Organic Sencha Yabukita

Location: Makizono, Kagoshima

Harvest Season: Early Spring, Shincha season - April.

Cultivar: Yabukita!

Process: Hailing from a renowned area for its clean air, water, and rich volcanic soil, the high-elevation of Makizono terroir produces a fresh fragrance typical of high mountain teas. The snow in the winter and cool night temperatures in the spring and summer produce sugar components that accumulate in the leaves, resulting in sweet flavors once the tea is brewed. The tea leaves are grown in the sun year-round. Prior to harvest, our tea is subject to the special kabuse shade-growing for 9 days (a relatively short time, which differentiates it from gyokuro). Once the first flush (shincha / ichibancha) is ready to harvest in the spring, the leaves are diligently gathered — most often this will be the bud with 2 or 3 leaves of new growth. To create our sencha, the leaves are steamed (Chumushi, normal steaming), dried, cooled, rolled into shape, sorted, and then rolled a final time.

Yabukita came to be when an astute tea farmer, Hikosaburou Sugiyama (1857-1941), cultivated a bamboo forest in Shizuoka prefecture and seeded some teas in the field. Only two of his tea trees survived and Sugiyama-san named the one on the Northside of the forest as Yabukita and the one on the Southside as Yabuminami. (Yabu means bamboo, and Kita and Minami mean literally North and South, respectively in Japanese.) The rest is history as tea farmers learned how to preserve favorable characteristics of tea plants and propagate the cuttings to become the cultivars we know today.

Characteristics in tea that farmers might try to preserve include what time in the season the plant buds (early, in the middle of spring, later in the year, etc), how hardy and resilient the plant is to a particular climate, and of course, what it tastes like. The key is to preserve a tea plant that is "stable" and reliable in what the producer wants to grow year after year. As the Yabukita cultivar resists cold temperatures and has an excellent taste, people started to plant the cultivar widely in Japan. This cultivar was registered in 1953 and has become a synonym for Sencha. Now, it is a cultivar most used for growing tea in Japan (accounting for more than 70% of the Japanese tea fields). Yabukita leaves feature glossy, dark green leaves that produce a deep yellow/green liquor when brewed.