Cost of Cold Homebrewed vs Bottled Green Tea

This campaign of Shizuoka green tea gave me a new habit of making and bringing my own green tea to work. From my friend’s recommendation for “research”, I got this new bag of Shizuoka green tea at home for myself, so I might as well start enjoying it and go get more while I am in Japan. In the beginning, I was recycling copied water bottles for cold green tea to go, just by brewing green tea and letting them sit in the fridge. Eventually I dug out this fancy tea defuser double lid bottle that my girlfriend received as a gift. It looks really fancy, and I can clearly see how the green tea defuses into the water as the colour of the water changed. My colleagues all thought I was suddenly a green tea master because I had this cool looking bottle sitting on my desk at work.

It got me thinking: if a bottle of home-made green tea (in a cool cup) looks so nice and tastes great, why do I need to buy bottled green tea from supermarkets? It also led me to think: if I just make green tea every time and avoid buying bottled green tea, how much money can I save? So I did some calculations.

An average bottle of cold green tea in Japan costs about 85 yen including tax if you buy them at supermarkets (and even more expensive from convenient stores). Some cheaper shops might give you a bottle for 68 yen before tax (73 after tax). Off brand green tea might be even cheaper, but we will go with the 73 yen for the price representing the bigger brands out there.

Thinking back, I picked up my bag of green tea because it was the one in front of me, but there must be some more affordable green tea available somewhere, so I looked it up on Amazon.co.jp. One extremely popular choice I came across was 茶の大胡 やぶきた静岡深むし茶 (link below), and this Shizuoka green tea is available for 699 yen including tax for 200 grams, even cheaper than the 570 yen for 100 gram pack I bought before. So we shall use this better deal for comparison (which I just ordered and is now on its way).

To make cold green tea, most instructions asks you to use 3 tea spoons of green tea per 500mL of water, which would be about 6 grams. If 6 grams makes the amount of 1 bottled green tea, the 200 gram package makes 33.3333 bottles.

So what we have here is:

Bottled green tea: 73 yen x 33 bottles =
2,409 yen
vs.
Homebrewed green tea of 33 bottles =
699 yen

Even if you want to include the fee for water and gas for boiling and round it up to a thousand yen, you are still paying less than half of the price.

Not to mention, the package of this Shizuoka green tea recommends you to make two brews with each patch of leaves, doubling your value to 699 yen for 66 bottles of homebrewed green tea vs. the 4,818 yen to buy them as bottles!

With this great value calculated and understood, it will be really difficult to me to shell out the money for green tea at supermarkets again!


茶の大胡 やぶきた静岡深むし茶 200g 
Permalink: http://amzn.asia/jhpYVcy

This post is supported by Shizuoka Green Tea Guide, one of City-Cost's Supporters helping City-Cost bloggers to enjoy life in Japan and engage in new experiences.