Green tea

Tea whose oxidation is halted early by heat, keeping the leaf green and the cup fresh, vegetal or marine in character.

73 teas in the catalogue绿茶

What it is

Green tea is defined by what does not happen to it. Shortly after plucking, the leaf is heated — steamed in the Japanese tradition, pan-fired in most of China — which denatures the enzymes responsible for oxidation. Everything that follows (rolling, shaping, drying) happens to a leaf that will no longer brown. The result is a family that ranges from the marine, umami-heavy steamed teas of Japan to the chestnut-sweet pan-fired greens of Zhejiang, unified by process rather than by flavour.

What makes it this category: Kill-green (fixation) applied before meaningful oxidation can develop.

Defining steps: Kill-green (fixation)

The steps that make it this category

A category of tea is not a plant and not a place — it is a decision about what is done to the leaf and in what order. These are the steps that put a tea in this category rather than a neighbouring one, each with what it does to the leaf.

Kill-green (fixation) — Denatures polyphenol oxidase and related enzymes, arresting enzymatic oxidation.
Basket drying (hong gan) — Dries leaf by still radiant and convective heat in a basket above a low fire, without pressing or tumbling it against a hot surface.
Curling and down-raising (cuo tuan xian hao) — Curls warm leaf on itself by repeated palm friction while it dries, simultaneously raising the leaf’s trichomes so they stand proud of the surface.
De-stemming and de-veining — Separates leaf blade from stem and coarse vein, standardising the material that goes into the finished tea.
Drum fixation — Passes leaf continuously through a heated rotating cylinder, denaturing oxidation enzymes by repeated brief contact with hot metal and hot air rather than by resting on a pan surface.
Final firing (hiire) — Reduces refined leaf to storage moisture using hot air, a heated drum or a radiant-fired cylinder, while developing surface browning reactions whose extent the refiner chooses.
Flat shaping — Flattens and dries the leaf against a heated surface while fixation is still in progress, setting the characteristic blade shape.
Hojicha roasting — Applies high, brief heat to finished green tea, driving thermal browning reactions that replace its existing aromatic profile rather than adding to it.
Leaf separation by hand (ban pian) — Separates leaf blades from the bud and the stem of each fresh shoot by hand, and sorts them by position, producing a batch of uniform single leaves before any heat is applied.
Needle shaping (li tiao) — Repeatedly throws warm leaf along a heated groove so it extends and sets straight while losing moisture, shaping and part-drying in one operation with minimal cell rupture.
Pan-firing (Chinese fixation) — Denatures oxidation enzymes through dry contact heat while simultaneously initiating surface browning reactions in the leaf.
Pearl forming (chao gan cheng yuan) — Compresses each piece of leaf into a sphere by continuous agitation against a heated pan wall while driving off moisture, so that shaping and drying happen together and the finished pellet is hard rather than pliable.
Pulling the old fire (la lao huo) — Applies very high radiant heat in repeated brief exposures with redistribution between each, taking the leaf to a low final moisture without holding it long enough at temperature to scorch.
Refining (shiage) — Cuts, screens, winnows and de-stems dried crude tea, separating one intake into several distinct commercial products rather than grading a single one.
Steaming (Japanese fixation) — Denatures polyphenol oxidase using saturated steam, arresting oxidation without applying dry contact heat to the leaf surface.
Stone milling — Reduces tencha to a particle size of a few microns without heating the leaf enough to damage its aromatics or colour.

History

The oldest category still made, and for most of tea’s history the only one. Loose-leaf green tea in the form recognisable today displaced compressed cakes at the Ming court in the fourteenth century. Japan received tea from China twice — as powdered tea with the monk Eisai around 1191, and as the steamed leaf style Nagatani Soen invented in 1738, which is the direct ancestor of nearly all Japanese green tea made now.

38 of the 73 teas in this category carry their own history note.

How it is made

Everything turns on stopping oxidation within hours of picking, and on how. China pan-fires in a heated wok, which adds a toasted chestnut note through direct contact with hot metal. Japan steams, which preserves the leaf’s marine and vegetal character and gives the vivid green colour. That single fork accounts for more of the difference between Chinese and Japanese green tea than climate, cultivar and altitude combined.

Where it is produced

Countries that name this category as one of their own, together with the countries the teas in the catalogue are actually recorded from. The two lists are not the same, and neither is a claim that production is limited to what is here — processing decides the category, so any country growing the plant can in principle make it.

What it tastes like

Grassy, vegetal and marine at one end; nutty, toasted and chestnut-like at the other. Bitterness and astringency rise sharply with water temperature, which is why green tea has a reputation for being difficult — it is not fragile, it is simply the category least tolerant of boiling water.

Across the catalogue: 16 delicate, 50 moderate, 7 bold. Filter this category by taste

How it is brewed

Styles recorded as suiting this category. The category carries no ratio or temperature of its own — those are written per tea — so these are routes into the method rather than a set of numbers for the family.

Cold brew tea — Leaf steeped in cold water in the refrigerator for several hours. Low temperature extracts the sweet and savoury compounds readily and the bitter and astringent ones barely at all, producing a cup that is genuinely different rather than simply a chilled version of a hot one.
Flash-chilled iced tea — Tea brewed hot at double strength directly onto ice, so it chills within seconds. The speed is the whole method: aromatic compounds that volatilise away while a hot brew cools slowly are captured instead, giving a far more fragrant iced tea than gradual chilling produces.
Grandpa style — Leaf loose in a tall glass or flask, topped up with hot water through the day and drunk around the leaf. It is how an enormous proportion of tea is actually consumed in China, and it needs no equipment whatsoever.
Ice steeping (kōridashi) — Ice cubes placed directly on dry leaf and left to melt, with no water added at all. The liquor arrives as the ice goes, drop by drop, and there is very little of it. It is the coldest steeping in ordinary practice and produces the most concentrated sweet extraction of any.
Koicha (thick matcha) — Matcha prepared thick enough to pour like paint rather than to whisk into foam. It is not a stronger version of everyday matcha but a separate preparation with its own motion, its own grade of powder and, in chanoyu, its own place in the sequence — and it is the older of the two.
Korean green tea brewing — A low-temperature approach to Korean green tea in which the water is cooled through a separate open vessel before it ever meets the leaf, and the pot is emptied entirely into the cups each time. Darye names the etiquette; the brewing approach below is shared by everyday practice outside any formal setting.
Kyusu brewing (Japanese style) — The Japanese domestic approach to green tea: a moderate quantity of leaf, water well off the boil, short steeps, and two or three infusions from the same leaf with the times adjusted each time.
Low-temperature brewing (gyokuro style) — A great deal of shaded Japanese leaf in a very small volume of water that is deliberately far below boiling — cool enough that the vessel can be held bare-handed. It is the most extreme low-temperature steeping in common practice, and it exists to extract one part of the leaf while leaving another behind.
Mongolian milk tea (suutei tsai) — Brick or green tea boiled in water and milk with salt, and aerated by being ladled and poured back into the pot repeatedly. It is an everyday drink in Mongolia and in Inner Mongolia rather than a ceremonial one, and it is savoury by design rather than as a variation on a sweet drink.
Moroccan mint tea preparation — Chinese gunpowder green tea brewed strong with a large quantity of fresh spearmint and sugar, and poured from height into small glasses. It is the daily preparation and the hospitality ritual across the Maghreb, and the pour is functional as well as expressive.
Mug infuser brewing — Loose leaf in a basket inside a mug — the most common way loose tea is actually made, and the method most often responsible for people concluding that loose leaf is not worth the trouble.
Noon chai (Kashmiri pink tea) — Green tea boiled long with a pinch of bicarbonate of soda, shocked with cold water, aerated, then finished with milk and salt. The pink colour is the visible consequence of the chemistry rather than an added ingredient, and the preparation belongs to Kashmiri households on both sides of the Line of Control.
Western brewing (teapot or mug) — A small amount of leaf in a large volume of water, steeped once for a few minutes and then strained off. The approach most English-speaking drinkers already know, and the one most teas sold in the West are made for.
Whisking (bowl-prepared powdered tea) — Powdered leaf suspended in water rather than steeped and strained — the only common preparation in which the leaf itself is consumed rather than discarded.

Where to start

Chosen for being forgiving rather than impressive — each tolerates an imprecise brew.

Hojicha
Roasty and gently sweet with essentially no astringency — the Japanese green tea for people who dislike green tea, and a common evening choice for exactly that reason.
How to brew it
Genmaicha
Toasted and comforting, with the rice doing most of the aromatic work. The story that it was a wartime economy measure is widely repeated and poorly evidenced; what is clear is that the rice reduces the cost per cup.
How to brew it
Longjing
Nutty and sweet with a soft body and very little grip. Where Japanese greens go marine and savoury, Longjing goes toasted and sweet — the clearest single illustration of what pan-firing does that steaming does not.
How to brew it
Sencha
Vegetal and savoury at once. Brewed cool it leans sweet and broth-like; brewed hot it turns sharply astringent, which is the single most common way people decide they dislike green tea.
How to brew it

Tools

Comparisons

Comparisons filed against this category, and against the teas inside it. 61 touch this category; the first 12 are listed alphabetically.

Asamushi vs chumushi vs fukamushi — How many seconds the leaf spent in steam, which decides whether the cup is clear and aromatic or cloudy and thick. Cloudiness in Japanese green tea is one of the most misread signals in tea: here it is the deliberate product of the steaming choice.
Bancha vs sencha — The same bushes, different harvests. Bancha is what sencha production leaves behind, and it is considerably better than that description implies.
Baozhong vs green tea — Baozhong is the lightest oxidised oolong there is, and the question of whether it is really an oolong at all is a reasonable one to ask.
Best teas for beginners, compared — Four teas chosen for one property only: they are hard to brew badly. This compares them on how forgiving they are, not on which is best — and makes no claim about anything other than flavour and technique.
Chinese vs Japanese green tea — The largest single split inside green tea, and it is not about country. It is about whether the leaf was fixed with steam or with a hot pan.
Enshi Yu Lu vs sencha — The rule that Chinese green tea is pan-fired and Japanese green tea is steamed is a good rule with one well-known exception, and tasting the exception is the clearest way to understand what the rule is actually about.
Genmaicha vs matcha-iri genmaicha — The green version with matcha blended in is now the more common product, and the reason is not that it is better tea. It is that the matcha covers for what is underneath.
Green tea powder vs matcha — Both are green and both are powder, and only one of them is matcha. The difference is three production decisions that happen before any grinding, and it is visible in the colour.
Green tea styles compared — Five green teas spanning steamed and pan-fired, shaded and unshaded, roasted and fresh. The fixation method splits this category more than any origin does.
Green tea vs black tea — The same plant, taken through opposite decisions about one step. Everything people believe distinguishes them — colour, strength, caffeine, delicacy — follows from whether oxidation was prevented or completed.
Green tea vs black tea for a beginner — The two most available categories, and the one people should usually start with is not the one they usually try first. The category most people try first is not the one that gives the shortest path to something better.
Gunpowder vs sencha — Two rolled green teas that look superficially similar and are made for opposite purposes — one to survive a sea voyage, one to be drunk within months of picking.

Every written comparison

Guides for this category

What is green tea? — Tea whose oxidation is stopped before it starts, by heat applied within hours of picking. The method of heating — steam or pan — splits the category into two families that taste almost nothing alike.
Water temperature, and why it matters more in tea than in coffee — Temperature is the single most consequential variable in tea brewing, and the one most often got wrong. It is also the easiest to fix without buying anything.
Floral infusions — Infusions made from flowers rather than leaves, roots or fruit. A category defined by plant part, which makes it the most botanically coherent of the herbal groupings.
The origin of tea — Where tea comes from botanically is reasonably settled; where and when people started drinking it is much less so. The famous origin story is a legend, and the honest answer involves more uncertainty than most accounts admit.
Why roasted teas taste nutty — Sustained heat on finished leaf drives browning reactions that generate toasted, caramelised and nutty compounds — the same broad family of reactions that browns bread, and a completely separate step from oxidation.
Choosing your first tea — Named teas rather than categories, chosen by what you already drink. There is no single right first tea, and starting from what you like now works better than starting from what is celebrated.
From green tea beginner to enthusiast — A route through green tea in an order that builds, starting with the forgiving teas and reaching the demanding ones only once the brewing is under control.
Exploring Chinese tea styles — China produces all six categories, and the useful way in is by province and processing rather than by trying to work through a famous-tea list.
Exploring Japanese tea styles — Almost entirely green tea, almost entirely steamed, and organised around three variables: how long the leaf was steamed, whether the bushes were shaded, and which part of the plant you are drinking.
How tea is processed — Every one of the six categories comes from the same plant, and what separates them is a short sequence of decisions made in the hours and days after picking. Learn the sequence and the categories stop needing to be memorised.
Storing tea — Tea has four enemies — air, light, moisture and odour — and almost every storage mistake is one of them. The rules are simple, and one whole category needs the opposite of the main one.
Kettles, and getting to temperature — A variable-temperature kettle removes the most common brewing error. It is also entirely optional, and three free methods get you close enough that the difference is hard to taste.
Does tea go off? — Dry tea does not spoil in the way perishable food does, but it certainly fades, and the date printed on the packet is usually about flavour rather than anything else. Some teas are deliberately aged and get better.
How to read a tea label — Most of the words on a tea packet are unregulated, and a few of them are load-bearing. Knowing which is which is the difference between paying for a tea and paying for an adjective.
Making matcha at home — Powdered tea whisked into suspension rather than steeped and strained. The technique is genuinely different from every other tea, and most of what goes wrong is temperature and clumping rather than skill.
How to judge tea quality — Quality in tea is not one property and is not the same as price. Four things are worth assessing, three of them are free to check, and none of them is what the packet is likely to be talking about.
Why green tea tastes grassy — Because the fixation step preserves compounds that oxidation would otherwise transform — and because in Japanese tea, steaming preserves a different set of them than pan-firing does.
Tea vs herbal infusion — One plant against several hundred. The comparison is worth making carefully, because almost every generalisation about 'tea' fails the moment herbal infusions are included in it.
Tea steeping times explained — Steep time is the variable people reach for first and the one that fixes least. Understanding what it actually controls makes the other variables easier to use.
The mistakes that make tea taste bad — Almost all disappointing tea is one of six errors, and five of them cost nothing to fix. None of them is buying the wrong tea, which is where most people start looking.
How tea spread across Asia — Tea left China by several routes over many centuries, and what each destination received depended on when it arrived. That timing is why Japanese and Korean tea culture look so different from each other and from China’s.
Cold and hot extraction are not the same process slowed down — Time cannot buy back what temperature is not providing. A twelve-hour cold steep and a three-minute hot one do not converge, and the reason is worth understanding.
Oxidation level does not set the brewing temperature — The tidiest rule in tea — more oxidised means hotter water — is a rough correlation dressed up as a law, and following it strictly will ruin several well-known teas.
Shade, and the two completely unrelated reasons it is used — Japanese producers shade tea for a few weeks before harvest to change what is inside the leaf. Agroforestry systems shade tea permanently to change the environment the plant lives in. The two practices share a word and almost nothing else.
Rainfall, temperature and the dormant season — Whether a tea region has a winter is the single biggest structural fact about it. It decides whether tea is a seasonal crop with flushes worth naming or a year-round one, and it decides what kind of product the region can sell.
Bush or tree: what an unpruned tea plant actually looks like — The waist-high hedge in every photograph of a tea field is an artefact of pruning. Left alone, the same plant becomes a tree, and the places where it has been left alone produce a category of tea that behaves differently from everything else.
Why green tea is the hardest category to make well — Green tea has the fewest steps and the least margin. There is nothing in the process that hides a mistake, no oxidation to build over a weak start and no roast to cover a flat finish, and every error is still in the cup at the end.
Steam or pan: the fork that split green tea in two — Japanese and Chinese green teas taste categorically different, and the reason is not the plant, the place or the picking. It is that one tradition stops oxidation with steam and the other stops it with hot metal.
Green tea and dark tea want opposite storage, and this is the fact to keep — One category is stored to stop it changing and the other is stored to make it change. Almost all confusing storage advice comes from a writer who has not said which of the two they mean.
Refrigerating and freezing tea: when it genuinely helps and when it is a mistake — Cold storage is standard commercial practice for Japanese green tea and a reliable way to ruin several other categories. The difference is not the temperature — it is condensation, odour and whether the tea was supposed to keep changing.
Why tea absorbs smells, and why that is also how jasmine tea is made — The property that ruins tea stored next to coffee is the same property an entire scenting industry depends on. Understanding it as one mechanism rather than two makes both the hazard and the craft easier to reason about.
Storing matcha, the most fragile thing in the cupboard — Grinding leaf into powder removes every physical protection it had. Matcha is the one tea where the clock after opening is measured in weeks, and where the decline is visible before it is tasted.
How much tea to buy at once, given everything storage cannot fix — The most consequential storage decision is made in the shop. No container recovers a tea bought in a quantity larger than its good period, and for the fragile categories buying less more often is the whole technique.
Harvest date against best-before date, and why only one of them is about the tea — A durability date is a packer’s estimate applied to a category. A harvest date is a fact about the leaf. For half the catalogue the difference decides whether you are buying the tea you think you are.
Ceremonial grade, and the other words nobody defines — A group of terms on tea packaging look like classifications and are not: no body defines them, no audit checks them, and any seller may use any of them. Knowing which words are in this group, and what to look at instead, is most of label literacy.
Scented and flavoured are two different productions, with a difference you can taste — Scenting puts a tea next to an aromatic material and lets the leaf absorb it. Flavouring adds a compound to the finished tea. The distinction is a production fact, it is visible in the ingredient list, and it behaves differently across infusions.
Why famous tea names are substituted, and how to read a price that does not add up — Some tea names are sold in far greater quantity than the places they refer to can produce. The substitutions are systematic rather than random, they follow the same commercial logic every time, and the leaf involved is usually perfectly good.
The five things a tongue reports, and where each comes from in tea — Taste proper is a short list — sweet, bitter, sour, salty, umami — and tea is unusual in delivering four of them noticeably and the fifth almost never. Sorting a cup into these five is the first step to describing it usefully.
Body and mouthfeel: what makes a tea feel thick — Thickness is the quality experienced drinkers rate most highly and describe worst. It is not strength, not colour and not astringency, and several quite different things in the leaf and in the brewing contribute to it.
Polyphenols and catechins: the astringency and bitterness family — The largest soluble fraction of a green tea leaf, and the one most responsible for grip and bitterness. Its behaviour explains why green tea is brewed cool, why oxidation changes everything, and why the same leaf tastes different at minute one and minute three.
Amino acids and theanine: the umami and sweetness side of the leaf — The savoury, brothy, sweet quality of a fine green tea comes from the leaf’s free amino acids, of which theanine is the most abundant. Their level relative to the polyphenols is the single most useful chemical fact for understanding why shaded teas taste as they do.
Caffeine as a flavour fact: what it contributes to the cup — Caffeine is intensely bitter, and that is a fact about the taste of tea. Where it sits in the leaf, and what raises or lowers it agronomically, therefore belongs to a discussion of flavour — separately from every other question people ask about it.
Firing, roasting and baking: what heat makes that was not there before — Heat is applied to tea at several points for several different reasons, and only some of them are about drying. The reactions between sugars and amino acids generate an entirely new set of aromas, which is why a roasted tea is not a darker version of an unroasted one.
What shading does to a tea bush, and why it changes the chemistry — Covering a tea field for the weeks before picking is one of the few agricultural interventions in tea with a direct, well-understood chemical purpose. It is also expensive, labour-intensive and hard on the plant, which is why shaded teas cost what they do.
Why season and flush change the cup — The same bushes, the same maker and the same process produce noticeably different tea in April and in June. Dormancy, growth rate, light and — in one famous case — an insect account for most of the difference.
Tea and Japanese Zen — The connection is real, documented and much narrower than the way it is usually invoked. Tea arrived in Japan through monastic contact with China, and the tea ceremony was shaped by people with Zen training — which is not the same as the ceremony being a religious rite.
The tea clippers, and why the races stopped — For about two decades, sailing ships raced from Chinese ports to London because the first new-season cargo landed commanded a premium. Then a canal opened and a steamship could take a shortcut a sailing ship could not, and the whole thing ended within a few years.
Geographical indications as an economic instrument — A protected origin name is a legal device for making a reputation non-reproducible. It creates value by excluding people from a word — which is both why it works and why it is contested.
Fertiliser and nitrogen in tea growing — Tea is harvested as new shoots, over and over, all season. That makes it unusually hungry for nitrogen, and nitrogen is where most of a tea field’s environmental accounting sits — in the soil, in the water and in the atmosphere.
Energy and fuel in tea processing — Making tea is mostly an exercise in removing water, and removing water takes heat. The drier, and whatever is burnt to feed it, is usually the largest single energy load in the whole business of producing tea — and the least discussed.
Old leaf, stem and stalk: the parts of the plant that are not the bud — Most of a tea plant is not the bit anyone photographs. Mature leaf and stem are structurally and compositionally different tissue, they are the specified material for several whole categories of tea, and treating them as failure states makes those categories incomprehensible.
Albino, yellow and purple: the tea plants with a pigment fault — A handful of tea cultivars produce leaves that are not green — white, yellow, or purple. In every case the colour is a property of the plant rather than of the processing, and in every case the name of the resulting tea has been confused with a processing category.
Why the order matters more than the steps — There are perhaps a dozen operations in tea manufacture and every category uses most of them. What separates green from black from oolong is almost entirely the sequence, and once you can see the sequence you stop needing to memorise the categories.
How one cultivar becomes three different teas — Several plants in commercial use are routinely made into a green tea, a black tea and an oolong, sometimes in the same district and sometimes by the same producer. What changes is the route, and what the plant contributes is a tilt rather than a category.
What happens after the drier — In several traditions a tea is not finished when it comes out of the drying machine. Sorting, refining, final firing, blending and resting are real operations, they are frequently performed by a different business, and they can move a tea further than anything the grower did.
Teas made from finished tea — Jasmine tea, hojicha, shou pu-erh and the Fu brick all begin with a completed, saleable tea and then do something else to it. That is where the six-category scheme starts to creak, and the creaking is informative.
What a freezer actually does to tea, including the defrost cycle nobody mentions — The advice to portion and freeze a spring green tea is sound and the hardware it is given to is not neutral. A frost-free freezer works by drying its own interior on a repeating cycle, and that is a different environment from the chest freezer the advice was written for.
What a best-before date on tea is, as a category of food labelling — Two kinds of date appear on food and they answer different questions. Tea carries the quality one, set by the packer to a policy rather than to the leaf — and understanding why the system produces that outcome is more useful than trying to decode any particular number.
Storing flavoured, scented and blended teas, which behave unlike plain leaf — A flavoured tea has a second clock running alongside the leaf’s own, a blend with visible botanicals has several, and both are aromatic sources as well as sinks. The storage arrangement that suits plain leaf leaves all three of those unaddressed.
Kuradashi: the one Japanese green tea tradition built on keeping it — Japanese green tea is the category most defined by freshness, and it also has an established practice of holding tea in cold store from spring and releasing it in autumn as a distinct product. The two are not in contradiction, and the reason is instructive.
How old is this tea? Reading age from the leaf when there is no date — The changes storage produces arrive in a reliable order, which makes them usable in reverse. A tea with no date on it can be placed roughly in that sequence from its colour, its smell, its sound and how it behaves across infusions.
Reading a Japanese tea label, field by field — Japanese packaging is the most informative in common circulation and most of it never reaches an English-language listing. The product name, the picking, the prefecture, the steaming depth and the cultivar are usually all present, and each of them narrows what the tea can be.
Reading a Chinese tea label, and the fields that carry weight — A Chinese pack carries a set of fields that a Western shopper rarely learns to read: a numbered grade within a named tea, a production date, a standard code and a producing area. Together they narrow a tea considerably, and none of them is the front-of-pack name.
Grading by picking date: the East Asian alternative to grading by appearance — The orthodox letter grades describe what the leaf looks like. Several East Asian systems instead describe when it was picked, which is a different kind of claim with different failure modes — and it is frequently the more predictive of the two.
How tea is sold by quantity: grams, jin, tongs and cost per cup — Tea is quantified in at least four incompatible ways across the markets a buyer encounters, and the unit a seller chooses shapes what a price looks like. Converting everything to one basis is the cheapest analytical habit available to anyone buying tea.
Buying tea as a gift, which combines every risk at once — Gift purchases push a buyer towards large decorative packaging, prestige categories and long-keeping stock, and every one of those is the wrong direction for tea. The generous choice is usually the smaller and cheaper one.
Tea subscriptions, sample clubs and advent calendars — A recurring delivery solves the discovery problem and creates a storage problem, and the two pull against each other. Which of the several formats suits a household depends almost entirely on how fast it actually drinks tea.
Floral: orchid, jasmine, lilac and the family that covers half the catalogue — Floral is the widest and least precise of the aroma families and it is also the one with the clearest chemistry behind it. A handful of compound groups are consistently associated with it, and the processing step that generates most of them is the one oolong is built around.
Honey, malt, caramel and dried fruit: the sweet aroma families — A tea contains very little sugar, and a great deal of what reads as sweetness is aromatic and arrives through the nose. These four families are the main routes, they overlap chemically, and three of the four are generated by heat.
Vegetal, grassy and marine: the green family and the seaweed question — The fresh green smell of a cut leaf comes from a well-characterised group of compounds released the moment a leaf is damaged. The marine character of shaded Japanese tea is a separate thing again, and it is the note most often mistaken for saltiness.
Roasted, nutty, chestnut and cocoa: the aromas heat makes — This family does not exist in the growing leaf at all. Every note in it is created by heat acting on sugars and amino acids, which is why the same descriptors appear in bread, coffee and roasted nuts and why a roasted tea is not a darker version of an unroasted one.
Sugars, pectins and polysaccharides: the compounds behind texture — Tea contains very little free sugar and a great deal of carbohydrate in larger forms, and the larger forms are what a drinker experiences as thickness and coating. This is the compound family Sprint 31 named in passing and never opened.
What colours a tea liquor, and why colour is a poor guide to strength — Four groups of compounds account for nearly all the colour in a cup, and none of them tracks how much material is dissolved. Judging strength by eye is one of the commonest brewing errors and this is the mechanism behind it.
Foam, film and the surface of the liquor — Three quite different things appear on the surface of a cup of tea — a foam, an oily film and a dull scum — and they have unrelated causes. Two are properties of the leaf and one is a property of the water.
How the famous-name teas acquired their names — Longjing, Biluochun, Tieguanyin, Keemun, Dahongpao: the names look ancient and uniform and are neither. They come from places, temples, shapes, emperors, competitions and twentieth-century lists, and knowing which is which tells you what a name is worth.
Chanoyu was a political institution before it was an aesthetic one — Utensils were granted as rewards for military service, permission to hold a gathering was a privilege in the gift of a warlord, and the most famous tea master of all was ordered to kill himself. The aesthetics are real; they were built inside a system of power.
Uji, shading, and the origin of the Japanese green profile — One district acquired a technique that changes the leaf chemically, and the whole prestige structure of Japanese tea was built on it. The accident story attached to the discovery is a legend; the agronomic and commercial logic behind the technique is not.
What matcha should cost, and what you are paying for — Matcha spans roughly two orders of magnitude in price, and almost all of the difference is decided before the leaf reaches the mill. Here is where each cost sits, and which of them a drinker can actually taste.
Choosing a matcha without a grading system to lean on — There is no regulated matcha grading, no certifying body and no agreed vocabulary. What there is: a small set of things a seller either tells you or does not, and each omission means something.
Cold matcha, and the mixing problem — Matcha in cold water is a suspension problem rather than an extraction problem, which is why the usual advice about temperature does not apply and why a shaker works better than a whisk.
Matcha and coffee, compared on what can actually be compared — Most people meeting matcha are coming from coffee. The two differ in preparation, in dose, in what is consumed and in caffeine per serving — and the last of those is far less clear-cut than either side's marketing suggests.
Using someone else's tea practice — A question people ask quietly and rarely find answered: is it alright to whisk matcha, brew gongfu, or pour Moroccan mint tea when none of it is yours. The useful answer is not a permission slip, and it is not a prohibition either.
Does elevation make tea better? — High-grown commands a premium in several markets and there is a real mechanism behind it. It is also a claim that stops holding well before the marketing does, and two of the world's most respected tea regions are not high at all.
Two leaves and a bud: the plucking standard — The first quality decision made about any tea is made in the field, before any processing at all: how much of the shoot the picker takes. It sets a ceiling nothing downstream can raise.
When tea is harvested, country by country — There is no world tea calendar. Some regions pick twice a year in sharply defined flushes, some pick continuously, and the vocabulary is different in each — first flush, ichibancha and pre-Qingming are three systems, not three translations.

Journeys through this category

Moving beyond tea bags — Someone comfortable with loose black tea who has never tried the other categories.
Exploring green tea — Someone who wants to understand green tea rather than tolerate it.
Discover Japanese tea — Someone who has had sencha or matcha and wants the rest of the picture.
Understanding matcha — Someone who drinks matcha lattes, or has bought a tin and a whisk, and wants to know what the thing actually is.
Discover Chinese tea — Someone who wants the breadth of the country tea came from.
Understanding tea families — Someone who has heard there are six kinds of tea and wants to know what actually separates them.
Finding your first loose leaf tea — Someone ready to buy loose leaf and unsure which of the hundreds of names to start with.
Building a home tea setup — Someone who wants to buy equipment in the order that actually improves the cup.
I like coffee — A coffee drinker who finds most tea thin and wants something with body and roast.
Exploring scented tea — Someone who likes jasmine tea and suspects there is more to it than one product.
Learning to taste tea — Someone who can tell they like one tea more than another and cannot say why, and would like to be able to.

Every green tea

Caffeine: Caffeine varies far more with leaf material, leaf quantity and steeping than with the category itself. Shaded teas such as gyokuro and whole-leaf matcha sit at the higher end; stem-heavy teas such as kukicha sit lower. TeaHQ authors caffeine estimates for only 11 of 302 teas and does not infer them from category, because category predicts caffeine poorly.