TeaChat

Hi all,

Found a tea in Jusco (department store with a supermarket) tonight. HKD60 for 100g (~USD8). It's clearly a green tea…I think.

It's labelled 八女茶 (Yamecha) in large, but on the side says 福みどり, which Google translates as "Fuzhou green". Fuzhou's in Fujian so…is this a Chinese-grown tea or…:?:

Smell: Like matcha but also a bit like a hayfield in summer on a farm by the sea.

Taste: Reminds me of matcha (the kind you taste in ice cream — I don't think I've ever drunk real matcha before) only not so sweet. Rather grassy and leaves my mouth a bit dry…tiny hint of bitterness, but neither in a medicinal nor astringent (which would give me a bit of sour as well) way.

I'm brewing with about 3g to 200ml, ~80ºC at a guess (I boiled water then opened the lid and waited for 5 minutes in an ACd room at 25ºC), for about 1.5 minutes. As expected (and I really wasn't expecting much, given the price), it's lost ~70% of its flavour this second infusion.

But my question is: What is this tea?

Oh, and on the nutrition label it says "Yame-cha Tea Fuku Midori green tea".

... my guess is Fuku Midori sencha from Yame on the island of Kyushu Japan.

Any photos of the tea and brew?

I didn't get any photos of the liquor before I finished it but from googling images of sencha, it's kind of that colour…reminiscent of the green of grass just before it turns to hay?

Does the label say fuku or fuka?

Midori is Japanese for green.

The label says fuku.

Hm, fuka I could understand. In fact there is a tea called Fuka Midori from Den's which I would transalate as "deep green."

I think FukuMidori may be a cultivar.

http://www.thes-du-japon.com/index.php? ... cts_id=187

This link above has a tea that's said to be

Fukumidori

cultivar.

That would make sense.

So conclusion is that it's a cheap sencha. Sorted!

…that tin of powder I bought the other day was also sencha, I have since found (konacha). Matcha seems to be impossible to find in HK…(this was ~USD10 for 30g).

Anyway, thanks for the help guys.

Now for the bitter lessons of learning how to brew this properly.

By the way, 'fuzhou' was an odd translation of 福 (potentially Chinese, but then it's just 'fu'). In Japanese, it would be 'fuku.'