Okay, so I'm no expert in tea, by any means! I ordered several different green tea samples from SpecialTeas, and to my surprise, I found little peices of popcorn in the Genmai-cha, in addition to the little brown nuggets of puffed rice. I picked out all the peices thinking it was remnants of someone's snack at SpecialTeas.
I wrote to them to let them know what I found, and to my astonishment they said those are popped rice kernals, which look very much like popcorn. They said they get the same comment often from people new to Genmai-cha. Okay, so I feel like an utter dope. Please tell me I'm not the only one who has made this mistake.