I recently mentioned my local tea shoppe selling a matcha + genmaicha blend making some kind of green psychedelic concoction. It was like one of those lava lamps with the rice and popcorn appearing disappearing in the suspended matcha particulate. I thought this odd. So I went to an asian market with a good selection of Japanese teas. It now seems matcha is added to every Japanese tea. Is this a fad du jour or has it been going on for awhile? I bought a sencha + matcha brand. The infusion was a murky hazy green so not a lot of matcha.
It is very popular,and not recent. Maybe 2/3 of genmaicha I see in Osaka has macha added to it. In fact, people that don't want the added macha tend to mix their gemaicha themselves (as you can get the popcorns and stalks or bancha separately).
That's not that systematic to add it to sencha, but it's popular in Summer as it's great to prepare cold-brewed iced-tea : you put the sencha-macha in a bag*, place it in the pot with very cold water, let it 30 minutes in the fridge and serve. Don't try to keep it many hours. You can do the same with gyokuro...when you can afford. Sencha + macha tend to cost 1/3 of gyokuro, so it's more an everyday drink. Maybe that fashion started 5 years ago, before even when it was very hot outside, I'd see people drinking hot sencha (also they'd put the air-conditionning much cooler then, not they are more reasonable).
But I don't like much that sencha+macha served hot, even if they write on packages that you can serve it that way.
*in Japan, we easily find non-weaved fabric bags, they work well for that, otherwise a paper or fabric pouch could replace them. With a strainer, you get a "cloudy" color and "powdery" taste.
Is the combination of sencha + matcha called "machairi sencha". I noticed that name on serveral brands with the matcha or just a special sencha used with matcha? The instructions show cold or hot. I thought hot was okay but I can see maybe better cold. I could tell the matcha was weak because it didn't tickle my throat.
That means litterally "sencha with macha added". From what I have seen it's ordinary sencha and ordinary macha, not high grade ones, so they benefit from being mixed.
Thanks Kuri. Another name for my tea dictionary. I've been using my modified cylindrical French press for about a month so I can become reacquainted with infusion characteristics of different teas. So far in all cases the leaf will give up and fall to the bottom or never bother to even get up and die insitu. Giving the pot a vigorous swish after the leaves die just produces a swill in the leaves creating a rotating mat. However this sencha leaf dies on the bottom insitu but will swill to produce a chimney like structure almost back to the top of the pot. This is the first leaf to reintroduce itself back to the pot. I've tried other greens with no similar results. A pleasant discovery that has some explantion but beyond me.
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