Ryokucha

Tea: Ryokucha
Vendor: Samovar Tea
Price: $16.00 / 4.5 oz
Vendor Description:

Origin: Organic Sencha, Matcha powder, and Toasted Brown Rice from Japan. Blended in San Francisco.

Flavor Profile: Forward notes of toasted brown rice crisps met with sweet green flavors that suggest grass and kelp. This tea is roasty delicious, full bodied, milky, and slightly malty.

Tea Story:Our version of the classic Japanese Genmaicha. This tea is a converter. It converts non-tea drinkers into devoted followers. Check out this infusion and you will be mesmerized and delighted. A stunning green color, this brew is like a meal in itself, a quintessential breakfast green tea.

House blended, we make this grassy, milky, roasty, malty, sweet, and smooth tea by blending organic matcha powder, organic toasted brown rice, and organic asamushi sencha.

Leaf: This tea is best described as a genmaicha blended with matcha. The color of the matcha powder is a bit offputting. It has a very pale yellow-green color to it. There is quite a bit of lightly toasted rice to it, but the dry leaf has a very unusual aroma. It has a very dry and powdery aroma to it, almost dusty. There is also a very vegetal aroma, almost pumpkin like.

1st Infusion Parameters: 5g, 5 oz, 185F, 90s

1st Infusion: The tea produced a murky green brown infusion. There is al ight rice aroma. The rice aroma is mixed with a dry dusty aroma still. The flaavor is full bodied, but there is not much intensity behind it. It is smooth with a medium sense of astringency, but the flavor feels muddled and clouded.

2nd Infusion Parameters: 185F, 30s

2nd Infusion: This infusion was still murky with a yellow-brown hue to it. The flavor was again light, but there was a stronger sencha flavor in it. There was a medium sense of astringnecy, but it felt like a very unimpressive sencha

Rating: 2/10

Conclusion: This was the first tea that I have tried from Samovar, and I had expected something a bit more impressive from them. This may have been partly due to my expectations from them, but this tea was in a word; disappointing. The matcha did not seem fresh, it was downright a hindrance to the tea. The underlying tea itslef was not terribly impressive when it showed thorugh in the second infusion. Still, my thanks to Jessica over at Authoritea for providing me this sample.