Kyoto Obubu Tea Farms

This is a fantastic Sencha. Each time I try a tea from Obubu I am impressed by the flavor. No exception with this tea.

There is an earthiness to this Sencha that I don’t think I’ve experienced in another Sencha. It also has a charming spice note to it that is quite good. Certainly one of the most interesting and unusual Sencha teas I’ve tasted recently, and I am really liking it.

Off to write a review!

I really enjoyed this Sencha. Rather than the sweet, buttery notes that I sometimes get from a Sencha, I am getting an interesting bittersweet taste with a nutty undertone. The taste is fresh and exhilarating.

Very nice!

Doing a double shot just to do a SIPDOWN! Still VERY nice! Buttery on the tongue! YUM!

I think this is REALLY incredible! This has all of the ‘right amounts’ of all of the stereotypical green flavors in it without any one flavor dominating the others. It leaves a sweeter after taste that is really wonderful!

If you were to put the song “I’m a little bit Country – I’m a little bit Rock N Roll” up against this tea…well. it would be the tea equivalent to that song!

A little bit of EVERYTHING GOOD in a Green Tea! Totally YUM!

Backlogging my genmaicha experience.

Obubu’s Genmaicha is a flavorful, well-balanced combination of Japanese sencha and roasted sweet mochi rice. The tea it produces is flavorful and light, with a wonderfully aromatic smell of roasted rice without a trace of bitterness. There is a slightly sweet, peppery aftertaste that adds layers of depth and complexity to the tea. For my full review and pics: http://www.leafjoy.com/2011/01/review-genmaicha-obubu-tea/

YUMMMMMMMM – see my previous note!

Thanks Brian for this one!!!

This is wonderful! I really like this! It has a fresh veggies type smell before infusing and after it smells like steamed asparagus! The taste is like a creamy-basil-pesto type taste which I LOVE as a taste in food and think it’s delightful in tea as well!

I had to try an ice brew method with this one, because I know it is so successful and wanted to give Obubu’s highest quality tea the best shot possible.

I may not have needed to do so, because every steeping was really delicious and overall the tea seemed pretty unique (in a refreshing way!). I’m surprised it is aracha, because it seemed to be only leaf (small whole leaves and broken pieces). There were so many small pieces in the dry leaf, I’m also surprised it wasn’t a chu or fukamushi.

I couldn’t figure out why I liked it, but it didn’t have the typical gyokuro flavors (nor the typical sencha ones)… it wasn’t strongly marine flavored or vegetal, or super sweet or bitter, or fruity, and yet somehow it was full of flavor and gave 5 good infusions.

I’ve finally finished the sampler from Obubu, and overall I wasn’t too impressed, but they do carry a couple that I found to be pretty good – this and Sencha of the Earth I can think of off the top of my head. Those might be good enough to pick up 100g some day. If they sold them in 50g sizes, I would definitely put them on the shopping list, because it would not only be cheaper in that amount, but 100g is just a lot of tea! (I get tired of the same one after a while, so it’s nice to have something different to try, and 2 – 2.5oz seems like the sweet spot for me).

I’m having trouble rating this one because while I enjoyed it, I couldn’t tell the difference between this and any other houjicha… it seemed somewhat bland.
The dry leaf smelled very good and even had a hint of green (not much but the wet leaves looked more amber colored instead of that dark brown, like raw umber). The smell reminded me of Tencha-Kuki-Houjicha by Den’s Tea, which is a lightly roasted tea that I really like.

The flavor, as I said, was fairly unremarkable, at least in my opinion. I was hopeful that I would really like it, because I hoped more of the green characteristics of the tea would come through. Instead, it seems, that neither the green, nor the typical roasted flavors came through. It is solid, but it seemed average.

This tea is fascinating and very much worth trying. It’s a really marvelous experience to drink clear, sweet nectar scented with cherry blossoms.

The flowers arrive salt-pickled and must first be soaked in warm water before use. The unsoaked salted sakura blossoms smell like a sweet candy. It reminds me a little bit of the smell of salted plum candies from the Chinese grocery store. While the liquor produced from steeping the sakura blossom is clear and virtually colorless, it has a very distinctive sakura taste, like honey, sugared plum and melon. Steeped as recommended, the flowers bloom exuberantly in the hot water and reveal a very sweet and floral taste with a complexity of flavor.

I also used this to flavor my everyday genmaicha and it tasted delicious. It really adds layers of complexity and sweetness to the tea!

The steeped flower is gorgeous, check out my photos here: http://www.leafjoy.com/2011/01/tasting-sakura-cherry-blossoms-from-obubu-tea-includes-pics/

So far, none of Obubu’s teas have really made me think, ’I’ve got to try that again some day (or rather, order a bag of it at some point)’.
But this one will make me reconsider. Nice to have Steepster, so I can look things up that I enjoyed.

The dry leaf smelled faintly peppery and sweet. The wet leaf in the pot was fantastic — it smelled more strongly of pepper, which quickly dissipated, then gave way to creamy notes and I even smelled what I would describe as plantains.
The tea itself was delicious – it had a light, almost playful sweetness up front, like sweet cream (and yes, the creaminess in the aroma was present in the taste!), then was perhaps fruity, like the smell of apricots.

The 2nd steeping, the wet leaf smelled like pesto — olive oil and basil are probably the best ways I could describe it. The taste had less creaminess to it, but was still sweet and more strongly like apricot again.

I tried an ice steeping as well, and it had more of the traditional balance of slight bitterness, marine, vegetal, and sweet that I’m used to, but it was good as well.

This is quite a unique sencha and I wish Obubu had a better description of it. It sounds somewhat bland or uninteresting from their website, but I still hoped it would stand out (I guess because I’m down to my last samples, and I was hoping this other of their higher quality teas would be really delicious). Well, my hopes weren’t for naught.

The wet leaf smelled incredible — strong notes of chocolate, with cherries and cigar smoke also in the aroma.
The taste, while nicely sweet, lacked depth (for me at least) and didn’t have all the flavors or aromas the wet leaf seemed to promise, so that was a bit disappointing.
I do like it, and it is slightly difference from regular houjicha, so I’d almost be tempted to seek it out. But the sample wasn’t quite convincing enough to put it on a list for when I’m looking to get houjicha.

It’s somewhat impressive that Obubu puts out 4 different kinds of houjicha. I wonder how difficult it is to have consistency of roast — what’s the difference in the roasting process between light, basic, and dark? Seems it could be quite difficult to do it consistently.

While I enjoyed this cup, the wet leaf smelled like pickled peppers. Now, I liked pickled things (be it peppers, kim chee, or cucumber), but that was a strange smell to get from tea.

Stranger still was that this was actually present as a flavor. I did like the tea, but it was strange. I don’t remember what else it tasted like, but I don’t think there was a lot there. I’m rating it this high simply because I enjoyed it, but in terms of good quality bancha, I’m sure there’s better out there.

Also interesting was the fact that this had really long twigs present (1" – 1.5"!) that really looked like twigs from a tree, rather than the very small, reed-like kuki in a regular kukicha.

Obubu seems to have a fairly unique approach when it comes to the green tea market. There are other tea farmers (like Hibiki-an) that sell directly to consumers, but Obubu sells all of its tea as aracha, which is unsorted tea. I don’t know a whole lot about it, but my understanding is that most of the green teas on the market have been sifted by machines by their size, and then once sifted, expertly blended with several other lots to come up with one unique, but consistent product (ie, if you know how to blend teas to achieve a desired taste, you can have the product taste the same every year no matter how good or poor the harvest is that year or other factors that come in to play).
Obubu, on the other hand, seems to distinguish their different products by where in the fields they grow them, and by which harvest (and method of growing, of course). I would guess that this can lead to a lot of variation in the product from year to year. The better the harvest, the better all of their products will be, and vice-versa.

I’m no expert, so that is just a guess.

Along those same lines, this is a cool, pretty unique tea. This is a 2nd harvest sencha, yet, it is covered for the last 2 weeks like a 1st harvest kabuse or gyokuro would be. If they didn’t cover it, I’m sure the flavor profile would be the nearly indistinguishable from their Sencha of the Summer Sun.

Enough rambling.
I did the first brewing with 40 degree water (5oz for the whole 5g sample) for 14 minutes. It tasted like a non-sweet gyokuro; lots of marine aroma and flavor, a little grassyness, maybe some hints of sweet.

The next steep was with boiling water for just 25 seconds. The wet leaf smelled a little peppery, and then was full of fruity notes just like a green oolong. I really liked that, and hoped that the cup would contain some of those oolong-like fruit flavors, as it would have been very unique.
The tea itself wasn’t bitter at all, nor astringent. None of the marine or nori flavors from the last brew were left. Instead, for some reason I tasted chocolate oranges. I’m not sure if the chocolate flavor was really there, but the orange flavor certainly was. This flavor wasn’t sour like citrus; but, again, like the orange flavor you get when you have a piece of orange-flavored chocolate. The body of the flavor didn’t taste like the fruity oolong the leaf smelled like. Other than the orange note, it was slightly sweet and grassy, but not a lot of depth.

I wonder if aracha is the reason I’ve felt like none of Obubu’s teas have had a lot of depth. There have been good/interesting flavors, and I have certainly liked a few of the teas, but many of them have seemed good at the beginning of the sip, only to give out towards the end and not leave any kind of aftertaste or aroma in the mouth.

Their description is right, this is a very bold tea for a Japanese green.
The loose leaf had an interesting look… there were a few leaves that were compressed together like a pu-erh tea cake.

The first steeping wasn’t as bitter as they described. It mostly tasted like a low quality sencha, in my opinion. I think I over brewed the 2nd steeping, as it was incredibly astringent and not much else. This would go well with strong tasting foods, as it is strong enough itself to not get masked.

I only had one sample of this, so it’s hard to form a strong feeling after just three cups (re-infused twice).
However, the genmai is sweeter than other versions I’ve had. The green tea base seemed to be somewhat thin, as I couldn’t taste it very strongly, but what I could taste was good. I’ve had a genmaicha where there was far too much genmai for my liking and there might as well have been no tea leaves at all. This wasn’t like that, because even though it seemed thin, the popped rice was good quality and tasted a little sweet.

So far, the bar has been set by 1TTEN’s genmaicha, as that has the most delicious (bancha, I think) tea base that I’ve had. Nevertheless, this is a good one.

This tea has very interesting steeping directions. However, they help to offset the salt (which preserves the blossoms)…
The sight of the tea is very nice—clear liquid with a pink flower floating in it.

The smell of the blossoms and the taste of the tea is like cherry jam, which I like very much. However, it is muted, and there is certainly salt present in the flavor (especially towards the end of the cup) so that wasn’t my favorite…

This is good, but, I wouldn’t buy it. The coolest thing about it (besides the appearance) is that I can now tell what Sakura really tastes like, and so it has pretty much the exact same flavor of cherry that Den’s Sakura Sencha has (though, that one is definitely stronger). I’m curious to also try Rishi’s Sakura Sencha to compare. Either way, I’ve now learned the difference between simply cherry flavor and sakura flavor (the latter being different, though I’m not exactly able to describe it well, it seems more buttery).

Their website says this tea is an aracha (unsorted) tea, but it looks like it’s just the top leaves and bud to me (at least, it is very similar in appearance to Den’s Sencha Zuiko, or their Hashiri Shincha). The wet leaf looked and smelled just like those teas too, though not as sweet as the shincha.

This seems like a typical first flush sencha (in my limited experience)… fresh bitterness, with a vegetal grassiness underneath. There was some sweetness present, but not a lot.

It wasn’t truly exceptional, but it didn’t disappoint, either. If you were to buy a whole bag, at $26 for 100g and shipping (from Japan), it’s not a bad price compared to similar kinds of tea.

An Exceptional Green! Very lovely! A SS Gift from Brian! Thanks so much! :)

Very clean and crisp and spring and a true green! YUM!

The wet leaf smelled just like pipe tobacco or a cigar. I actually like that smell (when it’s not present in a house or on clothes or something… just like when you get a whiff as you walk by a cigar shop or something), so that was a nice surprise. (Well, it wasn’t really a surprise since this is the ‘smokey’ version of their Houjicha; I’ve just never smelled that in a tea before. I’ve smelled Lapsang Souchong, and that was like campfire smoke, which seemed like the last kind of tea I’d want to drink….). Anyway, the point is, it was an interesting (in a tasty way) smell.

The tea itself was actually not as strong tasting as I would have liked (even though I used 5g leaf to 6oz water!), but the roasted sweetness was very good.

Overall I wouldn’t call it spectacular, but if I get tired of regular Houjicha, I might actually seek this one out to vary up things a bit, as the sweetness of the tea and the aroma of the leaves was very pleasant.

A nice mix of slightly sweet and umami, with just a (nice) hint of bitter (it was present, but I barely noticed it). It was one of those cups of tea that I enjoyed as it was drunk, but it didn’t pop out at me. The wet leaf smelled very sweet and delicious in the kyusu. And yes, the leaves are HUGE! If that is because it is aracha, I like that.

In case you haven’t noticed, I received a sampler of Obubu’s teas for Christmas. $15 for 15 teas (5g each) and free shipping! (I think it was a Holiday special or something). Normally, the price is $25 (I think that still includes shipping) and I wouldn’t say it’s worth it, since it’s not quite enough tea to make more than one pot for each type. But at $15, it was a great deal!