A comparison of the Harney & Sons Japanese Sencha sachet with the filter bag:
The dried tea in the sachet really does look very close to loose leaf sencha, except that it’s broken up a bit more. It’s not really possible to see the tea through the opaque filter bag, but it brews up nicely into a light greenish-yellow clear liquid.
The sachet brews up the same hue but cloudier, and there is more particulate matter in the bottom of the glass. Perhaps I should be unsurprised, then, that the brew also tastes a bit brothier—thicker, if you will. The sachet provides a tea with more substance to it, so if one regards brothiness as a positive quality, then the sachet would seem to be the winner in this contest because the taste is otherwise very similar—as it should be, since the tea is apparently the same, only the format has been changed.
The flavor of the brews is very similar, but the filter bag has a slightly cleaner taste. Is it cleaner or is it lighter? The sachet-produced tea certainly does not taste dirty, but it does taste more substantive, with an almost food-like quality. All things considered, I prefer the sachet, but I still must say that the filter bag is excellent.
I’m going to do something unprecedented for me right now: a second infusion of these wet sencha bags. I’ve never done this before, but the sachet contents look so much like loose leaf, that I’m pretty sure that it will produce a second cup. Not sure about the filter bag, which interestingly enough expands much more than the sachet and is also heavier wet…
second infusion of the sachet was good but lighter
second infusion of the filter bag was basically colored water (but no one ever said that filter bags were multiply infusable!)
