Matcha May

Have I ever told you that I'm a massive, MASSIVE fan of teapigs. I first tried their tea quite by accident at a coffee morning, it was the pure peppermint and it was amazing. So much mintier (is that a word) than any other mint tea I'd ever tried before and I was smitten from then onwards.

So when I happened to spot on twitter that teapigs were promoting something called Matcha May I chucked myself headlong on board.  The only slight disadvantage was that I had no clue what matcha actually was or what it meant. Ahhhh....

A few days later an exciting envelope plopped through my door, great (I thought) time to get supping on some new exciting tea.  I was not expecting what I discovered; green tea.  Yep! Green. Tea.  My arch enemy.   In all honesty I've never had a good one, never encountered one that didn't taste like pond slime.  Lesson learnt; do your research woman.  But I'd committed to this and I'm not the type if girl to go back on my word, so I would carry this one through.  Take one for the team. But I wont like it.  Can't make me.....

At this point (a little late admittedly) I started to do my research. I could carp on for ages about matcha and its history, but to be honest that's probably a story better told by teapigs themselves so I'd suggest clicking here if you'd like more information. I discovered online that teapigs matcha is pretty flippin good for you boasting 70 x the antioxidants of orange juice and claiming to raise energy levels for 4 - 6 hours.  It even won best slimming and fitness product in 2011.  Impressive.  Although, in my mind this did nothing to help distract from the idea that it would taste foul.....I usually find that if something is really jolly healthy it tastes revolting.

Nevertheless I was going to give it a go.  My package contained a little sachet of ground green tea leaves.  100% natural, organic green tea leaves in fact.....so obviously I looked at them suspiciously:

There was also a handy little recipe card giving me some suggestions on what to do with it.  The first idea I spotted was to make a matcha latte.  I could cope with that I thought, so off I set.  Half a teaspoon of powder went into my cup, it looked, erm, very green...

In went the milk and I gave it a blast with the impressive steamer on my Dad's posh coffee machine.  Now, I've never used been allowed to use the posh coffee machine before and perhaps I was doing it wrong, but I could not get rid of the great green lumps of powder that were floating in my cup however much I steamed that milky little tinker.

So how did it turn out? Lumpy green milk.  Lovely.  As you can imagine  I was really looking forward to drinking it.

Mmmm, yummers... I decided to have a go at straining out the lumps, with some success.  As you can see I really wasn't keen on my matcha latte.  It wasn't the taste.  In fact the taste surprised me, it was actually really quite pleasant and fresh tasting, it was those darn lumps.  By straining them I'd just made them smaller, rather than got rid of them.  By like I say, that's probably down to my inadequate steaming skills.

I'm not a lass that admits defeat easily, another day another matcha!.  This time I decided to mix it with apple juice and drink it like a shot.  I'm good at shots, I've had practice.  Here's the before and the after.  As you can see it goes a really lovely vibrant shade of green.  I'd learnt a lesson from the latte and made a paste with a little apple juice and powder first and then squished the lumps out with a teaspoon.

You will be pleased to hear my friends, that it tasted GOOD.  You could have knocked me down with a feather.  A very drinkable morning drink!  I thought I'd found the method for me.  Apple juice and matcha is a definitely winner. Even though I am very experience at necking back small drinks I found it was perfectly pleasant to sip it as well and would happily do either.

I thought that was it, I thought I'd found favourite way of drinking matcha.  Until I came across....dum, dum, dummmmm.....  THE MATCHA MARTINI!

Anyone who knows me will tell you how much I LOVE cocktails. I love them a lot!  So I was very, very excited to crack out my trusty vodka bottle (there's always some stashed away for emergencies) and get cracking on a matcha martini...

The recipe can be found here, but essentially it's matcha, sugar syrup, vodka and a wee bit of (green) fruit to decorate. I know its pedantic, but I wanted my fruit to match my matcha (see what I've done there?). Plus they were all things that I already had lurking in cupboards, fabulous!  And this is what the end product looked like: 

Cocktail time in the kitchen, wooo, woooo!  Ladies snd Gentleman matcha martini is AMAZING!  Not only did I get to treat myself to a cheeky cocktail on a week night, but I also felt very smug about the fact that this particular sneaky martini was actually good for me!  

Bottoms up!

In conclusion I was very pleasantly surprised by teapigs matcha green tea and I would definitely try it again.  I'd really like to try out a box so I could drink it over a longer period and check out the health benefits.  As a lovely treat teapigs are very kindly offering bloggers a 15% discount with the following code:

When I opened the packet I genuinely never thought I'd actually like this product but I've been really impressed with it and it has definitely lived up to teapigs reputation for making really delicious high quality teas.

Let me know if you've tried teapigs teas or their matcha green tea, I'd love to hear about it if you have.....

Love, love,

I was sent this free sample by teapigs for the purpose of this review, all words, photographs and opinions are my own.