Japanese Airport Duty-Free Green Tea
Recall that tea is just water and dried leaves, so the quality of each is of the utmost importance. If stranded in a place without a convenient clear mountain stream flowing nearby, don’t break out the good stuff. This is to say that it makes sense to match average tea with average water and exceptional tea with naturally mineralized “live” water. In fact, the ancient Chinese (and some less ancient Chinese as well) applied the same logic to marriage. 门当户对 one would hear, which gets unromantically translated as homogamy.
This green tea did not resemble in form or taste the sencha and gyokuro varieties I am familiar with. My best guess is that it was konacha, a leftover mishmash of buds, leaves, and of course, fannings, that are sorted during the gyokuro production process.
It is definitely possible to find high quality konacha, depending on the grade of gyokuro or sencha that it is a derivative of, especially if it is the small leaves that get sorted, but what I had in the airport was not this. The grade was more comparable to what they serve gratis at Japanese restaurants .
In hue, the tea was a vibrant green, which I appreciated in contrast to the stark grey of the entire airport (let the record show that I do appreciate how immaculate Japan is in general). In flavor, it was flat but not too bitter even after a long steep. Certainly, it would be unreasonable to expect the complexity of young raw puer and/or freshness of high mountain oolongs. I am pleased enough that it managed to improve, if only marginally, the airplane water.