Tea tasting: Sawamizuka cultivar (Hagiri Tea)

Happy new year! Here's hoping that 2023 be an awesome year for all of us! For fellow tea lovers, may our cups be abundantly filled with great tea! Today I'm writing about this sencha that I've opened last month. I've bought it sometime in October. Usually I don't buy sencha this late in the year, …

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Tea tasting: Koganemidori sencha (Koganemidori Chaen)

Revisiting the taste of this unique hakuyoucha or white-leaf tea after I have first tasted it in November 2019. To learn more about the previous tasting experience, click HERE. Koganemidori, just like its name 'golden green' implies, is characterised by its golden-coloured leaves that don't look like any regular tea leaves. However, it is still …

Tea tasting: 2022 Shincha – Nakaisamurai Meicha First Flush Organic Green (Nakaya Nouen)

I have been really slack in updating this blog. Too many things happening in real life, well, mostly work. Now that the pandemic has been declared endemic in my country, most things have resumed to pre-Covid days, including large-scale events that I have to attend. It's like, I had content materials but then as time …

Tea tasting: 2022 Shincha – Onocha (Yamaguchi Chagyou)

This is the first time I tasted tea from Yamaguchi prefecture, located at the far western part of Honshu, next to Hiroshima. Teas from here, specifically from Ube City and its surroundings, are known as Onocha. Ono region is gently hilly, with strong red soil. The tea plantations here have been in existence since the …

Tea tasting: Shincha 2022 – Shuntarou cultivar (Iba Yuu Seicha)

Two of my 2022 shincha orders have arrived last week! But I chose to start drinking one today, on Hachijuuhachi-ya (or the 88th night). It seems like it has become a tradition for me since 2020 to get shincha from Tanegashima (an island off Kagoshima prefecture) as my very first shincha of the year. This …

Tea tasting: Hand-rolled green tea

This is just a short post (and photo dump) for a delicious hand-rolled tea I received as a gift last week. In Japan, there are farmers who produce hand-rolled tea, usually in small amounts and sold at premium pricing. Also, as I have previously posted, some even offer the hands-on experience to visitors, at a …

Special Focus on Shizuoka: Traditional hand-rolling experience at a tea farm

Before the advent of tea-making machineries, sencha was hand-rolled. This manual method known as temomi was invented in 1738 by Nagatani Souen. The method resulted in high quality and refined green tea with leaves that are bright and needle-like in shape. Today, temomi is no longer widely practised in Japan, but are preserved as a …

Tea tasting: Rokurou cultivar (Suzuki Chaen)

Over the past couple of years, I tend to look out for single-cultivar teas to try, especially the rarer or unusual ones. I've been fortunate to come across a few, with many only produced by a particular farm or two. Rokurou is one of such tea. Rokurou is an old cultivar, having been registered in …

Japanese Tea Marathon (Finale) +thoughts

Day 15 (Aug 8) of Japanese Tea Marathon was also the final day of this amazing virtual event. We finished off in Shizuoka, the top tea-producing prefecture in Japan, having ranked No.1 consistently since 1883. However, as reported by Kyodo News in May, Shizuoka has been overtaken by Kagoshima in terms of green tea output, …

Japanese Tea Marathon (Days 8-10)

In the past three days, the Japanese Tea Marathon took us to the tea production areas of the Kansai region. If you have missed my previous summary posts, they can be found here (Days 1-4) and here (Days 5-7). Day 8 (July 31) Kyoto Place:Kyoto, an ever-popular tourist destination, is also the headquarters of the …

Japanese Tea Marathon (Days 5-7)

I've decided to split my summary of the Japanese Tea Marathon into two parts at this point so that I don't forget what was covered during the sessions. I have my written notes but it's good to type them out before impressions fade. There were really so much information packed into two hours each day. …

Tea tasting: Shincha 2021 – Yayoi Shincha Houju (Sasukien)

I think this was possibly the earliest shincha from Japan, as the tea leaves were first picked on March 18. In fact, the name Yayoi refers to the third month in the Japanese old calendar. What makes this tea unusual is that the tea plants are cultivated in a vinyl-covered greenhouse, not in an open …