The Loose Change

Green Tea Time

May 24th, 2008

Recently I was at a friends home and they are usually up to something interesting and unusal.  This time they had “the best green tea in China”, according to another friend who brought it back straight from China.  Curious, and being a green tea drinker, I wanted to try the tea.  They debated a while, as they did not have much left, but after careful consideration, allowed me to drink a cup or three.

Bottom line, it was truly amazing.  It was incredibly full bodied and very sweet.  It was easily the best tea I had ever had. And it didn’t have any added sugar or anything, it was just loose leaf pure green tea.  One small problem, they didn’t know the name of the tea and neither did their friend who brought it back from China.  So they gave me a box of “Gunpowder Tea”, and sent me on my way.  Of course, the taste of that gunpowder tea was no where in comparison to the “best tea in China”.

So that lead me on a quest searching for the “best tea in China”.  I have since purchased a lot green tea, loose leaf form.  The stuff in bags are not the highest of quality and usually what’s leftover from the loose leaf, so I stopped drinking bagged tea.  I now only drink loose leaf tea (the kind that you spoon out into a strainer and steep for anywhere from 1 - 3 minutes and generally not available in supermarkets) and I have drank a lot of it.  I have tried about 20 different types of green tea and NONE of them came even close to the tea I had at my friends house.  Many of them are quite good and have sublte depths of various flavors, but that one tea was still the sweetest tea I have ever tasted.  But I have no idea what the name of it is.

So for now the quest continues, I buy tea from incredibleteas.com, dragonherbs.com, and Silk Road Teas.  I even have and grow my own little green tea bush in my backyard (which fortunately has taken hold and is starting to grow like crazy) and in a couple years, might be able to a cup or two from it.  As I understand it, the best tea comes from 500 year old bushes.  Just my luck.

In case you didn’t know ALL tea comes from the same plant - Camellia Sinensis.  It doesn’t matter if it’s black, green or oolong tea.  They are all the same leaves from that particular Camellia plant.  It’s ultimately a matter of how oxidized the leaves are allowed to get after picking that determines whether it’s green, black, white or oolong.

If I ever discover the “best tea in China” then I will blog about it, I suspect, or I might just keep it a secret and let people venture down their own path of consuming copious amounts of the green stuff.  I hear it even has health benefits…

 

Entry Filed under: Green Tea, The Loose Change