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Sencha of the Summer Sun or 太陽の煎茶（夏） is the companion to Sencha of the Spring Sun, with a bitter taste that is strong at first. But the as the aftertaste spreads through you mouth, you begin to taste the sweet early summer sun shining brightly. Great for washing down oily meals (like summer BBQs…yum!).
Grown uncovered on west-facing slopes, the leaves take in the strong early summer sun and warm breezes before they are harvested in early July. The soil of the tea fields is composed of granite that has eroded after many millennia.
Product info
Product name: Sencha of the Summer Sun
Ingredients: 100% aracha from Wazuka, Kyoto
Tea plant: Yabukita plants, about 20 years old
Cultivation notes: Open air (uncovered)
Harvest period: early-July
Processing notes: light steaming (about 25 seconds)
Product size: 1 bag (24.5 x11.5 x2.0 cm / 9.65 x4.53 x0.79 in)
Weight of contents: 100 g / 3.53 oz
Producer: Akihiro Kita
Expiration: Good for 6 months from shipment
Storage: Seal tightly and refrigerate
Very nice, and quite different from other Japanese Senchas I’ve tried. This tea is very much like the description depicts: it starts off with a savory bitterness which wanes into a smooth sweetness toward the tail, and then there is an astringency that cleanses.
I enjoy this for how different it is. It is probably not a Sencha I’d drink every day, but, it is one that I’d enjoy on occasion, and it would definitely make a pleasing palate cleanser after meals.
An Exceptional Green! Very lovely! A SS Gift from Brian! Thanks so much! :)
Very clean and crisp and spring and a true green! YUM!
Beautiful name. Pleasant tea. My humans have promised to take me on a tour of the Obubu tea gardens. I’m not holding my breath on it, though. Photos and details: http://is.gd/foVAV
I drank this iced. I love love this tea. Tastes like buttery spinach. Used 1 tablespoon for 16 oz. This is my kind of sencha. No real astringency, slight sweetness.
Their description is right, this is a very bold tea for a Japanese green.
The loose leaf had an interesting look… there were a few leaves that were compressed together like a pu-erh tea cake.
The first steeping wasn’t as bitter as they described. It mostly tasted like a low quality sencha, in my opinion. I think I over brewed the 2nd steeping, as it was incredibly astringent and not much else. This would go well with strong tasting foods, as it is strong enough itself to not get masked.
Another very nice tea from Obubu Tea Plantations in Kyoto. I have been drinking this today using the parameters specified by Obubu, and it makes for a very pleasant set of infusions of a very bright and lightly buttery character. Nice vegetal taste with only a slight touch of bitterness in the first steep. It doesn’t take much imagination to taste the “early summer sun shining brightly.”
A really nice healthy green taste; It goes well with food, but I am enjoying it all on it’s own!
A lot more savoury and less bitter than I was expecting, especially as I brewed this tea with near-boiling water. I really like this tea – it has a surprisingly strong taste for a sencha, very vegetal and buttery as you might expect, but with more umami than I would have expected. The taste becomes less rounded and more bitter as the tea cools.
