Bringing you the sweetest and most delicious tea of the year.
The first harvest of 2020 started on April 9 in southern Kagoshima and some of our producers have just released their Shincha (new tea). Starting today and until early June, we are rolling out the 2020 vintage of our teas as we receive them.
The 2020 shincha collection opens with competition-grade MITSUE (sencha), high-grade MITSUMI (sencha), and premium grade REI (sencha), all of them from Chiran (Kagoshima).
Kagoshima has a warmer climate than other tea producing regions, this is why they have the earliest shincha of Japan. In a couple of weeks, we will receive Yame, Saga, Nagasaki and Miyazaki teas. Green teas that are covered for a longer period, like gyokuro or kabusecha, needs a little more time before plucking.
All our 2020 Shincha can be found in a special section of our online shop. Bookmark it for your convenience! To celebrate, we have created a special wrapping for the 2020 harvest - white washi paper with golden flakes, a washi obi with the name and grade of the tea above a red sunflower (symbol of hope in Japan), as well as the characters for 'shincha' in white against a deep purple color.
Of course as soon as we received the parcels with the new tea, we had to try it ! As we opened a fresh bag of MITSUE a fragrant scent of mango hit us, after shaking the bag a couple of times the stronger grassy tones took over, reminding us the particular smell at the processing factories during harvest. It feels like you're literally eating the raw leaves. After brewing the tea as fast as we could we just took a long breath and enjoyed our first tea from 2020, thinking about all that happened during these past months, and what still lies ahead. Nevertheless, the confort of the hot beverage, its smell and taste reminded us also all the hard work put in order to get it in our cups, challenging ourselves to do even better to promote these teas.
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