaps because I have to order it online, but I don't really have the time to do that.
I guess my impatience for tea distringuishes myself as American.
EDIT: Oh, I was also wondering if Twinings' quality varies by country to country. Is your Twinings in the UK, Singapore, Europe, Asia, etc. different to the one I buy here in America?