I tried a sample of this the other day (thanks Bonnie!). I was skeptical at first because it was called genmaicha but looked like it was made with gunpowder green tea. I read the label though, and started to get excited when I saw that it was tea grown in Thailand. I’d never had a Thai-grown tea before! It looked to be about half tea and about half toasted purple sticky rice. I LOVE purple sticky rice. The fragrance is amazing.
Flavor-wise, this is NOT genmaicha, or at least not recognizably so. It’s a fairly full-bodied tea with a wonderful jasmine rice fragrance. I steeped it twice and it held up to re-steeping well. A win for creativity for sure! I don’t think I’d drink this on a daily basis, but it was fun for my tastebuds!
I passed along some of the comments from Joe and Andy to Janet too about the saltiness. Interesting tea!
This was still in the testing stage, so to be fair, the recipe has changed twice since this review thanks to the crew at Happy Lucky’s with me and others giving input back to Janet.