How to Choose Green Tea - 5 Tips to Choose the Best Tea

What should you be looking for when you buy tea? In this video, we're going to make sure you never spend money on bad tea again. We'll show you all the things to look for when you're selecting the perfect tea. So first, we have variety. Before we even talk about the different criteria you should look for in a tea, it's important to at least understand the variety of tea you're buying before evaluating it. There are many different types of teas and depending on what type of tea is being sold, you can change your criteria of what to look for. The question of how to choose a good green tea is different for gyokuro compared to fukumushi sencha. When you buy gyokuro tea, for example, you want to look for large unbroken needles. When it comes to a fukumushi sencha, it's okay to have these broken leaves because during the deep steaming process, the tea leaves become more brittle and they're easy to break. While these broken leaves would normally be a negative quality indicator, it's no problem for fukumushi sencha. It even makes the tea more flavorful as the smaller leaf particles have a greater surface area and therefore more of the tea is able to flow into the cup. This example is just to show you that there's no one-size-fits-all approach to selecting tea. You have to decide which type of tea you're looking for. But now let's move on to the next step and that's not selecting a generic tea. When it comes to how to buy green tea, you really want to avoid teas that are being sold under very generic names. Generally speaking, the more specific category of the tea, the better the quality. For example, a tea called green tea at the grocery store is likely to be among the worst quality. A tea called Japanese green tea may be slightly better and a tea called gyokuro green tea will likely be even better than that. You really want to challenge companies to tell you more about tea. Otherwise, it's possible for them to find the cheapest leaves and try to convince customers it's a more expensive tea. Another thing you'll want to look for is the cultivar. As we've mentioned before, finding out what cultivar the tea comes from gives you even more information about the tea. If you're buying tea from a high-end tea shop, they should know which cultivar each tea comes from. This is an easy way to identify tea suppliers that know a lot about the tea that they sell. If a tea company goes out of their way to find a rare cultivar like saimidori or okumidori, they are likely to be very proud of that fact and make it more visible on their packaging. This is not to say that more common cultivars produce worse teas, but by mentioning the cultivar the tea comes from, a supplier is showing their intention of capturing a specific taste profile rather than just selling a tea. Next, let's talk about the source. So finding the source of where tea is produced can be a good tip when it comes to how to buy green tea. As a company, we're very transparent about which farms produce which teas, but we acknowledge that many companies do not like to give away their suppliers. Tea companies should at the very least provide you the location or region that the tea was produced. The reason for this is that you want to look for single origin teas. Mass-produced teas are grown in many different locations around a country, and therefore they're not able to capture the subtle nuances of a particular region or processing style. When you buy tea produced in one location, it is more likely that the tea was produced by a smaller operation where the producers were able to capture a more specific flavor profile. These small batch teas are exactly what tea connoisseurs are looking for, and it can be a fun adventure once you realize that every small batch of tea is just a little bit different. Of course, you should also always select loose leaf tea over tea bags. This is a topic we've discussed in great detail in other videos, but suffice to say that the best quality teas are always going to be made for loose leaf consumption. This is because the producers of these premium quality teas would never waste the leaves inside a bag. The bag itself can release chemicals into your tea, and the bag also doesn't provide enough space for the leaves to expand and fully release their flavor into the water. Finally, the tea leaves will need to be broken up into smaller pieces to fit inside the tea bag, and this will degrade the essential oils, which is what gives tea its complex flavor and aroma. We still have a few more tea tips to get to, but if you're liking this video so far, just know it's only a small excerpt of our book Secrets of Japanese Green Tea. This book contains 100 pages on everything that we've learned during our travels around Japan. If you'd like to get it for free, you can just click the link in the description and we'll send you a free copy. Now let's talk about the freshness of a tea. So when it comes to how to choose a good green tea, you will really want to choose a tea that's fresh. Tea doesn't go bad nearly as quickly as other types of packaged goods, and if properly sealed, it can retain its flavor for at least a year. That being said, you want to make sure that the packing date of the tea is within the last year. At Nio, all the teas that we sell have been packaged within the last year. If it gets too far beyond the packing date, we will give the tea away. Another tip on how to buy green tea is to always make sure that you go for organically grown or pesticide-free green tea. This is particularly important when it comes to matcha, because you're consuming the entire leaf, so you get an even heavier dose of everything that was used in the production process. If you want to know how to choose a good green tea that's more sustainable, you will also want to make sure that you go for organically grown tea. We visited many organic and non-organic tea fields, and the tea fields that are organically grown are able to support a much more diverse array of flora and fauna. On these tea fields, we see wild plant species growing and thriving populations of insects, birds, and even mammals. By purchasing tea produced on fields like this, you're not only ensuring the tea fields themselves are healthy, but also the surrounding ecosystem as well. Finally, let's talk about the quality of the leaves. While it's impossible to truly judge the quality of a tea without actually drinking it, you can get pretty close by closely examining the leaves. When searching for how to choose a good green tea, you can look at the shapes of the leaves to determine whether or not you're getting the tea you're looking for. As we mentioned before, gyokuro will have these tightly rolled needle-shaped leaves, sencha leaves will be slightly flatter and looser, fukumushi sencha will have small leaf particles mixed in, and kama-iracha will be rolled into these more curly shapes. By following this brief guide to leaf shapes, you can make sure you choose a good tea without buying the wrong kind. You can also actually get a sense of how sweet the tea is just by looking at it. Dark green leaves will tend to produce sweeter green teas, while light green leaves tend to produce teas with more astringency. This doesn't mean that either is lower quality, but it will help you select a tea based on what you're looking for. The reason the color changes is due to the shading process. The shading process used to make the tea sweeter also boosts the chlorophyll in the leaves and makes them greener. This makes it easy to tell unshaded teas apart from shaded teas, and as a result, you can actually tell a little bit about the flavor of a tea just by looking at the leaves. For example, a gyokuro tea will be shaded for the longest time, and as a result, it will have the sweetest flavor and the darkest green leaves. If you're interested in getting a good gyokuro, you now know what to look for. After trying many different gyokuro teas, we found the best ones are produced by Mr. Sakamoto in Shibushi. He's worked incredibly hard to produce strong, flavorful tea plants without using pesticides or chemicals. Through a long and labor-intensive production process, he's able to produce that unique sweet and savory flavor in the gyokuro tea. There are four different gyokuro teas from Mr. Sakamoto that you can choose from. The first is the Chamusume, which is made from the Yabukita cultivar. This tea has a strong umami flavor with delicate floral notes to it. Next, you have the Gyokuro Wakamusha, which is made from the Okumidori cultivar. This tea is smoother with a strong steamed vegetable flavor. We then have the Gyokuro Chamejin, which is made from the rare Saimidori cultivar, and it produces a light and sweet flavor. Finally, we have the Gyokuro Sasahime, which is made from a blend of all three cultivars. When you look at these teas, you'll notice dark leaves with these long needle shapes. If you want to try something new, we really recommend that you try a few of these teas and let us know what you think. Until then, we'll see you next time.