Makinohara Green Tea Sampling

This sampling of green tea bags and green tea leaf pies are from Grinpia in Makinohara, Shizuoka Prefecture. If you haven't experienced picking tea leaves yourself, I recommend it! There is a seasonal tea leaf picking experience at Grinpia (April-October) which is 1000 yen per adult. There is also a restaurant serving things like green tea tempura, mmm. Sounds awesome.

Limited English website here

First comes the fukumushi teabags.

When I opened up the package the tea smelled fragrant. The package says the tea is first picked sencha, meaning "new tea" picked right when it is the season in early May.

We don't have a teapot but sometimes brew tea in a one liter glass pitcher (shown in photo), either hot or cold. The tea bags are very easy to use and even though I didn't perfectly follow the instructions, the tea didn't get bitter when I left the teabag in the cup. I also reused the teabag and it was still good.

Shizuoka tea is known for being affordable and not fancy, and the packaging and experience matched that sentiment. One of the teabags broke off from the string after pouring water into the cup, but it's possible that I pulled on it too much while separating the little tab at the end of the string. The paper bit and string seem glued to the teabags.

Leaf Pie time

For some reason I thought I would receive one leaf pie, so when I got the delivery and it was a fancy gift box of pies, I was surprised. I did wonder how many there were because it didn't say anything on the packaging about how many pies it contained. When I opened the box, I noticed there are eight pies. The packaging seemed too big for the “leaf” as they were kind of floating around in the individual packaging. This means the gift box is also bigger than it really needs to be.

I ate one of the leaf pies together with a tea and it made a nice three o'clock snack.

The smell and the taste of the leaf pie was sugar. Inside there is matcha filling, but it was either very weakly flavored or overpowered by the sugary taste. I do like green tea and matcha flavored things so that was disappointing. I thought they were just okay.

The best by date is February 27th, around two months after they were made. This kind of thing is a little scary. I prefer sweets that are made freshly without preservatives.

Mitsu...not yet opened.

Not something that I would normally buy or use. We might put it onto some ice cream with corn flakes and make parfaits, but as it's winter that just hasn't happened yet. Recommended ways to use mitsu include adding it to kanten and kakigoori, good for summer, plus shiratama and warabi mochi, which we don't eat at home. Maybe on pancakes will happen. I'm afraid that we will use it once then it will sit opened in the fridge for way too long. Probably I'll wait until the weather warms up when we are more likely to use it.

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