STeaP Episode #27: St. Patrick's Day Matcha Making

Happy St. Patrick's Day, tea drinkers! We bring you a very green tea today, in the event that you're looking for something other than (or in addition to) green beer today. O-Cha.com Green Tea has generously shipped us some very high quality teas, including our choice for today, the Uji Matcha Kiri no Mori. They also included very helpful and specific instructions for properly preparing matcha, which can be found on their website. I also (Brandice) made a promise to discover whether the two types of matcha (usucha and koicha) are different by preparation or are actually different tea leaves. I very quickly found the answer here, which is that the usucha is a thinner tea with much more astringency than the koicha, which is why it's made with fewer scoops of matcha. The koicha is thicker, milder, and is made from much older leaves (often at least thirty years old). The tea that we're trying in this episode is a usucha.