Taking advantage of the scorching hot season of summer in Japan, green tea companies are making hard efforts to increase consumption of their products with “cold-brewed green tea.”
Green tea “bottles” displayed in a store front are attracting customers’ attention. (Ureshino-shi, Saga prefecture)
When the green tea is poured with cold water, not with hot water, it has been found, the cold green tea increases a percentage of functional constituents which are to boost people’s immune system.
In addition to such information, a fashionable glass-container like a wine bottle has been manufactured to facilitate an increase in cold tea consumption. This fancy bottle is a kind of green tea brewers with a strainer installed at its mouth.
Although cold green tea has been one of traditional soft drinks during the summer season in Japan, a campaign launched last year for further increasing consumption of green tea leaves has brought about a new situation.
“National Green Tea Festival Executive Committee,” organized by Shizuoka Prefectural Government, Japan Tea Central Association and tea manufacturers, made a declaration of “the first year for cold-brewed green tea” in 2015.
Members of the committee started the nation-wide campaign of promoting the cold green tea consumption, setting their eyes on growing popularity of the fashionable bottle for brewing cold green tea.
Aozora Agricultural Cooperative (JA) in Kagoshima, one of the major green tea producing prefectures in the country, began to sell green tea leaves and a “bottle brewer” as a set this year.
Staff members of JA Aozora are now putting lots of efforts into selling the set items saying “A combination of green tea leaves and a fashionable bottle, we hope, will be useful for us to sell more tea leaves to non-habitual green tea drinkers.”