comparable to Maiko`s Kyo Mukashi

[deepsplash]

Hi

I`m currently using Maiko`s Kyo Mukashi and Uji Midori for my daily matcha smoothies. It`s sooo delicious

Looking to try other ones that are comparable or better. How does Yuuki-Cha`s konjo or yame (I am inclined to buy from them on ebay because they include a whisk and free shipping..a whisk from my local tea store costs $20CAD so this looks like a good add-in)..how does matcha superior from hibiki compare. I have read tonnes of great things about o-cha but I find them a bit expensive (adding in the cost of yogurt and fruits). Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

p.s. I also tried Uji no Sato but it did not compare to Kyo Mukashi. Kyo Mukashi made the smoothies frothier...just better

[Oni]

You do not respect you tea, in a serious japanese tea drinkers eyes you are a blasphemer, a heretic... Buy the lowest price house matcha for smoothies.

[Chip]

You do not respect you tea, in a serious japanese tea drinkers eyes you are a blasphemer, a heretic... Buy the lowest price house matcha for smoothies.

Take a chill pill! Take it easy on the new member!

Even in Japan Matcha is used for many things beyond tea ceremonies. Japanese companies sell matcha snacks, matcha ice cream, etc.

Drink your matcha however you like it, like your matcha however you drink it.

[Intuit]

Why do you want a matcha whisk if you are making smoothies? A little silicon egg whip would work better for mixing finely ground matcha powder into your yogurt.

Unless..you are also using quality matcha for traditional preparation? If so, you might want to buy Yuuki's 100g pack of yame which *may* suffice for both purposes.

[Maitre_Tea]

all I have to say is I wish I were loaded enough to spend ceremony grade matcha for smoothies

[Oni]

Unfortunately Marukyu koyamaen sold their soul to the devil when they contracted with an american ice cream producer. I read about this a few years ago, and I lost some respect towards their company, and the owner of Horaido always complains that the price of low quality teas goes up because of this " Low quality tea is very expensive for the quality, because market is in too wild through 2003-2009." Because of this new green tea hype, they use green tea for a sale pitch, they have no respect for quality tea, they encourage the producer to produce quantity instead of quality teas.

[Chip]

eh hem, but there are MANY companies manufacturing and/or producing and/or selling food grade matcha. To say a company sold their soul just because they seized an opp to sell their tea to an ice cream maker is pretty judgemental. Granted, not all companies are in the position to do so, but to sell a lot of lower grade matcha makes economic sense. Plus it is lower grade stuff.

I am also thinking of a Japanese Company with a USA location that happens to sell Matcha icecream and other Matcha sweets.

Tea may be somewhat spiritual, but it is also a commodity to be bought and sold world wide for a wide range of purposes. Not all matcha is destined for the Japanese Tea Ceremony, nor should it be. In fact, how much Matcha is ever used for this purpose? Probably less than 5%, just guessing.

Though I have not made smoothies yet, nor icecream, I plan to at some point, why not?

[Intuit]

Furthermore, the Japanese green tea market instability arose from overproduction in 2006 that sent prices tumbling. Oversupply continued in 2007, in anticipation of rising global demand for green tea powder. I have no doubt that product stability issues were addressed with innovative (nano) technology, furthering product shelf-life.

Climate issues of a protracted and unusually strong LaNina cycle (2007-2009, coinciding with a near record solar minimum) have also complicated production and commodity contract pricing and trading*.

Declining Japanese domestic and rising foreign demand are also at issue. This appears to be largely due to the 'health hype' thanks to a certain Japanese company that sought the blessings of the US FDA for a green tea cure for cardiovascular disease, although improved North American retail access is also driving wholesale pricing rise in recent years.

There are major factors underlying green tea powder pricing fluctuations. Ice cream flavoring isn't one of them.

* The markets are still very much closed ranks to outsiders.

[Smells_Familiar]

You do not respect you tea, in a serious japanese tea drinkers eyes you are a blasphemer, a heretic... Buy the lowest price house matcha for smoothies.

In the renowned, very thorough Japanese cookbook Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, Shizuo Tsuji includes a recipe for Uji-Gori, or "Uji Ice". This is matcha mixed with a sweet syrup which is then poured over a pyramid of shaved ice. He offers a variation of this using vanilla ice cream instead of ice. The book was first published in 1980.

Oni, are you saying Mr. Tsuji is a heretic?

To the OP,

Sorry, but I'm not going to be of much help. All of the smoothies I've had with matcha in them were made by others and I couldn't taste the matcha. It sounds like you're basing the smoothie on matcha as the primary flavor. Is this correct? I assume any high quality matcha with good reviews on teachat would translate well into a matcha centered smoothie. If the matcha is just one component among many in the smoothie, I would then use a lower grade matcha.

[deepsplash]

Why do you want a matcha whisk if you are making smoothies? A little silicon egg whip would work better for mixing finely ground matcha powder into your yogurt.

Unless..you are also using quality matcha for traditional preparation? If so, you might want to buy Yuuki's 100g pack of yame which *may* suffice for both purposes.

im not sure if there is a specific order or way to make a matcha smoothie. But sometimes there are still a few clumps of matcha here and there (but my guess is I didn`t mix it well enough. But I am rushing to get to work in the morning though). Occasionally i do drink matcha the traditional way. I checked out reviews and apparently yuuki`s yame matcha has a mild taste (not sure if it`ll be too mild for the smoothies).
___________________________________________________________________


i did not expect my post to generate such a negative response. I do enjoy green tea the traditional way but not so much with matcha though. I am thinking of buying some sencha tea leaves for some afternoons after work. What would you guys recommend..something in the middle price-range, but good quality.

[Oni]

It is not until the internet age and globalization, that the japanese teas are available to us, I read that in the 50`s the price of ceremonial grade matcha was huge, not only recently that we can enjoy it, and look we use it for cooking, and as Chip guessed ceremonial grade matcha is around 5 %, if gyokuro is around the same percentage in total production compared to other types of tea, that means that the huge demand for mass production has cause plantation to mass produce instead of using traditional mehods to make ever better tea, like handrubbed old plantation sencha with sophisticated taste, or straw covered tana for gyokuro and matcha, if the we consumers do not demand the good stuff they will raise the prices and produce less of those teas that have less fans and start mass producing "junk tea" like china did in the past year, or worse, like CTC method in india, that is the work of missinformed consummers.

[Maitre_Tea]

I think that this raises the question of tradition vs. innovation, high end vs. consumer market, etc. As something relatively obscure, like tea (at least Oriental teas), become more popular, the mass market picks up this "indie" and "hip" thing, and as more and more people want in, producers are forced to cut quality to create a product that the regular consumer can buy, making "the good stuff" rarer and more expensive.

I'm not sure where I stand on either side, and I'm sure that there's some middle ground somewhere...but it's very boggy. While I like that more and more people are enjoying tea, things like Teavana and the other ridiculous crap people call "tea" scare me...and represent my greatest fears about the tea-drinking trend.

Don't know where I'm going with this, but this is making me feel a little depressed.

[Oni]

I am afraid of that time when people would think that they know tea and say there are 3 types of tea all in teabags in supermarket with some little black powder in it, they are called Lipton Citrus greentea, Rose-hibiscus black tea, and the misterious wu-long slimming tea.
That would be the death of tea, I think those Teavana type of companies sell more tea than o-cha, or Yunnan sourcing or Jingteashop, or Houde, teaspring, or teahabitat or any of those shops that do hard work to source rare and precious authentic tea for example, and teafriends we have a problem, here on teachat we are doing a great deal of educating the masses, but we are nowhere as famous as other media superpowers that seem to support financial streght instead of other more important values.
On the other hand what if people will demand good tea, would this solve our problems, would the chinese, taiwanese, japanese, indian tea producers cease to use chemicals to destroy the qi of the land and would they have more respect for nature and tea.
All in this tea, this movie showed alternatives to chemicals used in tea prouction, like using earthworms to transform byproducts like soy husks to make natural fertilizer, earthworm pu is one of the best natural fertilizers for all plants, and tried to make the bigwigs in chinese tea production change their minds about using chemicals, and they should respect local farmers with experience, maybe they should hire them.