Sencha Yumewakaba is made from a Japanese tea bush cultivar that offers abundant bright, sweet, and clean vegetal flavors layered onto a deliciously complex but well-balanced base tea flavor. For those who want a touch of astringency embedded in a tea with a slight vegetal style, this is a splendid choice.
Mr. Saito once again has given us a unique tea with special characteristics. In appearance, the leaf is large, with a superb finish that shows expert handling throughout its manufacture and firing. The color is deep forest green and the leaf has a nice matte finish. This tea is an easy steeper and and easy sipper – one does not have to wrestle with any challenging aspects of the leaf to enjoy this tea. It is simply solid and delicious.
The flavor characteristics are those of a bright and intriguing, sweet & clean, classically vegetal Japanese green tea. This cultivar shows some astringency but it is in perfect balance with the body and the aroma, so is barely noticeable. The aroma is one of the most ‘solid’ of this year’s offerings – it is just straightforward and intriguing and encourages sipping many steepings of the leaf. The body is quite full and balances a complex, spirited but accessible flavor palate. This Japanese green is particularly good when served cool or even cold.
The liquor is a pale-straw that might fool some regarding the bounty of flavor that the tea contains. Utterly delicious, this is one of the many highlights of the Shizuoka tea harvest for 2020!
Sencha Yumewakaba is produced by our creative tea producer Mr. Saito. His tea gardens are in Honyama, which many believe to be the area that produces the finest senchas in Shizuoka Prefecture. Saito’s tea fields are located in the mountains near the Warashina River. The environment of these tea fields is pristine and filled with natural beauty, healthy plants, birds, insects and all the good components of a thriving tea garden.
Fans of Mr. Saito may recall that he suffered the loss of most of his tea in the spring of 2015 when he had a fire in his warehouse. We received a small first order that year and then nothing else until the following year. We are pleased to report that his garden has suffered no serious permanent damage from the warehouse and living quarters fire of three years ago, and he is back to full production. Saito’s tea gardens are thriving, and his tea is as tasty as, or even better than when Mary Lou first met him in the autumn of 2012.
Want to know more?