Sencha of the Summer Sun

Very nice, and quite different from other Japanese Senchas I’ve tried. This tea is very much like the description depicts: it starts off with a savory bitterness which wanes into a smooth sweetness toward the tail, and then there is an astringency that cleanses.

I enjoy this for how different it is. It is probably not a Sencha I’d drink every day, but, it is one that I’d enjoy on occasion, and it would definitely make a pleasing palate cleanser after meals.

I finally opened this sencha! I was trying to finish my Sencha Fukamidori from Den’s first, since these types of greens apparently spoil rather quickly.

This is very different from the senchas I’m used to. It is still buttery and spinachy, but there’s a haylike or grassy quality as well. Kind of like sencha with some white tea thrown in? I find it interesting that this is the summer harvest sencha, because the hay notes really make me think of summer time!

There is a little sweetness but not as much as other senchas, so this one seems pretty savory to me. No bitteness at all though (I made sure to steep at a nice low temp) and very little astringency. Nice sencha, very glad I won it from a Yunomi.us giveaway! :)

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

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

I drank this iced. I love love this tea. Tastes like buttery spinach. Used 1 tablespoon for 16 oz. This is my kind of sencha. No real astringency, slight sweetness.

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.

Another very nice tea from Obubu Tea Plantations in Kyoto. I have been drinking this today using the parameters specified by Obubu, and it makes for a very pleasant set of infusions of a very bright and lightly buttery character. Nice vegetal taste with only a slight touch of bitterness in the first steep. It doesn’t take much imagination to taste the “early summer sun shining brightly.”

A really nice healthy green taste; It goes well with food, but I am enjoying it all on it’s own!

A lot more savoury and less bitter than I was expecting, especially as I brewed this tea with near-boiling water. I really like this tea – it has a surprisingly strong taste for a sencha, very vegetal and buttery as you might expect, but with more umami than I would have expected. The taste becomes less rounded and more bitter as the tea cools.

This smells more like a bancha with a hint of sencha. I started with a minute steep time but decided to begin the pouring at 55 seconds. It definitely has that metallic tint on the palate like a bancha. But the mouth feel is very smooth. It also probably wasn’t the best choice to consume after waffles. This is also called Summer Sencha on the packet so this one might have been produced a bit differently, at a different time during the summer, and or many other factors. This sample came from the Global Japanese Tea Association intermediate course.

I believe the Brightness tea I tried the other day was also a summer-harvest tea, so it’ll be interesting to see how this differs.

Dry leaves smell plenty grassy and dark green, sweeter, I think, than the last tea, and maybe there’s some milkiness in there. Wet leaves are foresty, mossy and…. why do I keep getting chocolate vibes in these teas?

For once, I don’t think I understeeped the first cup. It’s certainly…. interesting, starting out kind of sweet and brothy and turning astringent and … sour, like a hot and sour soup, maybe. It feels heavy and substantial in the mouth. The second steeping is a bit more immediate on the astringency but also… richer, more savory, less sweet. The sour notes are nearly gone, but seem to return in the third steeping, a umami-adjacent juiciness. It’s got some background grassiness, but that’s far from the focus. I’m not sure I can really define the focus, but it’s… it’s really good and just so interesting, competes with the Autumn Moon for my favorite tea in this sampler. I’d like to get more of each and try them side by side.

Looking at the website, it appears the only difference between this tea and Brightness is that Brightness is shaded for two weeks before harvest, while this tea is not. And I think I prefer this tea to Brightness, so maybe I just prefer unshaded teas? Brightness was still very interesting its own way, and might be excellent in certain applications, but this tea is more to my personal tastes, I feel. I love how so many of the teas in this sampler vary just slightly enough that I can start drawing conclusions like this.

I should start thinking ahead though, as I realize I’m about halfway through this sampler. While I still have enough houjicha to last me ~2 weeks, I should probably start shopping around for new sencha to try, given shipping can take a while. I’ll need to finish this sampler before I make any reordering decisions, so in the meantime I’m open to vendor or specific sencha recommendations, if anyone has any suggestions!

Sipdown! (8 | 417)

So I was saving my last packet of this to send to a friend, but I got my fall subscription package today, and inside were five more packets! So I’m finishing off this last older sample and I’ll send out one of the fresh ones.

Just wrote a note about this yesterday so I don’t have much more to say. I think this is a very well-balanced sencha that’s easy to drink. It has a nice combination of freshness and umami without being too heavy, and a creamy nuttiness that’s really yummy.