Japanese Tea Tasting: Shades of Green

Japanese Tea Tasting: Shades of Green comes to Brighton on Friday 14 August, a guided tasting session that works its way through Japanese green teas. If you've only ever had a standard tea bag, this is a good place to see how much ground there is to cover within one category.

The session is built around tasting, so you'll be sipping your way through different varieties rather than just listening to a talk. The title, Shades of Green, points to the range they'll be covering: the lighter, grassier notes of some teas alongside the deeper, more toasted ones. It's a guided session, which means someone will be walking you through what you're tasting as you go, pointing out the differences in flavour and aroma between the cups.

Japanese green teas are a broad church, and a tasting like this is one of the easiest ways to get a handle on them. You'll likely encounter the well-known ones like sencha, but the session is designed to show the variety across the board, so you'll get to compare them side by side. It's as much about learning what to look for as it is about the tea itself.

The tasting takes place in Brighton on 14 August, so it's a mid-August date to keep in mind if you're planning your summer. It's a guided session, meaning you don't need to know anything about tea to get something out of it — you just turn up and taste.