Organic Sencha Saemidori

Location: Satsuma Town, Kagoshima.

Harvest Season: Early Spring, Shincha season - April. 

Cultivar: Saemidori! 

Process: 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.

Saemidori is native to Kagoshima and officially registered as a cultivar in 1990. Saemidori means "clear green" in Japanese and is a cross between the Yabukita and the high-quality Asatsuyu cultivar. Over the years, the cultivar has been favored by producers growing tea for competition, and you'll often find prize-winning teas made from this cultivar. In the field, Saemidori flushes a little earlier in the Spring season after the main Yabukita flush. Saemidori produces a medium-high yield and accounts for about 4% of tea production today.

Why are cultivars important? 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 or disease, 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.