Tea — 茶

I like tea. These are some brewing notes for my favorites.

Green Teas

Grean teas like lower temperatures and shorter steeping times. I tend to prefer the bright vegetal flavors of Japanese green teas to the more subtle Chinese greens.

Gyokuro

One of the finest Japanese green teas.

Temperature 65°C (150°F)
Time 60 seconds
Quantity 1-2 teaspoons / 6 ounces water
Sencha
Temperature 80°C (175°F)
Time 60 seconds
Quantity 1 teaspoons / 6 ounces water
Kagoshima Sencha

Sencha from Kagoshima is finer, and tastes even more vegetal than most other sencha, and is much more delicate in flavor. This is my daily drinking tea. It steeps up nice and cloudy.

Temperature 80°C (175°F)
Time 90 seconds
Quantity 1 teaspoons / 6 ounces water
Genmaicha

A cute tea with lower-quality bancha leaves and roasted brown rice. The rice gives it a nice toasty flavor, plus it looks really nifty with some of the grains popped (like popcorn.)

Temperature 80°C (175°F)
Time 3 minutes
Quantity 1 teaspoons / 6 ounces water
Matcha

The strangest and most difficult (relatively) of teas. This is a leaf similar to Gyokuro that's ground into a very fine powder. You then whisk this powder with water into a delicious, frothy, and buddhistically significant elixir. This requires a fairly special whisk to accomplish with any decent results, however matcha can also easily be made into a delicious latté.

Because you're actually consuming tea leaves when you drink matcha you're getting an extra large dose of all the awesome health benefits of green tea. This is making it more popular in the US. Companies like Starbucks offer their own matcha latté, for which they use sweetened matcha powder, and a generous amount of some kind of melon-based syrup to come up with a drink that tastes like... melon milk. It's fairly disgusting. You can get it without the syrup for a decent drink.

Preparing match is a bit more difficult than other teas because of its nature as a powder. Ideally, you need to force it through a sieve to break up any clumps, and then whisk it with an open-ended, traditionally bamboo, whisk with a bit of the water to make a paste before adding the rest of the water. Then just whisk aggressively to froth.

A latté is made the same way using a little bit of water to make a paste, and then whisking in milk instead of the rest of the water. I find the soy milk gives a much nicer flavor with matcha than regular milk.

The amount of matcha you use also depends on its grade, of which there are generally two: thin and thick. Basically, "thin" matcha is a slightly lower quality, stronger tea, and "thick" matcha is a higher quality, more subtle tea. You would generally use twice as much "thick" matcha powder as you would "thin", but "thick" is also more expensive. If you're drinking it traditionally, "thick" is the way to go, in my opinion. But you would be hard pressed to tell a difference in a latté.

I generally make a traditional matcha like this:

Temperature 65°C (150°F)
Quantity ¼ teaspoon thin grade / 4 ounces water

For a latté the quantities are a bit more vague. Depending on the amount you want to make, I'd generally say when using the above temperature water to make the paste, use ½ teaspoon of thin grade for every 8 ounces of milk.

O-Cha.com has some wonderful information about matcha, as well as some excellent matcha itself. It's where I buy mine.

There are also some tea vendors I like quite a bit: