Comment by 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?
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.
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.
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.