Teas' Tea Pure Green

I can’t seem to get the link to the little picture of the bottle on the Ito En site to work. Oh well.

Today, my four year old and I went to Whole Foods to shop and decided to have lunch there. I picked this as the drink to have with my salad for lunch, mostly because unlike a lot of the other things on the shelf this didn’t have any flavorings.

As I have mentioned before I don’t have a lot of iced tea experience and most of what I have had has been on a scale on which the highested end point is unremarkable, and the lowest is retch-inducing. This is certainly better than anything on that scale, and it was a good accompaniment to lunch.

It has a vegetal, mild, sweet taste, with no bitterness and no artificial or chemical odd flavors or aftertaste. It’s only real downside is that it is a little on the ordinary/plain side. I didn’t really have a lot of time to spend with it but that’s my initial impression. I’d drink it again (but in the near term I’d probably pick something different just to gain more experience in RTD teas).

So no time for tea-time = bottled tea-time! I picked this up during lunch at work, thinking, “Hrm! Sencha-ish pickup for the middle of the day!”

I guess I should preface this review with my stance on iced tea. I’m not really a fan. Sure, I’ve drunk gallons of the pre-sweetened Nestea variety. That syrupy concoction that tastes more of manufactured sugary gloop than actual tea. And yes, on occasion, I can enjoy sweetened fountain-soda-tea. Like Lipton’s Raspberry Iced Tea from a fountain. Delicious if you can find it! But in general, iced tea makes me screw up my face in a pretty ugly grimace.

I can’t really talk much about a smell here, because I didn’t want to be seen sniffing my bottle like a nutjob at work (open-air cubicle). Besides, iced tea isn’t usually as fragrant as its hot cousin. First sip… grimace. It tastes like really cold green tea. Okay, that sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. It tasted like tea I had left out, half-drunk in a mug somewhere. Not my style.

It’s really interesting, though, in that this is an iced tea that tastes like tea. There’s no getting around it. It’s got the vegetal notes of a Japanese green throughout. A little bit more bitter than I like my greens, and the sweetness is muted through the cold. But it’s clearly green. It just tastes really plain. After a few sips in a row, I was losing the tea taste and just getting this sort of pure-water taste. Not that that’s bad, but it wasn’t a riot of nommy goodness in my mouth.

Sort of a meh.

Let me know how your tea journeys are going lately, guys! Happy holidays, Steepsterites!

Nice, fresh, and definitely green tea. Just tastes like iced tea with no additives. Sometime I get a bit of a light roasted flavor to it. Yummy and refreshing.

Probably my favorite bottled tea. Typically I don’t expect much from bottled teas but I’m a big fan of all Ito En’s white and green bottled teas in the Teas’ Tea line.

Vegetal notes of seaweed, grass, and spinach like a mild cold-brewed sencha. Crisp finish, noticeably free of any additives or sweeteners. I could drink this all the time, hot or cold weather. They are a little bit expensive (and hard to find) here in the US, but they are worth it over the syrupy sugar water that passes for bottled tea everywhere.

This tea was on sale at Harris Teeter last week, so I bought a couple of bottles. As far as teas go, I do prefer Ito En’s Oi Ocha better. This is a good brewed green tea. Less bitter than Honest Tea. Nice palate cleanser.