Are "broken" leaves normal for sencha?
I’m new to steepster, and it looks like you good folks would know the answer to my question :) Recently, I’ve taken to green tea as a replacement for coffee. I’ll spare you the details as to why I chose green tea (unless you’re curious of course), but I started off with some tea (bagged) my wife had, which had a very different taste to it than what I was used to in green tea. It had a distinct note of nori (seaweed), which I immediately fell in love with. So after some googling, I found out that the tea manufacturer sourced its tea from Japan rather than China, which lent itself to the nori flavor I was picking up.
So I sought out that flavor in a loose leaf, and landed at sencha. We have a Teavana locally, which has sencha, so I went to pick up some to try, assuming I’d test it out, and if I liked it, order it elsewhere. And so far I’m up to three different sources of sencha, all of which have somewhat “broken” leaves.
I have read that full leaf tea is revered as quality, so I’m a bit confused as to why only one of the three sources has had full-ish leaves vs very broken pieces. So far, they’re Teavana, O-Cha and a local shop. The local shop is the one with the much fuller tea leaves, both O-Cha and Teavana have tons of leaf bits in them.
When I search for “full leaf sencha” not much comes up. Am I missing something? Is this sort of broken appearance something normal for sencha? Despite the brokenness ive had no problem getting several flavorful infusions each time, but I’m just wondering if this sort of brokenness of the leaves is normal in sencha.
What I do know is that I love the flavor profile, so I’m hardly complaining :)
Thanks in advance!
- greenmeanie
Welcome to steepster greenmeanie. As a fellow Japanese tea lover, let me assure you that broken leaves are perfectly normal with sencha. Due to the way Japanese tea is processed – steaming then pressing, rolling, twisting, and drying – the leaves will naturally be fragmented. Some Japanese green tea will be more fragmented than others. Fukamushi/deep-steamed sencha is more broken than light steamed sencha because the steaming process is twice as long.
Chinese green tea on the other hand is pan-fired, not steamed, and is generally processed by hand which results in a full leaf tea.
Thank you so much for the detail! That makes perfect sense. Is the level of brokenness any indicator of quality for Japanese green tea? And do you have any “must try” suggestions for this new Japanese green tea-phile? Thanks again!
While broken leaves are normal, it shouldn’t be too powdery. That’s a sign of low quality tea. I’ve had Teavana and O-Cha sencha and both are quite good, although Teavana is somewhat overpriced. And if you like sencha, you may want to later “upgrade” to gyokuro, the highest grade of Japanese green tea.
My biggest problem with Teavana is that they are overpriced. They sell some good teas despite the fact that they get bad press on here but their teas are sold for an amount of money that I believe is greater than their value.
I agree, many of their straight teas are pretty good but overpriced. It’s like charging 30 grand for a Civic. A perfectly good car, but not worth paying that much for.
Totally agree on Teavana — once I did even little research so that I’d reasonably know what I was looking for, it was clear that Teavana was on the higher side. That being said, I thought it was the only tea shop in town, so I thought it was my only option to try some decent loose leaf tea. Turns out, there’s a killer tea shop on the other side of town which has a great selection, good quality and is local :)
I’ve been trying to determine whether or not I should try gyokuro… it sounds like I need to bite the bullet and give it a shot!
The best way to find whole leaf may be to email people you are considering buying from,ask them if it is whole leaf or broken leaf. Broken leaf is very common. A good source of Sencha is Yunomi in Japan.
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