Sencha of the Summer Sun

Tea type
Green Tea
Ingredients
Green Tea
Flavors
Butter, Butternut Squash, Dry Grass, Hay, Kabocha, Pumpkin, Seaweed, Soybean, Spinach, Squash, Sweet, Thick, Umami, Vegetal, Apple Skins, Creamy, Grass, Nutty, Smooth, Bok Choy, Green Beans, Vegetables, Freshly Cut Grass, Kale, Vegetable Broth, Earth, Summer, Sweet, Warm Grass, Beany, Camphor, Clove
Sold in
Loose Leaf
Caffeine
Medium
Certification
Not available
Edit tea info Last updated by Cameron B.
Average preparation
180 °F / 82 °C 1 min, 15 sec 5 g 10 oz / 308 ml

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23 Tasting Notes View all

From Kyoto Obubu Tea Farms

Medium-light in body, Summer Sun has a light astringency with gentle kiwi undertones. The liquor is a bold brass yellow with an aroma of moist timber. The lingering aftertaste is floral and sharp. Grown in full sunshine and made from the summer harvest, Summer Sun is a bright July tea.

Taste: Astringent
Body: Medium
Texture: Sharp
Length: Medium
Harvest: July
Tea Cultivar: Yabukita
Origin: Wazuka
Cultivation: Unshaded
Processing: Lightly Steamed, Rolled, Dried

About Kyoto Obubu Tea Farms View company

It started with a single cup of tea. As the legend goes, our president Akihiro Kita, or Akky-san, visited Wazuka, Kyoto one fateful day. At the time, Akky-san was still a college student in search for life's calling. After trying the region's famous Ujicha (literally meaning tea from the Uji district), he immediately fell in love and his passion for green tea was born. He had finally found what he was looking for in that one simple cup of tea. After fifteen years of learning to master the art of growing tea from tea farmers in Wazuka, Kyoto Obubu Tea Farms was born and as they say, the rest is history. So what's an Obubu? Obubu is the Kyoto slang for tea. Here in the international department we call ourselves Obubu Tea. That's "Tea Tea" for the bilinguals. We love tea so much, we just had to have it twice in our name. Now Obubu means more than just tea to us. It means, family, friends, passion and the place we call home. More than just tea. Though the roots of Obubu stem from tea, it has become more than that over the years. Obubu is an agricultural social venture, operating with three (1) bring quality Japanese tea to the world (2) contribute to the local and global community through tea (3) revitalize interest in tea and agriculture through education.

23 Tasting Notes

88
4843 tasting notes

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.

Azzrian

Never heard of this tea vendor – thanks for someone new to check out! :)

TeaBrat

I want to try this company too – waiting for the 2012 season!

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85
1113 tasting notes

I finally opened this sencha! I was trying to finish my Sencha Fukamidori from Den’s first, since these types of greens apparently spoil rather quickly.

This is very different from the senchas I’m used to. It is still buttery and spinachy, but there’s a haylike or grassy quality as well. Kind of like sencha with some white tea thrown in? I find it interesting that this is the summer harvest sencha, because the hay notes really make me think of summer time!

There is a little sweetness but not as much as other senchas, so this one seems pretty savory to me. No bitteness at all though (I made sure to steep at a nice low temp) and very little astringency. Nice sencha, very glad I won it from a Yunomi.us giveaway! :)

Fjellrev

Congrats on the win!

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91
6768 tasting notes

An Exceptional Green! Very lovely! A SS Gift from Brian! Thanks so much! :)

Very clean and crisp and spring and a true green! YUM!

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97
335 tasting notes

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.

Preparation
180 °F / 82 °C 2 min, 0 sec

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70
280 tasting notes

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.

Preparation
180 °F / 82 °C 1 min, 0 sec

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93
134 tasting notes

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!

Preparation
160 °F / 71 °C 1 min, 15 sec

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95
32 tasting notes

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.

Preparation
205 °F / 96 °C 1 min, 30 sec

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87
1233 tasting notes

Tasted as part of one of the Gloral Japanese Tea Association courses. Long dark green leaf. Glossy and gorgeous with vegetal notes and a nice fresh tone. The wet aroma is full of umami, butter, cream, and grass. It is smooth on the palate. Strangely, I can’t get that thought of udon noodles out of my head. That is what my palate tastes for the most part along with some umami and grassy notes. It is smooth with a touch of astringency.

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76 tasting notes

I believe the Brightness tea I tried the other day was also a summer-harvest tea, so it’ll be interesting to see how this differs.

Dry leaves smell plenty grassy and dark green, sweeter, I think, than the last tea, and maybe there’s some milkiness in there. Wet leaves are foresty, mossy and…. why do I keep getting chocolate vibes in these teas?

For once, I don’t think I understeeped the first cup. It’s certainly…. interesting, starting out kind of sweet and brothy and turning astringent and … sour, like a hot and sour soup, maybe. It feels heavy and substantial in the mouth. The second steeping is a bit more immediate on the astringency but also… richer, more savory, less sweet. The sour notes are nearly gone, but seem to return in the third steeping, a umami-adjacent juiciness. It’s got some background grassiness, but that’s far from the focus. I’m not sure I can really define the focus, but it’s… it’s really good and just so interesting, competes with the Autumn Moon for my favorite tea in this sampler. I’d like to get more of each and try them side by side.

Looking at the website, it appears the only difference between this tea and Brightness is that Brightness is shaded for two weeks before harvest, while this tea is not. And I think I prefer this tea to Brightness, so maybe I just prefer unshaded teas? Brightness was still very interesting its own way, and might be excellent in certain applications, but this tea is more to my personal tastes, I feel. I love how so many of the teas in this sampler vary just slightly enough that I can start drawing conclusions like this.

I should start thinking ahead though, as I realize I’m about halfway through this sampler. While I still have enough houjicha to last me ~2 weeks, I should probably start shopping around for new sencha to try, given shipping can take a while. I’ll need to finish this sampler before I make any reordering decisions, so in the meantime I’m open to vendor or specific sencha recommendations, if anyone has any suggestions!

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85
3986 tasting notes

Sipdown! (8 | 417)

So I was saving my last packet of this to send to a friend, but I got my fall subscription package today, and inside were five more packets! So I’m finishing off this last older sample and I’ll send out one of the fresh ones.

Just wrote a note about this yesterday so I don’t have much more to say. I think this is a very well-balanced sencha that’s easy to drink. It has a nice combination of freshness and umami without being too heavy, and a creamy nuttiness that’s really yummy.

Flavors: Apple Skins, Creamy, Grass, Nutty, Smooth, Soybean, Spinach, Sweet, Umami

Preparation
170 °F / 76 °C 0 min, 45 sec 5 g 7 OZ / 200 ML

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