A tasting of bagged green teas

Tea tasting

I drink a lot of bagged tea at work. It's cheap and convenient. What can I say, my office is not set up for brewing a nice pot of loose leaf. While the dedicated tea heads of the world preach staying away from the bagged stuff because it is low quality, and doesn't taste as good, bagged tea is very popular around the world. So, after ransacking my cupboards for random bags of green tea (I have several boxes that are consolidated from boxes that had just a few tea bags left), I came up with 7 different teas to try. I actually did my tasting in 2 batches because I found 2 other tea bags after the fact. So, how did I do it?

The blue thing on the bottom of the cup is a piece of tape with the name of the corresponding tea bag on it.

Then I placed the tea bags in the cups, and cut off the tag.

Then I mixed them up. Even with the trial of 2 cups, it's easy to lose track of which is which if you pay attention to something else, like a program that you are listening to.

I added my water and brewed for 2 minutes. The differences were already becoming evident.

Check out the differences in color. They aren't even finished brewing yet!







The end products came up like this:

I gave the first batch numbers to keep track of them on my scoring sheet. I decided I didn't need to label the second trial because I could compare the darker brew to the lighter brew. I compared the following parameters:
Smell
Taste
Mouth feel (drag)
Flavor with aeration (yes, you get to loudly slurp your tea)
Flavor after sitting (because my tea at work often sits for a while before it all gets drunk)


So, does cost matter? Yes
The more expensive brands tended to fare better in this trial. This didn't always prove true. While I had 2 mint flavored teas, only one of them actually smelled or tasted minty. The other one did not register any mint at all in a blind trial. I found that a lot of them had a bitter flavor, even when brewed with water at the proper temperature. Most of them got much more bitter while sitting. I found one national brand that while highly boring when fresh and warm, became mellow and pleasant after sitting. It probably explains why I like drinking that brand so much at work.

I also found that one of the more expensive national brands made a pretty good bagged green tea (even though it was a blend). I keep thinking that part of this experiment should be helping myself cut down on the different flavors of bagged tea that I buy, and give me a core base of teas to keep on hand. We'll see how this develops, because there are a lot of good, flavored teas out there...