Green tea for beginners: what to actually buy in India
Most people's first green tea is a dusty supermarket bag brewed with boiling water, steeped through two emails, and abandoned after a week of penance. Then they tell everyone green tea is bitter. Green tea isn't the bitter one here. Scalded, over-steeped, stale green tea is.
If you're starting over, three decisions matter.
Start with a scented green, not a plain one. Jasmine green tea is the friendliest entry point in existence, because the florals give your palate something familiar to hold while you learn to taste the leaf underneath. Our jasmine pearls are green tea rolled with fresh jasmine blossoms over successive nights, so the scent is in the leaf rather than sprayed on. Plain sencha-style greens can wait until the pearls make sense.
Take the water off the boil, always. This is the whole game. Boil your kettle, then leave the lid open while you get a cup and find the tin, which takes about two minutes and puts you near 80°C without a thermometer. Boiling water cooks the leaf and drags out the bitterness people blame on the tea.
Steep two minutes, then taste. Green tea steeps faster than black. Start at two minutes and adjust from there. And re-steep: pearls unfurl gradually, the second cup is often better than the first, and three brews from one spoonful is normal, which quietly fixes the price-per-cup math too.
Skip anything labelled "slimming," "detox," or sold on antioxidant counts. Tea is not a supplement, and a company shouting about catechins usually has nothing to say about the leaf. Green tea earns its place the same way the rest of our tins do, by making a well-made cup at 4 p.m. one of the day's reliable pleasures.
That's the entire starter kit. One tin of jasmine pearls, cooler water, shorter steeps.