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Before this review, I had never had matcha before. Well that’s not strictly true, I have had matcha as an ingredient in soft drinks ice cream and speciality KitKats. All of which led me to the conclusion that I don’t like matcha in my soft drinks ice cream and chocolate-covered wafer snacks. I much prefer all those things without it.
Based on that experience, I wasn’t actually expecting to like Rosie & Java’s Izu Matcha. I was determined to try Matcha because, hey, I’m the Tea Fancier, it’s what I do, but I was expecting something unpleasantly weird and literally earthy tasting. This is why I’ve put off doing a matcha review for five months.
While bugger me, that shows what I know about anything. (Which is nothing. I know nothing about anything.) Izu Matcha was absolutely delicious. It was full-bodied, it was refreshing and it was very, very tea.
Matcha is in fact more tea-y than other teas. That’s because the tea leaves aren’t steeped in hot water like your common or garden Camelia sinensis brews. Instead the tea leaves are ground to a powder and then dissolved. (If you can’t quite picture what the difference is, imagine putting some socks in a cup of boiling water, removing them, and drinking the remaining liquid. Now, imagine grinding the socks up in some kind of industrial strength blender and then bunging the ground-sock-powder into your mug of hot water and drinking the lot. I am not sure why I’m using socks in this analogy, but I can assure you that they’re clean.)
Being a matcha virgin, I didn’t have the traditional equipment used in matcha preparation. Nor do I yet have the proper matcha making skills. I did wonder why my tea looked darker and less opaque than the ones I’d seen on Instagram. Investigating the matter further, I can see that this is due to insufficient whisking. This is possibly because I was using a metal whisk, rather than a proper bamboo matcha whisk. It is certainly due to a lack of matcha-whisking skills.
Despite my incompetent amateur efforts, I still found this tea to be an absolute delight. I made another one straight afterwards, and that one was great too. (Still under-whisked, though.)
I may have been worried about matcha initially, but now I think that this quintessential Japanese tea and I are going to get along famously. Welcome to the tea shelf Izu Matcha! It’s good to have you here!
Today’s featured book is The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology.
