Ingredients · Tea

Green Tea

Camellia sinensis · Theaceae (tea family)

Green Tea
The same leaf as black tea, with the oxidation stopped almost as soon as it starts — by pan-firing in a dry wok in China, by steaming in Japan. That one difference is why green tea is green, grassy and delicate where black is dark and malty, and it is also why green tea is fussier to brew: boiling water scalds it and turns it bitter. It is the oldest form of tea and the first the world traded. Thirteen products here are built on it.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partLeaf
KindTea
CaffeineContains caffeine
Where it is fromChina (native range)
TasteGrassy and vegetal with a clean sweetness; gunpowder is bolder and faintly smoky, chun mee plummy and less sweet
How to brew it
  • 175°F / 80°C
  • 2 to 3 minutes
  • never boiling water

How to use it

Around 175°F, 2 to 3 minutes. Boiling water is the single most common mistake — it makes green tea bitter and no amount of shortening the steep will fix it. Good for multiple infusions. Gunpowder is the base of Maghrebi mint tea, poured from a height over mint and sugar, and of Kashmiri noon chai.

With food

Rice and sushi. Steamed fish and vegetables. Cucumber. Edamame. Sesame. Light fruit — melon, pear, citrus. Mild cheese.

With spices

Mint and spearmint. Lemongrass. Ginger. Jasmine. Lemon peel. Cardamom, in Kashmiri chai.

With tea

Scented rather than blended, as a rule: jasmine, rose, or toasted rice for genmaicha.

Its story

Where it comes from

Green tea originated in China in the late first millennium BC and remains the most common tea drunk there; China supplies around 80 per cent of the world's green tea. Songluo Mountain in Anhui is named in nineteenth-century accounts as the place green tea was first made. Gunpowder comes mostly from Pingshui in Zhejiang; Chun Mee, once from Jiangxi, is now made largely in Taishun County, Zhejiang.

What happened

Chinese green tea was once steamed, as Japan's still is; after the early Ming it was typically pan-fired in a dry wok, and with the 1391 ban on compressed tea, the world got loose-leaf green tea. One story worth telling plainly: in 1848 and 1849 Robert Fortune, travelling in disguise through the green-tea country of Huizhou, watched an overseer grind Prussian blue and burnt gypsum together, four parts to three, and scatter the powder over the leaves five minutes before they left the pans. The workmen's hands were blue. Asked about it, Chinese from the region said they never drank dyed tea themselves, but that foreigners seemed to want it, the ingredients were cheap, and such teas fetched a higher price. Green tea was also in Boston Harbor in December 1773 — sixty chests of Singlo and fifteen of Hyson, about a fifth of what went over the side. UNESCO inscribed China's traditional tea-processing techniques in 2022, with green tea first among the six categories.

On the shelf with it

Every product it goes into.

Every ingredient in the shop

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Other ways in

Ingredients Every plant, seed, bark and salt in the shop on one page — what it is, why it is in the blend, and where it comes from. See them all Collections Every shelf in the shop on one page — teas by leaf and flavour, spices by kind and cuisine. Open any shelf to see what is on it. Browse the shelves The Showroom The whole shop on one floor — every tea, spice and blend, filtered by what you are after, with the basket beside you. Open the Showroom Elsewhere Seventeen short trips — a place, a moment, a feeling — each with the teas and spices that get you there. Take a trip