Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green (Matcha)
Where to Buy: Red Leaf Tea
Tea Description:
The highly intoxicating taste of gingerbread when mellowed by Matcha produces a treat that is both compelling and delicious. The pungent aroma of Gingerbread Matcha is enough to attract curious and adventurous takers to partake of its wonderful delights. This minty treat is perfect for any audience who want to feel alive and fresh in every sense in their body. It is an exceptional cold weather drink that brings back the pep that the cold has numbed out. It is also great for its cooling effect when the weather is too hot for comfort. Its spicy undertones makes this delectable snack stand in a class of its own.
Learn more about this flavored Matcha here.
Taster’s Review:
Mmm! Gingerbread!
Is there any cookie (baked good? Bread? Cake?) that says Christmas more than gingerbread? To be honest, I didn’t eat gingerbread as a kid. My gramma would bake a huge assortment of different cookies at Christmastime, and she’d even make sugar cookies in the shape of gingerbread men. But she never really made gingerbread – or at least, I don’t recall her doing so.
So I don’t remember ever really eating gingerbread as a kid. I remember eating gingersnaps though, and I loved those! And this Matcha has a gingersnap-pish kind of appeal to it – YUM!
With my first few sips, though, I was not really all that impressed with what I was tasting. It tasted ginger-y, sure, and I could taste cinnamon and maybe a hint of molasses. But I didn’t taste that bake-y, bready, cookie kind of taste that I wanted from something called “gingerbread.” So I thought for a moment, and decided to add a splash of milk to my chawan … this did the trick! The milk brought out all the delightful bake-y flavors that I craved, and desired, from this Gingerbread Matcha.
The flavor is strongly ginger, but it isn’t a super hot or peppery kind of ginger, it is a sweeter ginger. I also taste cinnamon, as I mentioned, and a molasses-y kind of sweetness (if you want to enhance this, try adding a bit of brown sugar to your chawan). And with the milk, this becomes a delightful Gingerbread Matcha Latte that would rival the gingerbread lattes from the local coffee shops. Sure, those are made with coffee and this with green tea, but, this has that same creamy, delicious, gingerbread-y taste that you’d expect from a gingerbread latte. And it’s not as heavily sugared as most of those lattes from the coffee shop … even if you do add a little bit of brown sugar to it!
And even though the flavor of the “gingerbread” is strong here (I opted for the distinctive level of flavoring for this batch of Matcha, along with the classic grade of Matcha), the flavor of the Matcha is not overwhelmed. I taste the vegetative notes here, although they are not as strong in some of the other flavored Matcha that I’ve tried from Red Leaf Tea. So that is to say that the ginger and other spices do play a certain role here in muting out a little of the Matcha flavor, but, certainly not all of it. The vegetative tones are more like butter here than grassy or vegetable, but there are faint vegetal notes as well. The buttery tones meld perfectly with the aforementioned bake-y flavors, giving this gingerbread a rich, buttery undertone.
A really delightful treat!
