Japanese Sencha

John Harney Appreciation Tea #5

It’s been a while since I brewed up a filter bag of Japanese Sencha, but today I did after lunch, and it was like meeting up with an old friend. For years, Stash Premium Green was my go-to filter bag green tea, but now I find that this Harney & Sons bag is just as dependable and easy to prepare—and it tastes even better!

The contents of the filter bag expand something like four-fold, and the liquor is cloudy greenish-yellow, so it’s clear that H&S did some serious research in figuring out how to offer a high-quality sencha in the filter bag format. This stuff is super tasty and warrants the epithet on the envelope, “Nourishing Tea”, because drinking it feels like eating food!

A tea bag sample kindly sent in a Harney order. I was not crazy about the other sample but this one, which did not seem too promising ( I usually like Chinese tea better than Japanese) is delicious, maybe my favorite of the lot, even better than what I had aqctually ordered (apart maybe from Queen Catherine). A nice simple sencha in a convenient tea bag format. Very nice. Staple-ish tea potential and to buy if/when I order from them again (transatlantic shipping costs being responsible for there being an IF).

A small note – I brewed this with about twice as much water as recommended (hmm, about .7l, enough for two mugs worth) and it was perfectly to my taste just like that – I did use mineral water though! Brewed a second steep and it held up to that as well. If you are making this, or using the loose leaf, might be worth experimenting with being less generous with tea quantity than advised, might work for you as well.

I feel terrible for not being certain of who sent me this, but I’m pretty sure it’s ToiToi, so thank you ToiToi!

This is a nice bagged sencha. It was very drinkable. Nothing stood out as particularly bad or good, but all in all I enjoyed this very much.

One of my favorite coffee shops in the area keeps this tea on hand. It’s quite tasty for a bagged tea. I think Harney & Sons have some of the best bagged teas I have tasted. A light aroma, pale liquor, a nice light grassy flavor. For an inexpensive high quality bagged sencha I would say this is a good option.

I experienced this tea at a corperate function today, and I was definitely glad of it! They had a small selection of teas from H&S, but I thought this Sencha would be the most refreshing. It’s the first time I’ve sampled a Sencha, and I was looking forward to trying it.

The tea in the bag looked quite dull to start with, but it smelt good. It was quite grassy as someone else has mentioned. When brewing a hint of nut was also released in the background. The taste was similar, although the nuttiness at the back came out more to balance the grass. The wet leaves were a fantastic emerald green colour. I did feel the bag hindered the flavour a bit though, whether it was the general tea in a bag production or the steeping.

I was impressed with this first try of Sencha. I have some loose leaf to sample soon, and I expect a more natural flavour. I’m excited to try multiple uses to see how the flavour changes.

One other thing about my experience, there was lots of bits on the outside of the tea bag before I put it in the mug!

This is a sachet that thereadersteacup was kind enough to share with me!

This summer I’ve been really, really spoiled by having a lot of very fresh, very high quality Japanese green tea available to me thanks to my coworkers who visited Japan earlier this year. I’m not even historically a big drinker of green tea, but I’ve been more open to it in the last month than maybe ever before.

Unfortunately, this tea kind of felt like a step backwards from all that progress I feel I’ve been making with this style of tea. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it was just very coarse with more of a blunt feeling hay note than the rich umami flavours that have become a guilty pleasure of mine. That said, I still drank the full mug which is more than I think I would have a year ago. And if I didn’t have such recent memories of a much higher grade of sencha so fresh in my head, then maybe I could have been even more on board with this tea…

I bought a box of Harney’s Japanese Sencha tea sachets (foil wrapped and nitrogen flushed) at a local tea store today, because they were sold out of dragon well. Steeped for 1.5 minutes in 170° water. The liquor was greenish gold in color, wonderfully aromatic, and tasted nutty, buttery, with notes of asparagus and edamame, and every bit as delicious as another major brand I’ve had recently. Re-steep was also delicious. I rate this as an 81, (same as Adagio’s) and would be happy to recommend and buy it again. I got no bitterness, no astringency, nothing harsh at all. I strongly recommend you avoid oversteeping!

I bought a set of 12 Days of Christmas teas, kind of like an advent calendar thing, but completely neglected to open it until, well, today. Better late than never. The holidays and work completely took up the majority of my time and attention.

Starting off on a fairly average note here – this tea was…fine, good even, but largely unremarkable. There are notes of slightly bitter, almost matcha-like flavors, but the overall taste is nice. I expected something a little stronger. I wouldn’t buy this particular tea again, but I’m optimistic that there will be some better brews coming up in the box.

The dry aroma was better then expected. Grassy, sweet grass, and slightly nutty. Bagged green teas generally make me run for the hills but this is good. For a Bagged tea. The wet leaf is radiant in vegetal notes. Sweet corn, sweet grass, sweet peas, slight asparagus. As per usual. Do not over steep.

While I’m not new to “green tea” this really is somewhat new territory for me. Outside of matcha I’ve never had any awareness of what sort of tea was in whatever “green tea” I was drinking, so it may not have even been a quality tea to begin with in most cases. That could also be why I was never much of a fan of green tea (outside of matcha, I love that).

This is the first time I am aware to have had “sencha” so I spent a little time learning what I could about this particular tea, which I learned is from Shizuoka province, the largest tea producing Japanese province. In that regard I suppose this is a fair starter sencha.

The flavor is distinctly green, dark green in fact. At first I was thinking grassy, similar to a shot of wheatgrass, but further along it clearly became a bowl of sauteed spinach (sans garlic or other flavorings) that had transformed into pure liquid form in a cup. It’s substantial in both flavor and body.

I liked it.