Culinary Teas Gyokuro Green Tea Review
Culinary Teas Gyokuro Green Tea is a smooth green tea with a moderately strong flavor that will be enjoyed by anyone who loves the clean purity of high grade Japanese green tea. Gyokuro is one of the higher quality green teas grown in Japan – less common than the “everyday” sencha tea, and of superior quality thanks to the growing and processing methods used to produce it. Unlike sencha green tea, it is not exposed to direct sunlight right through to harvesting, but is covered over and grown in the shade for around two weeks before the leaves are picked. Being shielded from the sun like this has a very pronounced effect on the tea leaves, as the catechin levels in them are reduced, taking with them the bitter tendencies of many green tea products. The plant's amino acids, on the other hand, start to multiply in the shade, and are responsible for adding sweetness to the eventual taste of the drink. The result? Gyokuro is much less bitter than other varieties of Japanese green tea, and even contains hints of pleasant sweetness, making it a highly sought over and treasured gourmet tea.
Gyokuro's name can be translated as “jewel dew” or “jade jew”, and the jade part refers to the color of the tea – a pale green infusion. And of course, as the jewel part suggests, it's rather more expensive to purchase gyokuro tea. This is a premium quality green tea that will cost you more than your average sencha – but the reason for the price difference become clear when you taste it.
Culinary Teas' version of Gyokuro Green Tea is an excellent shade-grown tea, pure and unaltered by any additives or flavorings. It is 100% natural green tea, nothing more, nothing less. You can tell its quality even before you brew the tea, just from a quick examination of the leaves themselves, which are remarkably clean – no trace of the dust on so many inferior tea leaves, which gathers at the bottom of your cup and makes the last precious mouthful impossible to drink.
The fragrance once the tea is brewed is everything that a pure green tea aroma should be – clean, fresh, and leafy – much like the taste. There's no grassiness whatsoever in the flavor, as there can often be with so many lower grade green teas, and the shade-growing techniques employed in the production of this tea means that it has no unpleasant bitterness, either, whether in the initial flavor or in the lingering aftertaste. It's got quite a strong flavor, and yet it stops short of being overpowering, getting the balance of flavors just right.
Green tea enthusiasts will particularly enjoy this one. Newcomers to green tea might prefer to start with a milder variety, as the intensity of the flavor can sometimes prove to be a bit much for palates that are unaccustomed to the distinctly “green” taste, but this is definitely one to work up to. It may be more expensive than a lot of green tea products on the market, but in this case, it really is a case of “you get what you pay for” - and that's a superior quality, clean-tasting, nutrient-rich, loose leaf green tea that will delight your senses as well as boosting your system with the powerful antioxidants that make green tea so good for you.
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