Do you get a bad aftertaste from your green tea? Before you throw out your tea, consider changing the type of water you use. Especially if you use tap water!
On my first day of visiting my family in the USA, I woke up and started making my morning green tea. I was excited because I had just bought some shincha from one of my favorite tea farms near Uji before taking this trip.
While preparing the tea, I was boasting about how this was the very first pick of the spring and how wonderful it was going to taste. Once I was done bragging and the tea finished steeping, it was the moment of truth. We sat quietly at the family kitchen table drinking our freshly brewed Japanese green tea.
The first thing that struck me was that there was no green tea smell. All I could smell was the water! More specifically, the chlorine in the water. I shrugged this off and started drinking my brand new tea. After the second or third sip, I began to notice a horrible aftertaste.
My first thought was that something was wrong with the tea. So I went back to the bag of tea I had bought and smelled it. Everything smelled and looked great. Then I started thinking of what I had done differently and it hit me.
When I’m in Japan I always use either a water filter or bottled water. So I ran to the cupboard and grabbed two bottles of water and dumped them into a pot. I warmed the bottled water and brewed a new batch of tea and the result was 1,000 times better.
I’m no water expert, and I don’t really know the nuances between all the different types of water (i.e., spring, distilled, purified). However, I will tell you this. If you want your green tea to taste better, use either filtered or bottled water. My personal favorite is spring water because it seems to bring out the aroma of the tea and gives it a more robust taste.
The water you use to brew your tea has a huge impact on the quality of the drink. So before you throw out your green tea, try changing the type of water you use. It could make all the difference.
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