お茶の子さいさい！~The Tea Appreciation Thread~

First of all, if you think that this is not a new subject and should be merged into another one, please do so. I checked the threads in this forum going back to Aug 2005, but couldn't find anything similar. (Oh for some reason the Search function doesn't work!!)

Anyways, since a few weeks I've been drinking a lot of tea. I used to drink a lot of coffee but wasn't happy with the stomach pains I got after drinking X cups of coffee. Japanese tea isn't widely available here, so first I started drinking English tea, and recently I bought some Chinese tea. I personally like 菊花茶 (Ju2 Hua1 Cha2 if I'm not mistaken..) which is some kind of Chrysanthemum-based tea.. I never knew flowers could taste this good!!

Other favorites of mine are 普洱茶 (Pu'er tea) and 烏龍茶 (Oolong tea), but I like Japanese tea too. I especially like お茶漬け (Ocha-zuke), rice with tea poured over it, preferably with bits of salmon and nori.. Yummy!!

So how about you guys? What do you think of tea? Do you prefer Japanese or Chinese tea? Any food/tea combo's you would like to recommend? What about good old English tea? I remember I used to drink a lot of English tea with milk and sugar as a kid, and get hyper for the whole day!!

I like the brownish colored Japanese tea, don't know what it's called, and Oolong tea.

I like 緑茶 (Ryokku-cha, green tea) and 煎茶 (Zen-cha, I think it is green tea + some Maccha). I love 抹茶 （Maccha, powdered green tea) too. I also enjoy 抹茶 icecream, sweets, Starbucks Frappichino etc.
I'm not a fan of the Japanese brown tea made of wheat or something like that.
(I brought a load of these back from me from a Japanese supermarket in HK, I forgot to bring any back from Japan... d'oh)

I like various Chinese teas too. Jasmine, Oolong, Iron Buddha and the 菊花茶 one you mentioned, good for the health.
I don't like that tea they have in HK that is like English tea, far too strong.
I've tried Taiwanese green tea with milk and sugar, not my cup of tea.

For western stuff I like Earl Grey, Chai and I got a great Assam from Harrods called Knightsbridge blend. I'm not usually a fan of Assam, its too strong for me. I don't like English Breakfast much either.

Yay tea!

im a really big fan of green tea. can i get some recomondations of other teas but with a stronger flavor?

Genma-cha?

Hm... I know Japanese really don't like to be compared with Korean? But I notice the first time, this fragrant tea in a small Korean bbq restaurant. My friend said, it's made of corn? WEll, dunno bout that. But I found this quite similar one, called Genmai-cha? It is green tea with roasted brown rice. I loooove it! But maybe next time I will buy the loosen ones instead one with paper. More environmentally friendly and ih hope it will taste better.
I personally love Japanese green tea better than Chinese', be it matcha or sencha. Hm...actually shirimasen about the difference Anybody can explain? I heard one is more bitter than the other...
I constantly drink sencha, atleast once a day. At first it took me a while to appreciate the smell. My first experience was, "ugh....it's like sipping on a squid..." Gomenasaiiiiii, gomenasai, didn't mean to insult it, but it really is an acquired taste of drink for me >___<
Now, I reaaaaaaallly like it :]

I think there is another thread about what people's favourite teas were, I remember because I posted that mine was mugi-cha, or Barley tea... I also like Oolong tea, and I'm particularly fond of Green tea, I never cared for it UNTIL I had it in Japan, as apparently the United States doesn't really care for the taste of it at all, and all of their so-called 'green teas' taste nothing like it...

I like mattcha, it's my prefered way to drink green tea, because it seems the strongest to me, and reminds me of how I drank it as sushi bars in Japan. I know it might not be exactly authentic mattcha, but it is powered and whisked w/ hot water instead of seeped.