Kimberley's Kyusu

Hey there Teacups.. Happy Matcha Monday. For this week’s Matcha Monday Post I’m going to be reviewing Adagio’s – Uji Matcha. I’ve tried quite a few Matchas from Adagio to date both flavoured and pure and I’ve really enjoyed all of them. So when I came to this tasting session I definitely had quite high expectations, especially as this Matcha is part of their Masters Teas range. Because of that I expected nothing but excellence from this Matcha just like the other Masters Teas I’ve tried this year and oh boy did it deliver.

Here’s what Adagio themselves have to say about this Matcha over on their website: “Matcha is a fine powder made by grinding shade-grown Gyokuro tea leaves. To prepare, place one teaspoon of matcha in a bowl, add a few drops of hot (160-180F) water, and whisk into a paste. Then add more water and stir to produce a dark green liquor with bright foam. The resulting cup is sweet and vegetal, with hints of grass and a creamy finish. Our Masters-grade Matcha hails from Uji, Kyoto. It is a ceremonial-grade Spring-harvest Matcha. You’re sure to love it.”

Tea Tasting Notes

For this tasting session I simply tried this Matcha on its own prepared in my chawan with freshly filtered water at 80-85°C. I used 2 Matcha scoops of Matcha which works out at about 1 1/2 – 2 full teaspoons. When it comes to the tasting session I do with pure teas I never like to add anything additional to them like honey or milk because I want to enjoy them for what they are unaltered. I’ll normally try them both hot and cold but other than that when it comes to experimenting I leave that to the flavoured and blended teas. Because pure teas like this matcha are often much more complex and they were created to taste a certain way so altering them makes little to no sense to me.

With this Matcha I was able to get it to build a thick sturdy foam that didn’t dissipate at all after a short amount of time, it makes my Matcha loving heart so happy when I’m able to easily froth a Matcha and have the froth stick around pretty much right up until the bowl was empty. I know I’ve mentioned that I’m trying to move away from the mind-set of good froth = good Matcha but its so gratifying to see your whisking pay off even if you are only whisking for such a short amount of time as the frothing process aerates the water, which in turn definitely affects the flavour profile. You can really see the difference between a matcha prepared in the more widely used method taught by Urasenke and the pond style method taught by Omotesenke. To me a great Matcha is one that can be prepared both ways and still yield fantastic results. This is definitely one of those Matchas.

In terms of it’s overall flavour profile this Matcha brings strong vegetals, subtle butteryness, grassiness and somewhat mint like quality (not in the way mint tastes but in the way it makes your mouth feel). It’s also smooth, fresh, lingering and refreshing. The vegetal notes reminded me of fresh kale and spinach straight out of the fridge. It tasted much more savoury when hot than I was expecting and those vegetals were no doubt the star of this show but I didn’t hate it and there was still a hint of sweetness to it.

I decided to let around half of the bowl cool to see how it would effect the flavour profile and surprisingly once it started to cool a little that sweetness started to become much more prominent which I loved. The vegetals were still strong when it started cool but all of the elements of its flavour profile did seem to mellow out a little as it started to cool its phenomenal both ways honestly and definitely met all of the extremely high expectations I had going into this tasting session.

I’m going to enjoy making my way through the rest of the tin that I have over the next few months and I have no doubt in my mind that it will be one I actively seek out and purchase in the future should Adagio continue to stock it. I can definitely see myself doing lots of tasting sessions with this in the spring and summer of next year mostly because I think it would be perfect to do out door session with should my health allow that. The refreshing quality it has is going to be ideal for when the weather hopefully starts to get warmer.

Overall Teacup Rating: 5/5

If you want to find out more about Adagio and purchase some of this Matcha for yourself you can do that here for the UK and here for the US. As always if you have any questions at all either stick them in the comments or send them to me on Twitter/Instagram @teaisawishblog and I’ll answer them all as soon as I can.

Speak to you all again soon. Happy Steeping – Kimberley

*the tea featured in this post was gifted to me for the purpose of this review. All opinions are my own and have not been paid for*