Tao Of Tea: Mei Li, Green Kukicha & Jade Cloud

Currently, my favorite online tea shop is Tao Of Tea. I am not being handed mounds of cash every month to spend on tea so this is mainly due to financial reasons. I tried out some of their teas, enjoyed them, and now I buy in bulk from their inventory. Their prices are also extremely reasonable compared to sites like Verdant Tea or Camellia Sinensis while maintaining a good step in quality from Adagio. All these tea sites are awesome and highly recommended by many avid tea drinkers in the r/tea community on reddit.

My most recent purchase from Tao Of Tea included Green Kukicha, Jade Cloud, and Mei Li.


Green Kukicha

This is a Japanese green tea that tastes like a mix between Matcha and Sencha. It has a powdery, sweet, and vegetal taste with an optional mild, yet, sharp bitterness that can be brought out with slightly higher water temperature. This tea contains a heavy amount of stems, which is part of what give it a distinctive flavor over Sencha. If you're a fan of Japanese greens then I'd give this a whirl (I've never said or typed that idiom before in my life, nor do I plan on ever doing so again). I use a gaiwan (although I should be using a kyusu) and when I pour it out I pour it through a little hand held filter. I use 170-175°F water for about 40 seconds in a gaiwan.

Here is some brewed Kukicha with the cool container in the BG.

Jade Cloud

Pre-brew...

This Chinese green can be described as sweet, floral, and smokey. Unfortunately, it was hard to ever bring out a strong version of this flavor. I experimented with amount of leaf and water temperatures but never got a really satisfying cup out of it (minus 1 randomly awesome cup when I first got it, probably due to freshness). I won't be buying this tea again, but maybe there is somebody out there who can teach me how to make it taste right. My only guess would be that you may have to practically stew the leaves in order to get a strong flavor out of it (around 185-190°F), but I kinda doubt that.

Post-brew...

Mei Li

I really liked this Chinese tea... it had a bold and deep mildly sweet flavor and I SWEAR has a hint of chocolate on certain days... maybe I'm just crazy, though. I'd say this is my favorite of the three greens. I usually pour the water over the Mei Li in a gaiwan while the water is around 178°F and then let it steep about 45 seconds. Use a fair amount of leaf... nearing or at two teaspoons. This gives you some great Mei Li yummy goodness.

YUM. COME TO ME, MEI LI. Sounds like a girl.

Mei Li & Jade Cloud blend??

Hell yea. I used the last of my stash of both to try out a blend. It turned out to be great! I used a good chunk of leaf and 170-175° water for 45 seconds and got a good combination of both flavors. I'd side with a straight Mei Li brew but this is certainly awesome. Haven't tried the second steep yet... but I have no doubt in my mind that it'll taste good.

Lookin' good.

It got kinda messy in there. I liked it.

"Moar Tea For Me" Rediscovered

I just remembered that my blog existed thanks to somebody I know who also remembered that her blog existed. I will surely be whoring out about tea occasionally from now on. Time to catch up...

So I used to consume and own a LOT of tea. That was about 3+ years ago. Even then my college roommates got used to me taking up an entire freaking cupboard in our apartment for my loose leaf and teabags. Now I consume so much tea that I could flood my bathtub on a daily basis. However, my tea collection and teaware is expanding all the time. I don't think you can ever fully master tea... not even the Grand Tea Masters can. I will be learning new things about tea for the rest of my life.

Hello, tea. I am going to learn about you forever and ever.

Anyway, this is who I am. I am a film composer who graduated from California State University of Northridge and was then admitted into the USC SMPTV (Scoring For Motion Picture & Television) graduate certificate program, which I politely declined to continue my career. Only 20 people are admitted into this program every year, so you can see that my main passion in life is composing music. However, my second biggest passion is tea.

Tea and music go wonderfully well together. Tea and work go well together. Since I am a musician that means music is my work. I just shotgunned three clay pigeons all at once.

You could see my current tea making set up in the above picture. There will be another one below this paragraph. I LOVE using a Gaiwan because it allows for multiple quick infusions and, thus, very precise tea steeping chemistry. I heat up my filtered water using this over priced kettle from Adagio Teas that I would not recommend purchasing because there are cheaper ones and the temperature control is absolutely a lie. I then pour my water into my ancient looking tea pot (I checked the inside and there isn't a single crack) and measure it with a digital thermometer. By the way, if you are using a thermometer don't let it touch the bottom of the teapot or glass that you are using because it can change the temperature by about 10°F. Once the tea reaches the desired temperature I then pour it into the Gaiwan and do my thing. I usually steep my green teas rather strong. I never steep my teas for 20 seconds in a Gaiwan. That seems crazy to me. The minimum I ever do is 30-40 seconds for my first steep.

Green Kukicha purchased from Tao Of Tea.

This is all I want to cover for my first post in a long time. I'll finish by promoting some good tea websites below:

Tao Of Tea (I order a lot of tea from here. Highly recommended!)

Adagio Teas (PERFECT for beginners)

Verdant Tea

Camellia Sinensis

Tea on Reddit (you can learn so much about tea by discussing it with the reddit /r/tea community. I post here and 14,000 other tea drinkers do as well)