Description
Yabukita & Saemidori (Blend) Sencha - 2025 Shincha (New Harvest Tea). Naturally grown with no synthetic pesticides or fertilizers.
Origin: Sou, Kagoshima Prefecture.
Cultivar: Yabukita - Saemidori Blend
This sencha from the town of Sou infuses to a medium golden-green hue with a light marine air aroma. It's smooth and lightly sweet with minimal astringency, with these notes lasting into a fourth infusion. As a delicate tasting tea, be sure to use enough tea leaves to bring out the flavors.
Sou is in northwest Kagoshima bordering Miyazaki Prefecture and sharing the Miyakonojou Basin, an area famous for tea growing, with Miyazaki. Although highly mountainous and heavily forested, the area is famous for agricultural products; such as Tea, Chinese Cabbage, Watermelons, and most notably, Yuzu fruit.
Sou was part of the former Ousumi Province in the Edo Period (1600-1868), but became a series of independent villages afterwards, and through the modern era. With depopulation of rural areas leading to the merging of many small towns and village, the reverse is now happening. Sou was created in 2005 by the merging of Ousumi, Sueyoshi, and Takarabe. The area has nostalgic meaning for me, as my father came from a small village that was merged into the town of Ousumi in 1955.