Trying to live a healthy, moral, realistic life in a time when most people are oriented toward distraction is a beast. The rest of them care more about what makes them look cool to others, and how they can band together to conspire to face the fewest challenges in life possible, and you're without hope looking for something as simple as a beverage you can believe in. Never fear: we've found the answer, at least for green teas.

Perpetually gaining popularity because of its potential health benefits, lack of complexity and moderate caffeine dosage, green tea also does not taste like dreck as most darker teas seem to. What makes it green is that it is cured lightly without dehydrating it, so unlike black tea, it does not resemble the leaves you sweep up every fall, and correspondingly, preserves more of tea's medicinal and flavorful properties.

With that in mind, we tackle the three most popular brands found in our area, and come up with some startling conclusions. Our challenge here is that green tea is a well-known commodity, drunk for thousands of years, and it isn't complicated to cultivate and prepare it. So the real question is: how much has green tea improved since its birth, and are these newer versions even worth paying attention to?

Stash Premium - Premium Green Tea

As consumers, we look so hard for quality, and we distrust advertising. The brilliant plan of Stash is to market tea under a humble name and then to really hit you hard with how good it is, quietly, by repeating the term "premium" on the packaging until you believe it. This was the "sweetest" tea we tasted, but hard a somewhat sharp and acidic aftertaste. Otherwise, it was completely middle of the road, leading us to believe Stash are basically glorified generics. Having the lowest price in the group seemed to confirm this suspicion. This comes in a foil-and-plastic envelope with a good seal. It's a good "high average" tea. Its taste is muted a bit from the truly plantlike taste of raw green tea, but it isn't tricked out in any weirdness or adulterated significantly. Still, it's hard to recommend. How ringing of an endorsement is "better than average, and they didn't screw up anything major"?

Kirkland Signature - Itoen Green Tea

Japanese brand Itoen and American yuppie generic powerhouse Kirkland Signature -- spawn of Costco stores, and so purchased by 90% of real yuppies out there (as opposed to hipster yuppies, who are young urban failures living beyond their means) -- is unique in that it comes with matcha, or powdered green tea that's the green tea drinker equivalent of kif. The instructions are too ritualistic for a mass-produced product, leading me to think they're mostly there for authenticity, and they tell you exactly how to dump the matcha on top. In our testing, however, it delivered the fullest flavor when dumped in with the tea bag itself and then steeped for three minutes. These teabags come in easy-tear plastic envelopes that provide a quality seal, but the teabag and string are formed from plastic mesh. This tea was one of the favorites in our testing, since its flavor -- perhaps in another desire to be "authentic," which can be achieved by making anything taste more like barnyard -- has a slight bitterness but the full, grainy, autumnal flavor green tea drinkers have come to expect from the good stuff. There is no reason to ever turn down a cup of this.

Salada All Natural 100% Green Tea

You mean that after looking into the most popular and most elite brands, you're going to review boring old salada, found in the boring old white person's grocery store, Randall's? Yes, and the results may surprise you. This tea comes in paper envelopes, so it's not something you want to store in your un-climate-controlled shed for a decade and then hope to have a decent cup. The tea bag and string are made from textile and have longer than average string reach. When you fire up the hot water and pour it over this tea, however, you notice that for all its lack of markers of authenticity or hipness, it has the best middle of the road flavor. It is stronger in smell and taste than the others, but preserves the harvest flavor of green tea, and while it has some bitter aftertaste, it is mostly flavor and only a little bitterness. Where the Itoen tries to go for the soft touch, and the Stash nails a generic "good" taste, the Salada has some character, and it's fighting character: this tea in taste and smell reaches out to pummel you. Let's make a cup of good tea and get back to it, it says.

Uncle Lee's Premium Green Tea

Everything about this tea is a pain in the rear. You can't find it in regular stores. It does not come in tea bags, which means you need one of those little perforated metal balls to steep it. Even more insulting to American consumers, it comes in a carboard and metal cylinder without a locking hygenic seal. It's... it's like being alive, or something. In flavor, this tea is comparable to the Salada, but even stronger, with a very faint undertone like that of a green onion, but a strong and harsh taste that is powerful, slightly bitter, but full of the grainy august flavors that make green tea like an exercise in camping compared to the processed, refined, flavored, sweetened teas that come in boxes with uplifting slogans on them. Not only that, it rocks the caffeine charts in a way no other tea we tested did. While it can be seen as a disadvantage to either have tea greens on the bottom of your cup, or to use a steepage ball, to us it provided that 100% certified authentic zany cachet of reality that very little else outside the produce section does.

So what are our recommendations? None of the teas we tested were bad; the Stash is so middle of the road we ran right over it and didn't look back, and the Itoen is very much like Hello Kitty and Honda, but maybe not what's needed. In addition, only the Salada and Uncle Lee's came without plastic -- paper is easy to recycle, and tea grounds compost, leaving the world in roughly the state you found it when you were born. Plastic? Recyclers pitch much of it out, especially tiny, annoying tea bags. This kind of thinking about a whole experience that allows manufacturers to stay away from plastic also suggests they'll take their teas seriously in both flavor and cleanliness, and that has been our experience here. Go for the Salada -- but keep Uncle Lee's on hand if you can find it. When friends bop over for a quick cup of green tea, the teabag is infinitely better as an option, but if you're sitting at your desk cranking out music reviews (dunno why I'd think of that) having a master cylinder of Uncle Lee is what keeps both sleepiness and lack of flavor away.