Tregothnan – Single Estate Green Tea
I reviewed Tregothnan Single Estate Black Tea a few days ago. This is not the only round in Tregothnan’s single estate arsenal. They have another one up their UK-tea-production sleeves. And this time it’s green!
Well, I say ‘green’. Tregothnan Single Estate Green tea is not all that green for a green tea. Maybe I’ve been having a lot of particularly delicate green teas lately, but I was surprised by how brown this tea looked in the cup. It’s a goldeny sort of colour, that has a delicate Darjeeling-esque appearance.
Admittedly, it’s still yellower than your standard black tea. At no point was I tempted to put milk in it or anything crazy like that. But there’s something in both the look and taste of it that suggests a more delicate version of regular tea than a flowery, grassy, vegetal tea experience. I would compare it to an oolong if my current oolong experience weren’t so woefully limited that I’d be worried about showing myself up.
(Tregothnan do produce an oolong by the way. I tried a cup of it during the Tea Tasting Masterclass and it was delicious. I would have bought some for review purposes had it not cost a whopping £75 for 7g. Now, I’m fairly free and easy with my tea expenditure, but that’s a bit steep even for me. It makes this Single Estate Green Tea’s price of £39.50 for 11g look like pocket money prices by comparison.)
Tregothnan Tea Company in their early prototype alpha-testing stages were originally considering being an entirely green tea-focused outfit. They figured that if they could break into the British green tea market, they’d have a good enough little earner to make an economically sustainable tea business. The disappointment in the faces of potential tea customers when they were told that they wouldn’t be any Proper Tea made them swiftly rethink that idea and turn their hands to producing the sorts of English Breakfast-style tea that its public were expecting.
This is a peculiarly British green tea – an unoxidated tea that isn’t so far removed from regular tea that it’s going to scare the horses. I would recommend Tregothnan Single Estate Green Tea to people who think they don’t like green tea. It’s like a gateway drug to other green teas.
An interesting thing about green tea is how quickly you can get through cups of the stuff. Because it’s brewed at 80 degrees rather than with boiling water, I can drink it almost as soon as it’s finished steeping. Normally, one cup of tea is enough to sustain me during the writing of a tea review I put away three mugs of Single Estate Green in the time that it took me to write this. (Using the same leaves each time, of course. Tregothnan Single Estate Green is very amenable to a bit of re-steeping.)
I certainly wouldn’t ever get sick of this tea. It is light, refreshing and tastes exactly like Camelia sinensis done right. I could cheerfully drink this tea all day every day. I won’t, of course. At almost a tenner a pot, a regular Tregothnan Single Estate Tea habit would interfere with my ability to afford other little luxuries in life, like cat food and heating bills.
