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Good morning Steepsterites.

I jumped back into the box of surprises I received from Wombatgirl recently, and this is the one that spoke to me today. I’ve only been up about half an hour or so and I’m still pretty sleepy. Maybe that’s the reason I chose this one. Genmaichas have always rather struck me as breakfast-y teas. I think it’s because the flavour of the rice reminds me of cereal.

This one seemed to have a serious lot of rice in it and not so much actual leaves, and the leaves that were there were broken and itty bitty. Seems this is the norm. I can’t remember ever having met a genmaicha were the leaves were of a decent size and two thirds of it didn’t look like it was rice.

But then again it’s been a while since I’ve had any at all. The last one I had was the malted one from 52teas where I didn’t really like the malted flavour much. Coincidentally that’s also the only time I’ve ever seen a flavoured genmaicha.

Anyway part of this choice is the cereal aspect and part of it was the realisation last night that when it comes to green my tastes seem to lean mostly towards Japan. I have some excellent chinese greens, but somehow the japanese ones just strike me as more interesting, without that necessarily having anything to do with the actual flavour of them, if you know what I mean. It’s a little difficult to explain.

And now that I have explained in great excruciating detail why I chose this particular one to start the day, let’s move on to the actual purpose of the post.

I have to admit I didn’t bother smellling the leaves. I could smell the rice already when I opened it, and it was rice and rice and rice and rice all the way through, so I think I’d be able to stell anything else anyway. After steeping it’s pretty much the same story. I’m picking up a lot of rice and a lot of the cereal quality, but the green tea isn’t really coming through much at all. It never does with these.

Quite cereal-y, very rice-y. A little salty too, but not hugely so. I figure it’s the rice that creates the salty flavour. There isn’t really a lot all else to say about it. I find it difficult to write extensive posts about these things because the primary flavour is just the roasted rice and that is a fairly consistent flavour.

I like genmaichas generally, but their individual ratings depend more on how I’m liking genmaicha in general on that particular day than it does on one being preferable to others. I’m liking it quite a lot today. :)