I want to share with you a short tea video: It’s about three years old, but still relevant today. Many households in Japan don’t have a kyusu anymore. The...
Marushige Shimizu Seicha Terakawawase Sencha
I want to thank Ian Chun of Yunomi.life for sending me this sample for review. One of the things about Japanese tea that I enjoy is tasting different cultivars....
The Terakawawase Tea Cultivar
The name Terakawawase (寺川早生) comes from Terakawa Toshio (寺川俊男), the registrant of this cultivar, and the term ” waseshu” (早生種) which refers to early budding cultivars. It was developed...
Top 3 Largest Japanese Tea Companies
¿What are the largest tea companies in Japan? When I first started researching this topic, it turned out that the biggest companies in the Japanese tea industry didn’t cultivate...
Kanes Tea Organic Benifuuki Oolong
The Benifuuki cultivar is usually found as either a green tea or black tea. I hadn’t tasted it as an oolong until I tried this one from Kanes Tea....
The Shunmei Tea Cultivar
Shunmei (春茗, しゅんめい) means “spring tea”. The name implies that it is an early budding tea cultivar. On a warm region, it will bud four to five days earlier...
Green Tea and Grapefruit Cocktail
I made this cocktail with a recipe that my friend Kayoko taught me. She found it in a Japanese magazine, if I’m not mistaken. The original recipe uses a...
Sugimoto Tea Organic Sencha Saemidori
Sugimoto Tea has continued to sell their single cultivar series for wholesale clients. This first harvest fukamushi sencha from the Saemidori cultivar comes from Hioki city, Kagoshima prefecture. The...
Learn from Zero! How to Enjoy Japanese Tea (Book Review)
The original title of this book is ゼロから分かる！日本茶の楽しみ方. It’s written by Oscar Brekell. I wanted to read his three books. This was the one I was missing. It’s only...
Stacking Tea Infusions
Stacking infusions means that you re-infuse a given tea and then mix it with a prior infusion. Why do this instead of drinking each infusion separately? One reason might...
Maruchu Fukamushi Sencha
Many thanks to Webexpoo.com for sending me this sample. Maruchu (丸忠) is a tea company in Kakegawa city, Shizuoka prefecture. They cultivate the tea using a sustainable farming practice,...
The Yutakamidori Tea Cultivar
I hadn’t written about Yutakamidori because it’s not an officially registered cultivar, but it ranks second after Yabukita in terms of cultivated area in Japan. Yutakamidori (ゆたかみどり) means “abundant...