Please see my apology.
Wash your mouth out!
With Beer.
~~Bender
Yes, well, remember what Orwell said:
Ok. I’ll retry it.
I’m nothing if not adventuresome. 
IME a lot of green tea benefits from somewhat lower water temperatures than black tea. Do not use water at a rolling boil; if you are having problems with stewed leaves or bitter taste that may help.
Wiki advice is
The bandwagon. If everyone else is doing it, you are inclined to do it, too.
In the US, tea in the late 18th century was equated with the British. If you are at war with someone, you demonize their habits. So the US switched to coffee as a protest.
It’s not horrid, it’s radioactive!
In recent years we have witnessed the second tea revolution (at least with respect to iced tea). I love Outback Steakhouse but their iced tea used to be cloudy sludge. In the past 15 years or so it has become excellent. And most other restaurants have great tea today also. I suspect they all use a standard brewing system of some sort. And look at the brands of iced tea in the beverage stores!
Absolute Power S02.Ep05 “Spinning America”
American Ambassador: “Could we interest you in some fine iced tea?”
Martin McCabe: “You couldn’t run to some warmed-up tea, by any chance?”
American Ambassador: “It’s kinda the way we like it.”
Green tea is bitter (which I happen to like). A tiny amount - and I mean tiny, like 40 grains - of sugar will take the edge off. It won’t taste sweet at all, just different.
Green tea is often combined with jasmine. Same effect.
Weird how tastes differ among people. For me, black tea is the more bitter of the two by a decent margin.
According to this article there are 20 to 40 genes for detecting bitterness with different people possessing different combinations of them.
Different sensitivities to bitter tastes probably arose from evolutionary pressures in different parts of the world. Most toxic plants taste bitter, and nomadic groups that came into contact with a variety of plants would have, over time, developed a variety of receptors. People from malaria-infested parts of the world tend to carry a gene that makes them less sensitive to some bitter compounds… Juyun Lim, a sensory scientist in Oregon State University’s Department of Food Science, says that we have a natural aversion to bitterness and certain odors: “Most people don’t like beer the first time they try it.”
In an effort to reduce my caffeine intake I’ve switched from coffee during the day to green tea and now to a green tea mixed with brown rice that I found at Super H-Mart, a Korean grocery store. It really smooths and mellows out the tea.
For me green tea tastes slightly metallic, which I like. Black tea doesn’t taste metallic at all.
Green tea is bitter only if you use water that is too hot, or steep the leaves for too long; two of the most common mistakes people do, the third being using too much leaves per serving.
Boiling water or anything near it is too hot for most green teas. Around half of my home selection needs just 70 C, the other half 80 C (I only drink unfermented green tea).
I have an electric kettle with temperature adjustment now, but years before I had one, I used old Japanese bubble evaluation techniques to judge when the water was there; small bubbles rising from the bottom of the kettle, called ‘shrimp eyes’, and the water is at 70 C. Nowhere near boiling.
There is an obvious difference in oxidation, but trying to generalize tea and what it tastes like into green vs black seems like classifying wine as white versus red.
Very true, but do we want to go there in this thread?
Probably not, but it makes me wonder whether tea may owe some of its recent popularity to good marketing and availability: one can walk into a tea store, or go online if there is not one nearby, and choose from dozens of varieties of tea from all the countries in the world where it is produced. And (depends where) there are plenty of traditional tea houses and tea rooms promoting tea culture. One would have to have been pretty well sheltered not to have been exposed to tea at home or elsewhere.
This morning I’m drinking coffee, because my hotel serves free drip coffee, but charges for tea and “coffee drinks”. Price matters. 
Down here in Chile, tea was the preferred hot-drink (probably still is - came to me as a surprise in Coffe-South-America):
- there was a good amount of british influence in the ports → TEA (but then again, that is true for Argentina, and I think they got way more of a coffee culture than Chile (prob. owed to the Italian/Spanish heritage, that seemed to have outdone the Brits)
- a tea-bag is dirt cheap - and goes a long way in a family setting (probably 4 cups for the whole family), whereas coffee doesnt …
- before tea-bags you’d buy “loose tea”, and that was even easier to max. in terms of cups x gram. Loose tea is still a thing here (also hierba-mate, but to a lesser degree than in argentine):
- there is no coffee culture in Chile (when I came here, late past century, “coffee” was synonym for Nescafé (soluble coffee) - huge bummer! … It’s got a lot better, but the mere fact that Starbucks are the quality driver for coffee - might tell you a lot.
so, tea - more often than not in recent history - b/c its dirt cheap - throw lots of sugar in it (also dirt-cheap) and you have a poor-mans energy-drink/comfort-beverage. Ticks a lot of boxes per $$$
