Comment by dima55

3 years ago

Do you actually drink not-bottom-of-the-barrel sencha? If not, your experience is not applicable, respectfully. With even middle-of-the-road sencha the difference is far from subtle.

13 comments

dima55

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galangalalgol  3 years ago

15% of people don't taste bitterness in the same way. Hops taste floral and a bit sweet to me and I like to chew on Artemisia species my family finds hideously bitter. I could put cheap gunpowder green tea in a percolator for an hour and it wouldn't taste bitter to me. Perhaps the gp has the same trait?

  • dima55  3 years ago

    Maybe that's true, but arguing that putting boiling water on decent (i.e. not bancha or genmaicha or whatever) japanese green tea is a weird, minority opinion for a good reason. Also, gunpowder greens are not japanese.

  • pasquinelli  3 years ago

    i suppose i'm in that 15%. i sometimes drink a tea made from a fresh hop cone to help me sleep. it's not so much that i don't taste bitter, just that i'm not averse to a lot of the flavors people call bitter (and there are a lot of flavors people call bitter.)

    i don't know if it's related but i've also noticed i'm much more tolerant of ginger than most people and i can't taste cardamom (seed of the ginger plant, interestingly) at all.

    hey, people are different.

  • hinkley  3 years ago

    I’m a bitter taster. There are some strains of loose leaf green tea that are my go to. One I confused with jasmine tea the first time I had it. Black tea is a vehicle for caffeine, as is coffee. Earl Grey is five kinds of bitter at once ans somehow gets a pass, but only in small quantities. English breakfast once in a while, but the rest is chai.

numpad0  3 years ago

Even most bottom-of-the-barrel sencha taste awful in boiling hot water, and this is vice versa; bottom-of-the-barrel black tea in not-boiling hot water tastes just as awful.

olivermarks  3 years ago

I always thought Sencha was different to green tea, steamed leaves, more subtle?

  • elif  3 years ago

    "green tea" is an English term which essentializes Asamushi, Chumushi, and Fukamushi versions of Sencha, Gyokuro, Matcha, Bancha, Genmaicha, Hojicha, Kukicha, Shincha, Tamaryokucha, Kamairicha, Konacha, Mecha, Guricha, Hentaigama, Batabatacha, Wakocha, Karigane, Tencha, Aracha, Yanagi, not to mention the regional specializations.

    • 3np  3 years ago

      Aside from matcha (powdered), konacha (powdered), hojicha (brown) and perhaps kukicha (twigs), most (all?) of the other ones are also just sencha, or loose-leaf green tea.

      Shincha would just refer to freshly picked sencha, for one.

      "Green tea" would be 緑茶 (ryokucha). Hojicha is not ryokucha nor green.

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