Over the years, Ippodo has received queries from customers around the world asking if we have organic teas. In response, Ippodo embarked on a search for tea leaves that would meet the standards for JAS organic certification as well as provide a taste suitable for an Ippodo product, thereby ensuring that customers enjoy the tea leaves’ natural mellow fragrance and flavor. After visiting many tea plantations and repeated taste tests, we eventually found organic tea leaves worthy of the Ippodo label, and are now happy to make them available to our customers.
We named the new product Organic Sencha 10, due to the fact that it only uses organic sencha produced in the 2010 season. Supply of this product, currently Ippodo’s only organic sencha, will be limited to approximately 2,000 bags.
While still retaining sencha’s unique sweetness, Organic Sencha 10 is more strongly characterized by its sharpness. It has a clear, refreshing fragrance that is distinctive of sencha, and not found in bancha teas, which are made with aged sencha tea leaves that have a parched, sun-dried aroma to them.
Compared to Ippodo’s standard sencha, whose leaves are raised so as to accumulate umami and sweetness, most of the cultivation of organic sencha is left up to nature, resulting in a robust taste that reflects the pure, unaltered flavor of nature.