Flavor Post: Rice Tea!?

Rice tea, popcorn tea, gen mai cha, whatever you call it; this tea is suprisingly tasty! The characters to the right read "gen mai cha." "Gen" is closely translated to mean "dark" and "obscure", "mai" stands for uncooked rice, while "cha" is tea. "Genmai" ends up meaning rice that is unhulled or unpolished, dark, or in this case brown rice. It's sometimes called "popcorn tea" because the grains of rice sometimes burst during roasting, giving them the appearance of popcorn.

Our Gen Mai Cha tea from Two Leaves & a Bud is a mixture of roasted brown rice and long leaf Sencha tea. Gen Mai Cha is extremely popular in Japan and originated from Japanese peasants using rice as a filler for their tea mixtures. I know your still here thinking about how gross the Jelly Belly Popcorn flavor is and that there is no way that sipping hot rice is going to be satisfying. I was a skeptic, too. When steeped, the rice provides a mellow, nutty flavor that enhances the tea and rounds out the sharpness of the Sencha.

Trust me, it's an amazing toasty sweetness.