I’ve been wanting to try green tea, and it was time to buy more tea, and I noticed this on the shelf … and well, it came home with me.
I like the taste okay. It’s not really “tea” to me yet, but it’s nice and light and refreshing.
I just can’t help thinking that buying “green tea” from Luzianne is like, I don’t know, ordering off the “light” menu at Cracker Barrel. Am I really getting the kind of green tea that green tea drinkers would call green tea?
Green tea is the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant, processed to prevent oxidation. (Black tea is the oxidized leaves of Camellia sinensis.) As far as I can tell, the ingredients of Luzianne are 100% green tea. What do you think they could have done to it to make it different from other green teas?
It’s probably closer to being the Bud Light of Green Teas. I’m sure there are some tea snobs out there who would look down their snooty noses at Luzianne, but that doesn’t stop you liking it.
This site, while interesting, doesn’t seem to say anything about green tea in particular, just black tea. Nor does it say how one grade might be better than the other, as far as flavor or health benefits are concerned. In fact it says:
(bolding mine)
First off, if you like it, by all means drink it.
There’s not a massive difference in taste between different types of green tea, but it’s one that most people could probably distinguish. The main factors that affect the flavor of the leaves themselves are where it’s grown, how it’s grown, and when it’s harvested. (Further processing has an effect, but I’m sticking to green tea only, which has minimal processing).
The factors after that are the ones you’re more likely to be dealing with here. The age of the tea is probably the biggest, since you want green tea to taste and be fresh. How it’s packaged and whether it’s mixed with other tea will also make a difference.
Think of it about the way you would freshly-milled vs. already-ground spices: They’re both the same thing, but one is going to be missing some of what the other has. Tea doesn’t necessarily age as poorly as some spices do, to be fair. With few exceptions, bagged tea is made from broken leaves, so as a rule it will undergo more exposure to air and thereby be less fresh than whole leaf.
Personally, I’d rank them something like this:
Mass-produced pre-made tea (e.g. Snapple). Most likely sweetened and mixed with other flavorings to produce a consistent product that is almost, but not entirely unlike tea.
Bagged broken-leaf tea, ranked roughly by price. I don’t know how expensive Luzianne is, but I’m guessing it’s somewhere in this group.
Loose/whole leaf tea. This covers a wide range, and some preparations get rather fancy. Bad loose tea can easily be worse than good quality bagged tea, but even then the whole leaf is going to last longer.
As an aside - matcha is a Japanese powdered tea that’s more of a specialized product. Just because it’s powdered doesn’t make it bad; what I’m comparing is mainly if you took the same tea leaves and delivered them in these different ways.
I have not had Luzianne green tea, but others have indicated it is probably not too much worse than any other prepackaged green tea. Just fyi, you need to be a lot more cognizant of water temperature and length of steep with green tea, it can get really bitter fast.