What Is Green Tea? How It’s Made, the Main Types, and How to Make Green Tea Without Bitterness

Once a tea leaf is plucked and bruised, those enzymes start to darken it, the way a cut apple browns. Black tea lets that process run its full course; oolong stops it partway; green tea stops it almost at once.

Our own training notes put it in one line: fresh green tea leaves “are steamed or pan fired so no oxidation takes place.” Speed matters. Our 2023 tasting deck describes the plucked leaf going straight to the factory to be “fixed,” or “de-enzymed,” by steaming or pan-firing, which stops it from oxidizing and turning brown.

That single step is the whole difference. It is not a different plant, and it is not a younger or older leaf by definition: a green tea, a black tea and an oolong can all be made from the same bush, even on the same day. What changes is what the tea maker does next. It is the question we hear most often, so we opened our 2022 masterclass on tea types with it: do different teas come from different plants? The answer is no. All of them come from Camellia sinensis, and they differ in the way they are made, from plucking to processing.

That is also why green tea keeps more of the color, the fresh vegetal flavor and the lighter body of the living leaf. Even so, the cup is rarely truly green. As Frank Miller wrote in our guide to tasting, green tea “is seldom deep green, but a light, greenish amber or bluish green.”

For how it sits beside the other families, see Types of tea: a beginner’s guide; for the head-to-head comparisons, see Black tea vs green tea, White tea vs green tea and Oolong vs green tea.

Some makers also let the leaf wither briefly before fixing, though Tea 101 notes this is not widely practiced.

1. Plucking. Young shoots are picked and brought to the factory quickly, before they start to darken.
2. Fixing. The leaf is heated to “fix the green.” In China and India this is usually done in hot pans, woks or rotating drums; in Japan the leaf is usually steamed. Artisanal makers may also use charcoal firing or sun-drying; large modern factories use ovens, tumblers or steam tunnels.
3. Rolling. The softened leaf is rolled by hand or by machine. This breaks the cell walls, so the flavor comes out when you brew, and gives each tea its shape: flat, twisted, curled, needle-like or rolled into pellets.
4. Drying. The leaf is dried in pans or industrial dryers until very little moisture is left, so it keeps on the shelf.

Small choices at each step change the cup. Tea 101 puts it simply: slowly pan-fixed green tea tastes sweeter than tea fired at high heat, and the longer the fixing takes, the more aromatic the tea. Steaming keeps a brighter green color and a grassier, more marine taste; pan-firing gives yellower leaf and a nuttier, more vegetal cup.

Wok, drum or steam

Most fine Chinese greens, such as Longjing, are pan-fixed slowly, for 2 to 3 minutes, which gives the leaf time to release its aromatic compounds. In Japan the leaf is steamed for an extremely short time instead.

Our 2017 lesson on Asian green tea describes the Chinese kit: small batches heated by hand in a vessel like a large wok, and larger ones “twirled with a broom in a special tub the size of a washing machine drum or in a cylindrical machine similar in size to a phone booth.” As long as the leaves keep moving, they do not burn.

Steamed leaf comes out wet, so Japanese makers cool it at once with air jets in a tube or by spinning it in rotating cylinders. Japanese steamed teas hold more moisture after fixing, so they are often dried three or more times, against one or two for Chinese greens.

How dry is dry?

Tea 101 gives about 1% moisture for green tea as it leaves the dryer. Made tea picks up a little moisture after that, so when we buy, we check it again: our buying rules set about 4.5% as the norm for green tea, and 6% as the most we accept. India’s own green tea makers are in Indian green tea, and the full journey from bush to cup is in How tea is made.

It reached Japan with Buddhist monks, where it grew into an art. The ritualized drinking of tea there, chado, “the way of tea,” has existed for over 500 years.

Green teas are not graded like black teas; they are known by style, origin and the shape of the finished leaf. Our own range runs from a plain Darjeeling green and a twisted Nilgiri autumn green to spiced Kashmiri kahwa and shade-grown matcha from Shizuoka.

It is made from tencha: young leaf from tea bushes shaded before harvest, steamed, dried, stripped of its veins and stone-ground. Our 2016 samurai story describes the bushes being covered for about three weeks, and grinding so slow that it can take an hour to make a single ounce. As we put it when we first sold it, matcha is the only tea where you consume the whole powdered leaf, instead of steeping the leaves and throwing them away.

Where ours comes from

We launched our matcha in September 2018, sourced fresh from Shizuoka, Japan. Our first import, that December, was 10 kg in 1 kg bags from a tea exporter in Kakegawa, Shizuoka, shipped to our facility in Siliguri with a certificate of origin. Later orders were 10 kg, 10 kg and then 20 kg.

The product is made the traditional way from shade-grown leaf: only the youngest tencha leaves are chosen and stone-ground into a fine, vivid green powder. Matcha comes in grades. Ours is a premium grade, which we have described as “not the culinary and neither the Ceremonial,” a middle grade meant for everyday drinking. Made well from good leaf, matcha is subtle, grassy and slightly sweet; made badly, it turns into what the samurai story calls “a truly awful, bitter foamed sludge.”

How to whisk it

Our method: put 1 teaspoon of matcha in a bowl, add 150 to 165 ml of hot water, and whisk in a zigzag motion until frothy. A bamboo whisk, the chasen, gives the creamiest texture. Our quicker version is 1 teaspoon to half a cup of hot water, whisked hard until it froths. Customers bake with it too; one turned ours into matcha cupcakes with coconut whipped cream.

Try it with our Pure Japanese Matcha Premium Green. Matcha deserves a guide of its own; this is the short version.

Tea 101 describes a range running “from cooked vegetables and charred greens to grass, nuts, and citrus,” shaped by small changes in processing. Its shortest version: pan-fired greens taste of roasted greens and grains, while steamed green tea tastes of blanched greens and boiled rice.

The cup is usually pale yellow to bright yellow-green and clear. Chinese greens tend toward the vegetal, nutty and floral; Japanese greens toward the marine and herbaceous, with a savory depth. Indian greens are often softer and rounder, with floral notes and, in some high-grown Nilgiri teas, a sweet undertone.

How our tasters describe it

Our training deck gives the words we use at the tasting table: vegetal, grilled greens, grassy, toasty, nutty and herbaceous, with a liquor from pale green to yellowish green and a cooked-vegetable, cooked-corn flavor.

Corn comes up again in a real lot. Our tasting card for the Glendale Autumn Twirl Green, picked on 23 October 2023 from the CR 6017 cultivar in the Nilgiris, reads: aroma “cooked corn, earthy and floral”; palate “sweet-floral, brisk, hint of greens.” Our tasters have also noted that Indian green teas have a reputation for being a bit bitter, and that a few stand apart, like the greens of Barnesbeg in Darjeeling.

With food

Green tea is also good with food. A 2015 piece on our blog found that its nutty, roasted, floral and fruity notes can work with cheese, from a fresh sencha with Japanese-style cheesecake to Longjing with a salty French cheese. Read The Unusual Pairing of Green Tea with Cheese. Peter Keen, writing for us about jasmine teas, counted them among “the few teas that adds to light food.”

Too-hot water and too-long steeping are the two most common reasons green tea tastes bitter. Peter Keen, writing for us, warned that the finest Japanese greens are spoiled in under three minutes at water only a little hotter than they like.

The amount in your cup varies with the leaf, how much you use, the water temperature and how long you steep it. Our 2023 green tea FAQ uses the same figures.

Green tea is not caffeine-free. Dry green and black leaf can hold similar amounts of caffeine; green tea usually ends up lower in the cup because it is brewed cooler and shorter. Peter Keen made the same point for us in 2016: green teas are often wrongly assumed to be lower in caffeine than black teas, when soil, harvesting and brewing have far more effect than the type.

Matcha is the exception to watch: you drink the whole powdered leaf, so a bowl generally carries more than a steeped cup. Shade-grown leaf adds to it; our 2021 story on fine teas notes that growing gyokuro in the dark raises its caffeine. Our product data reflects this: we rate our Darjeeling Green Tea “Low” for caffeine and our matcha “High.” More in Caffeine in tea.

Many people drink green tea for their health, and the old Tea 101 pages made big promises about it. We no longer make them. For what research has and has not shown about tea, see Health benefits of tea.

Indian greens are generally smooth and gently floral, with less of the marine character of Japanese teas. Our customers have taken to them. When Teabox released its first Tea Report on International Tea Day in May 2022, one of the headline findings, as our founder Kausshal Dugarr shared, was a “23x increase in Green” during Covid.