Green Tea

The story of green tea

Green tea is the oldest way of making tea and the closest to the leaf itself. The Chinese have been drinking something recognisably like it for well over a thousand years, though for most of that time it was pressed into cakes, ground, and whisked rather than steeped loose. Lu Yu's Classic of Tea, written in the 8th century during the Tang dynasty, is the first book anyone wrote about tea, and it is fussy in a way any modern tea person would recognise instantly — it has opinions about water.

The whisked-powder method travelled to Japan with Buddhist monks in the 12th century and stayed there, becoming matcha and, eventually, the tea ceremony. China meanwhile moved on to loose-leaf steeping during the Ming dynasty, when the Hongwu Emperor abolished the tribute of compressed tea cakes in 1391. That single administrative decision is why most of the world steeps loose leaf today and why Japan is the outlier that kept whisking.

The split in heat treatment is the reason Chinese and Japanese greens taste so different from each other. Pan-firing, the Chinese method, toasts the leaf: you get chestnut, warm grain, a rounder sweetness. Steaming, the Japanese method, preserves the fresh vegetal character: you get sea air, cut grass, umami and a brothy weight. Neither is more authentic. They are two answers to the same problem.

Origin: China and Japan, with the two countries using different heat to stop oxidation — pan-firing in China, steaming in Japan. · For the longer story, see the history of tea.

What it tastes like

Green tea should taste sweet and savoury at once. If yours tastes bitter, the water was too hot — that is nearly always the whole story.

• Notes: fresh-cut grass, steamed greens, chestnut, seaweed, sweet peas, butter
• Body: Light to medium, but Japanese greens can be surprisingly thick and brothy
• Astringency: Low when brewed properly, sharp and drying the moment you overdo the heat or the time

How to brew green tea

Two grams per eight ounces, water at 175 °F, two minutes. Take the leaf out. Green tea does not improve by sitting in the water.

Gongfu style

Five grams in a 100 ml gaiwan, 175 °F, 20 seconds for the first steep, adding five to ten seconds each round. Six or seven steeps from good leaf.

The mistake to avoid

Boiling water. It scalds the leaf and strips out bitterness in seconds. If you have no thermometer: boil, then wait three minutes, or pour a splash of cold water into the kettle first.

Health benefits, honestly graded

Worth knowing before you make it a habit

• Concentrated green tea extracts — the capsules, not the beverage — have been linked to liver injury in rare cases. Brewed tea is not implicated in the same way.
• Tea polyphenols reduce absorption of plant-source iron. If you are iron-deficient, drink tea between meals rather than with them.

Buying green tea well

• Buy by harvest year. Green tea is the one type that genuinely goes stale — a year-old sencha has lost the thing you were paying for.
• Japanese greens should be refrigerated in a sealed pouch once opened; Chinese greens are more forgiving but still want dark, dry, and airtight.
• Loose leaf over bags, and not for snobbery: bagged green tea is usually dust and fannings, which over-extract in seconds and taste bitter no matter what you do.

Common questions