Genmai Tea Explained and Reviewed

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The Question:

What the *bleep*ing *bleep blee-bleep* is genmai tea?

My Answer: Well, a good way to answer that question is to draw your attention to the picture to the right. What you see there are the three Chinese characters that, in Japanese, read as "genmai cha," i.e. "genmai tea." Koreans pronounce these same characters as "hyunmi cha" and the Chinese pronounce them as "hsüanmi cha." In any case, the first character, "gen," has such meanings as "dark" and "obscure," while the second character "mai" stands for uncooked rice (other words are used to signify cooked rice). Therefore, when taken together, "genmai" stands for rice that is unhulled and/or unpolished; in other words, "genmai" basically stands for brown rice. (As pointed out above, the third character "cha" means "tea.") However, before you get images in your head of brown rice being boiled into a mush and then being strained to make "brown rice tea," let me point out that genmai tea is actually a mixture, usually in equal parts, of green tea and roasted brown rice. To some it may seem like an odd combination at first, but trust me, the result is wonderful. Green tea, which is already an amazing drink to begin with, is very much enhanced by the inclusion of the roasted brown rice. The roasted grain essences in the rice get steeped out to add an extremely mellow, almost nutty aspect that compliments the crisp, leafy qualities of green tea (and let me add here that white rice would never be able to impart such flavor, even if it was roasted), and the flavors "round out" the green tea, completing the overall taste in a really satisfying way. It's for these reasons that I love genmai tea as much as green tea alone.

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Brands I Recommend:

Maeda-En The best brand yet that I've tried is Maeda-En. This company's green tea is top quality, with an extremely fresh/deep, leafy flavor, and that makes all the difference. Combined with the aroma of toasted/roasted brown rice, it's absolutely awesome. The package this tea comes in has instructions on preparation, so if you don't have an intuitive sense about when your tea is fully brewed, just follow the instructions to the letter. To quote Maeda-En, getting the temperature of the water just right will properly bring out the taste/aroma/color of the tea. (Price: $4.19 for 5.3 ounces/150 grams. This is rather steep, but you have to realize that the tea I got was of Maeda-En's "Gold Quality" grade. This grade of tea, which is available in limited quantities every year, comes from the year's first picking of the first tea leaves to bud and grow. The leaves harvested from subsequent pickings, while still quite good, are not as flavorful because they don't have the same concentration of nutrients and phytochemicals that one finds in the leaves from the first picking. The leaves in the first picking have the privilege of drawing the highest amount of nutrients from the soil, while leaves from later pickings get less and less. Consequently, you have a higher price for the Gold Quality, but it's worth it, cause it tastes damn amazing. :p Don't get me wrong - Maeda-En's regular genmai tea is still awesome, but everyone buys the Gold Quality whenever it's available, cause it's in a class of its own.)

Shirakiku It was my mother who got me hooked on genmai tea some years back (and later, teas in general), and Shirakiku was the brand she was drinking at the time. Shirakiku has good genmai tea. One unique thing about Shirakiku (a company that also packages and sells other Japanese food products like inarizushi wrappers and sunomono) is that their genmai tea comes in a box with two airtight pouches. One pouch has the green tea, while the other has the roasted rice. This is probably done to keep the flavors separated till the tea is purchased, but I personally doubt that this makes any difference in the final end product, since you want the flavors to join when the tea is brewed. Still, it's fun to open the box and mix the contents of the two pouches together. *g* At any rate, Shirakiku's genmai, while nice, is not as good as Maeda-En's regular genmai, let alone Maeda-En's Gold Quality genmai. Even my mother agreed when we compared the brands recently. XD I personally liked Maeda-En better because even in their regular quality genmai their tea leaves were more flavorful than Shirakiku's tea leaves; interestingly enough, my mother preferred Maeda-En's genmai because the essences of the roasted rice came through better. Proof that two separate pouches don't really help anything, I guess. :p (Price: $5.69 for 10 ounces/284 grams. Keep in mind that although this is much cheaper than Maeda-En's Gold Quality, it's not that much cheaper than the regular quality, and even Maeda-En's regular quality tastes better than Shirakiku - at least, in my opinion! Also, as far as I know, Shirakiku doesn't sell any sort of "first harvest grade tea" the way Maeda-En does.)

Final Verdict:

Try Maeda-En, of course! :p Shirakiku isn't bad - in fact, it's good. It's just that Maeda-En is better. *L*