My search has lasted over 6 months to try to find a solid "fishy"
tasting green, and no matter how much money I've thrown at it and
searching and trying new greens I have come up empty... until last
weekend. A local Korean Grocery had a small box of Yamamotoyama green
tea for like $4 and I picked it up for work use since I've been
hellishly busy and needed a teabag tea or two for the hectic days. This
is the ticket! It is actually better than a number of my senchas I just
purchased and has a wonderful vegetal/fishy taste. These aren't your
average teabags either, they are well stuffed with tea and not
powder/fannings either... they also come individually sealed in foil
pouches and are extremely fresh.

I've since picked up all they had and now happily reveling in the glory
:) I'm going to have to dig into this company a bit more and find out a
little about them. The other day I saw this brand in highly colored
photographic boxes in my grocery store in surprising varieties: Puerh,
Dragonwell, Gyokuro, Sencha, and a bunch of others. However these
"western" offerings were twice as expensive as the unassuming
white/green box from the same company from the Korean market.

Just an FYI for others who enjoy and seek out a good "fishy" green.

It's an old thread, but Yamamoto teas come from Brazil which in itself
makes them 'fishy' if you didn't know that.

Jim

Dominic T. wrote:

Dominic T.1161779462.676942.153910@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com10/25/06
08:31dominictiberio@gmail.com

That's just what I thought: Fishy/seaweedy is a mark of
some of the cheaper offerings. BTW, your tea was most
likely grown in Brazil, but what the hay.

Michael Plant wrote:

I originally thought this too, but over the years I have been proven
wrong over and over. I have had tea hand delivered from a Japanese
friend that was only a week old and it was the most splendidly fishy
green ever. It was fresh, expensive, and ultra high-quality. Then
through the years a lot of my seasonal fresh greens from certain
Japanese farms (many in Uji) have produced fishy teas one year and then
completely non-fishy teas the next.I have also tried many cheap greens
that have no fishyness either.

It's basically a crap shoot, which is why it drives me so insane. Other
people have go-to teas for certain flavors, but with this there are
none... except this Yamamotoyama (the yama thing is really quite
redundant :) I vow to one day pin it down to either nature or nurture
as to the fishyness of green tea because it has to be something
concrete that causes it.

- Dominic

Dominic T. wrote:

Aha! I may be on to something here... part of the answer may be very
simple after all!!! A quick read of the Yamamotoyama website
(http://www.yamamotoyama.com/index.html) turns up very quickly that
they sell only two products: Green Tea and Nori (seaweed)!

I never knew this but the long half-clear pouches of sencha sometimes
found in asian markets are also made by Yamamotoyama which I never
realized and also I buy for a more subtle fishy taste!

Now, I sent my friend in Japan an email asking if the Tea grower he
frequents also processes or sells nori!

It's funny the way YamaMotoYama works in Japanese. It translate as
YamaMoto mountain. The character for both Yama is the chinese
shan(yama) for mountain but Moto says use the preceding literal and not
the meaning. I have a box of green tea teabags in aluminum foil that
is at least 10 years old. One of these days I'll make a point to see
if they taste fishy and report back. I wished all teabags came in
aluminum foil. These are the only guys I know doing it in their entire
product line from what I remember seeing on the shelves.

Jim

Dominic T. wrote:

Space Cowboy wrote:

I was unaware of that rule in Japanese... it has never really come up
before in anything I've seen... but thanks for the explaination I
appreciate it, I like that kind of stuff.

Basically any character in Japanese can have the Chinese or the
Japanese sound if it is common to both languages. The two characters
for Japan are Nippon in Japanese. That is the Chinese sound. You'll
never hear the Japanese sound Hinomoto. Marco Polo gave us Japan.

http://www.watanabesato.co.jp/jpculture/howmanyi/howjapan.html

Jim

Dominic T. wrote:

[Michael]

[Dominic]

Michael Plant wrote:

We may switch to calling it "seaweedy." We may switch to calling it
"seaweedy."

;)

- Dominic