Are green tea bags the same as ordinary tea?!

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Green tea is a powerful antioxidant with compounds that can shield you from many harmful diseases including cancer and heart disease. It is now known that green tea improves cardiovascular health, reduces the risk of cancer and helps with weight loss. Green tea comes from the same plant as black tea, but is harvested at a younger age. It is consumed fresh, rather than roasted like black tea. Green tea is thus less processed and retains more of its nutrients and antioxidants than black tea.

Green tea bags are quite good and very convenient for use and they typically retain a lot of the health benefits from the tea. The less processed the better and fresh green tea leaves will always have an advantage over tea bags for this reason.

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It's true! All teas are not created equal. Regular tea, or black tea as it is sometimes called, is not the same as herbal green tea. All herbal green teas are not the same either.

While all teas do come from the same plant, what makes one tea different from another is the way the plant is grown, harvested and processed.

Ordinary tea, the type we've been familiar with most of our lives, is fermented with apparent focus of caffeine at the expense of natural health ingredients.

Herbal greens teas, on the other hand, are grown, harvested and processed with explicit attention on enhancing and preserving all the natural benefits and flavor. Be cautioned, though, that there are significant differences in the different types. The highlights below will help you save time and money and select the ones best for you.

Tea (camellia sinensis ) is a hardy plant that grows best in higher altitudes. Tea plants like warm days, foggy mornings, and plenty of rain. Tea bushes can grow to be quite tall but are usually cut back to make harvesting easier. Tended bushes can produce tea for up to fifty years or more! The tea bush will not be ready for it's first harvest for three years.

A type of herbal green tea called Macha is grown primarily in the shade. I found the technique for doing this quite interesting. The tea plants are grown in rows, poles are put up on either side of the rows, then poles are placed across the top of those poles over the plants and more poles are placed across the top along the sides of the rows. So it looks kind of like a box over the plants only with out sides. A type of woven grass mat is then placed on the top of the polls, which can be opened up to form a type of roof over the plants: shading them from the direct sun. Using this technique becomes even more useful for the type of herbal green tea called Gyokuro because Gyokuro is only shaded for the last three weeks before harvesting.

Most green tea is hand harvested because the higher quality tea is pulled from the "flush " of the plant. The "flush" of the plant is the new growth on a bush consisting of two leaves and a bud. The harvesters walk between the rows pulling the flush of the plant and throwing in a large basket on their back.

After the leaves are harvested they are steamed or pan fired to stop the enzymes from breaking them down. The leaves are then rolled to bring the liquid in the leaves to the surface. After rolling the leaves are hot air dried to further reduce the moisture content. Here is another place where some of the differences in types of green tea come in. Some of the teas are rolled very tight, some are opened to dry flat. After completely drying some are ground into a tea powder.

The dried leaves are sorted by size, using a number of different large sifting type boxes with varying size holes. The best types of green teas are made from the larger leaves. The smaller the tea leaf the lower the grade of tea. After the sorting a tea "dust" is left. This tea "dust" is used to make tea bags.

general

Yes it's the same as the more traditional way of tea-making. Let the bag soak for a long time though, to get all the "juice" out.

Technically yes, green tea from bags is the same as the loose leaf green tea. But on practice tea bags are often used to hide the low quality of the tea.

Yes just be surE to brew it for 3-5 min