Dragon Well Green Tea (Tea bags)
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From Ten Ren Tea
This teabag contains broken leaves of green tea, but they are more whole than the fannings and dust found in some teabags. The green tea is a basic pan-fried green tea.
The tea brews a clear golden colour and has a rather strong smokey aroma with some hints of grassyness. It has a crisp flavor with some bite. Even when brewed at a lower temperature, there's still a bit of an unpleasant acidity to it. Compared to a typical dragon well tea, I find this tea to be much more smokey, and less grassy.
The brewing instructions printed on the teabag are wrong--it says to use boiling water, 2-4 min, and to use one cup. As one would expect, this will scald the tea. TenRen gives better brewing instructions on their website. But also, I have found that this is a strong-ish tea and the teabag contains a good volume of leaves. I recommend using at least a cup and a half (if you have an adequately-sized mug) and brewing this for only two minutes. You can then make a second cup brewing it longer.
This is among the best green teabag teas I've tried. It blows away TenRen's regular "green" teabags and is only a few cents more expensive per cup. If, like me, you like to stache a handful of teabags on you "just in case" you're stuck somewhere with lipton-only, this is a good choice.