Sencha Henta Okumidori

Whhhhaaat?! This is a sencha? Look at those dark glossy leaves! Seriously? The aroma is nil though. I can’t smell what should be, what I assume should be something good. The infusing tea smells of asparagus an cooked spinach. Actually mainly just spinach. Hmm… the flavor is not gyokuro. Tastes more like a sencha. Slightly grassy and a bit vegetal.

After my “interesting” experience with matcha, I’m happy to have picked a more standard green tea from Nio’s generous pile of samples. I steeped 5 g of leaf in a 150 ml porcelain pot using 140F water for 1 minute, plus several 20 second steeps.

The dry aroma is of cantaloupe, nuts, sweet grass, spinach, and umami. The first steep has notes of wheatgrass, spinach, cantaloupe, cream, green beans, and umami. This tea doesn’t punch me in the face like some other green teas, and is more grassy than vegetal. The veggies become more pronounced in the second steep, with more kale and spinach, while the third and fourth steeps return to being buttery, beany, and pleasant with some cantaloupe and floral overtones. Later steeps give me a peachy, grassy aftertaste. The final few steeps are generic veggies and grass, though the bitterness never gets out of hand.

This is a pleasant sencha that I wouldn’t mind revisiting. However, most of these Japanese green teas are kind of vegetal for me.

Nio Teas Advent Calendar 2022 – Day 8

I made it, the last green tea of the day lol! Apparently December 8th is green tea day, I somehow ended up with 5 of them from my 7 advents. Actually super happy to see a regular sencha from Nio today though, there’s been a lot of everything else but. Regular, unshaded, non-deep steamed sencha tends to be my preference.

Steeped it at 160°F because that’s the lowest temperature on my normal kettle and I didn’t feel the need to go lower for this tea. The description calls this sencha light, but I’m not finding that. To me it’s actually somewhat intensely vegetal in flavor, almost like a kabusecha, with plenty of umami. The usual steamed spinach is present and accounted for, plus fresh wheatgrass and perhaps some other leafy greens. It’s very smooth and silky, with almost no bitterness. There’s a hint of floral at the end of the sip.

Subsequent steeps are lighter and grassier, with perhaps even a bit more of the floral finish? Interesting how my experience doesn’t seem to align much with the tea’s description ha ha, I guess I’m doing it wrong! :P Still, a very enjoyable sencha.