I would agree with what other commenters say, that this is not a strongly flavored tea, that it has grassy qualities. On the other hand, these are not bad things for everyone!
This is the first tea I tried in my new IngenuiTea tea maker, and I have say parenthetically that the IngenuiTea is the best invention since the mesh ball—and easier to use! I highly recommend that anyone who loves tea, get one! Anyway…
In my first brewing I followed the directions on the sample package: 2 min., 180 f., just over a teaspoon of leaf (though these are such long squiggly leaves dried, that it’s tough to measure in any meaningful way). I found the resulting light golden brew to be, well…acceptable. The flavors weren’t strong, but they were: grassy, buttery, a little mineral-y. Like a combination of white tea and lightly fermented oolong, but at an inoffensive and almost insignificant level of flavor. Yet I didn’t taste wateriness, leading me to believe that this was not strictly an understeep or too little tea for the amount of water; this is just not strongly flavored tea.
In the second brewing (a couple of hours after the first, though I don’t know if it makes any difference) I kept the temperature of the water the same, but steeped for radically longer: six minutes. Wish I could claim this was some important insight on my part, but what actually happened was that the phone rang right after I started steeping. I was worried this brewing would be lost to bitterness, but it seems low flavor also means low bitterness in this case: at six minutes the brew is more flavorful but otherwise unchanged, as if to say, “No, really, I am an everyday type of tea in every sense of the word; you can’t get me wrong.”
I’ll remember to steep longer in the future because with a longer steeping, even on a second brewing, the flavor is really nice; the butteriness is more pronounced and there is almost a clean, though not at all watery, quality to it. The grassiness recedes to the background, and overall, it becomes very drinkable, if still rather inoffensive. Is it possible the 2 min. recommendation is some kind of typo on Adagio’s part?
Probably I won’t buy this again; there are lots more interesting and tasty teas out there than this one. But I’ll finish the package probably over the next couple of weeks at work, when things will be quiet and I’ll be looking for ways to stay alert! For the price, I do recommend it to anyone who is looking to try (or to help someone else try) green tea for the first time. It may not be remarkable, but it is still head and shoulders above what you might get in any American grocery store, and balanced enough in flavor that anyone who thinks green tea is too grassy, vegetal, sweet, or, well, too whatever, will be pleasantly surprised.
