Teabag - Gyokuro

Tea: Gyokuro
Vendor: Maeda-en
Price: $6.50/10 teabags
Vendor Description: Maeda-en's Premium Gyokuro Tea Bag is characterized with clear crystal blue-green color along with Gyokuro's unique balance between bitterness and sweetness. For maximum brewing, we use nylon-mesh tea bag.

This is the first teabag that I decided to review. I was a bit skeptical about this when i picked it up, mostly because I picked it up at an asian grocery store. I have had some of the products from them in the past and was generally happy, although as I got more and more into loose leaf tea I started stepping away from buying tea from non-specialty shops. I love the taste of gyokuro and I figured that this might be a good solution for it.

This teabag is made of the nicer non-paper material. Although the shape of the teabag is the flat satchel type. This was actually the first time I had seen one of these in this shape / material combination. The teabag does come individually wrapped in a foil package.

The leaf itself was rather small and it was a smaller particle size than most gyokuro I have had from them in regular loose leaf packaging from them. The brewed liquor was actually more of a yellow color than I normally see in a gyokuro.

The tea has a very mild vegetal flavor to it, with a weak flavor to it. There is a very light sense of astringency, but all in all this was a very weak flavored gyokuro. This was actually rather surprising considering I steeped this teabag with a rather small amount of water so the ratio of tea to water was rather high. All in all this was a very unremarkable gyokuro.

Rating: 2/10

Conclusion: I was hoping for more out of this teabag, but was disappointed. The style of teabag is ok, but I would have thought a tetrahedral or pyramid shape would have been better. The tea is very weak all around and not worth the cost. All in all you're better off looking elsewhere.