Tea Emperor

So, my review was a long time coming as my wife so eloquently put it in the previous article – Tea Emperor’s own review post will come soon after mine.

MAKERS OF THE TEA
Small tea plantation in Japan under private ownership. Can tea get any more real? Not much!

INSTRUCTIONS
Instruction manuals (and asking the way if lost) are for women and engineers. They are helpful if one has no idea about the topic, but useless if one doesn’t know how to read. Luckily I can read and I am rather new to tea. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I drink several big mugs of the damn thing every day, but ceremony and gong fu are far beyond the reach of my skills. Good thing that they include all the necessary guides on their website too, check them here.

COVER LETTER
They had included a very comforting cover letter, which told about the teas in question. Sample bags were stabled on to the paper so it was impossible to mix them up and therefore accidentally review a wrong product. Simple and effective not to mention beautiful.

THE TEA
Now you know that supportive items were fine, but how about the tea itself?

1st steep for half a minute
Refreshing and light taste with sweet aftertaste. Just my kind of a cup of tea that’s what this is, but then again I am from Finland and the strongest spice that we use here is black pepper. We like our food mild and vodka strong and cold. We drink coffee here tea, however, is a drink for old women… Anyway I liked my first cup.

2nd steep for about ten seconds
Much stronger and pit over the top for me. I liked the aftertaste though and had high hopes for the third steep.

3rd steep for half a minute again
This one already had lost its luster and was easily downed as a refreshing drink.

4th steep for one minute

Frustratingly bland and got quickly thrown away, but the left over green tea salad was fantastic!

Under the organic label they sell the most peculiar beetle dung as tea.  And people buy because someone told them that when it says organic it is healthier and tastier. Not so! Well at least not so with the taste. I’ve been drinking this organic green tea from Clipper and I can say that it tastes like dry grass. Don’t get me wrong I’m all for fair trade and all that but I so wish that they would get the tea from a tea plantation where they actually know something. OK, it’s not that bad, I’m still drinking it… or then I like beetle dung and dry grass.

One could say that we have a tea collection, but to say so would be incorrect. We merely buy more loose tea than what we consume. Poor is the faith of some of our purchases as tempting tea packages lay in some forgotten cupboard corner only to be tossed to the trash.

MAINLY LOOSE TEA

As you can see from the photo below there are mainly loose teas in our collection, but we have made some room for daily quick fixes and few specialties. With quick fix I refer to the morning bulk bag tea, which is fast, black, cheap and easy. Come to think of it that is almost how I like my women, but don’t tell that to the Empress…

Our collection of loose teas.

FEW SPECIALTIES

These we get from our travels to Asia and Northern Europe. Let’s face it, in Asia they know how to make a good cup of tea and in Northern Europe they have pristine nature with all sorts of wild plants just dying to be dried and labeled as X tea. So you want an example? Birch leaf tea, Bilberry leaf tea, Bilberry berry tea, Buckthorn tea, Cloudberry tea and then there are all those meadow herbs… I’d like to see them grow those in the Orient.

THE TEA COLLECTION

The good thing about having more than one tea brand in your slate is that you can offer more variety for the visitors, and more importantly, you can add some taste into your life just the way you need it. For some people tea collection might be a source for little competitive spirit. There’s nothing wrong in real tea collections, but remember that very few teas age well.

Dr. Kaijun Niu, at Tohoku University Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering in Sendai, and his colleagues found that men and women who are aged 70 and older and drank four or more, versus one or fewer, cups of green tea daily were 44 percent less likely to have symptoms of depression. This means that drinking several cups of green tea every day will very likely improve your spirits (like a true scientist, Dr. Kaijun Niu suggests further studies before any strong recommendations can be outlined). Also several prior studies have linked green tea consumption to reduced levels of psychological distress, so this information is very solid. Furthermore, through history, green tea has been associated with positive effects to both body and soul.

What makes Dr. Kaijun Niu’s research findings even more interesting is that if green tea was to be substituted with black tea, oolong tea or coffee then there are no beneficial psychological effects. What seems to explain this is the amino acid theanine, which apparently has soothing effect on the brain. Looks like all kind of treatment and processing of tea will diminish the nutritional value of the tea. Naturally this is especially true for coffee, which is roasted. After reading about this study, I’m willing to make the recommendation that we should always drink and eat as lightly processed beverages and foods as possible for example berry powders.