According to Hiroki Murakami, who will become the farm's 4th generation master, the family doesn't know exactly when they started farming tea, though his great-grandfather was the one who built their first processing factory in the late 19th century.

Based in the Yoshiwara district, a mountainous region famous for its sea of clouds within the municipality of Shizuoka City, the family produces about 2 tons of tea altogether per year (first and second flushes).

Their leaves are mostly processed as a near-fukamushi (deep steamed), a steaming technique that creates a tea that has fukashimicha's deep, opaque green color and sweetness, but while also retaining much of the leaf's shape.

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Farm Info

The Maehara Tea Farm is a vertically integrated, family-operated farm located in the southern Japanese prefecture of Kagoshima. Their fukamushicha is a green tea that has been steamed for longer than usual (\"deep-steamed\") to create an opaque, deep green, richly flavorful tea, though the leaves themselves are broken apart as a result of the long steaming time.

Most recently, they won the Kagoshima 2021 tea competition for regular sencha (award pictured in the product photo).

The Harashima family's Hanatsumi sencha comes from the first picking of the year in April, resulting in an extra delicate sencha. Sold as Shincha in May and June. With this top-quality sencha, one will taste the rich deep taste and high aroma of sencha which sprouted slowly over time being surrounded by the beautiful mountains of the village of Yabe (Yame, Fukuoka Prefecture). The climate of the semi-high cold region at an altitude of 600m creates a deep and fragrant taste. Please enjoy the breath of the very first picked small sprouts. This sencha can also be a perfect gift for that special someone...

Please enjoy across multiple steeps. Because these tea leaves are high quality, after you have finished drinking the tea, the Harashima family recommends repurposing the tea leaves in your fried rice, miso soup, or however you fancy!

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Steeping Notes

The steeping guidelines below are from Chiyonoen. For more steeping tips including cold steeping and ice steeping, please see Yunomi's steeping guides.

About the Farm

Chiyonoen Tea Farm is a small tea garden operated by husband and wife farmers Masashi and Eri Harashima deep in the mountains of Yabe Village, Fukuoka, Japan. The 3rd generation farm specializes in high grade mountain-grown sencha and gyokuro. Established by his grandfather and the farm's namesake, Chiyokichi.

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Steeping Notes

The steeping guidelines below are from Chiyonoen. For more steeping tips including cold steeping and ice steeping, please see Yunomi's steeping guides.

About the Farm

Organic tea farmer Yoshimitsu Masuda's best sencha, Daichi no Meicha 大地の命茶 (\"Tea [made from] the life of the earth\"), is a deep-steamed sencha or fukamushicha that produces a deep green tea with a rich umami flavor.

The leaves for this tea is a single cultivar, Kanaya Midori, are picked while they are still very young in spring.

About the Kanaya Midori cultivar

Tea research institutions operated by the Ministry of Agriculture in each major tea region constantly experiment to create new cultivars. In 1949, the Shizuoka branch crossed the Yabukita cultivar with a tea plant called Shizuoka zairai number 6 (静岡在来6号, often shortened \"S6\"). The best descendant was selected and registered in 1970 as tea cultivar number 30. The name comes from the old town of Kanaya which was merged into the city of Shimada where the Zenkouen Tea Garden is based.

The Japanese tea industry uses Yabukita as a standard, and the Kanaya Midori cultivar can be harvested approximately 4 days later. The leaves tend to be smaller yet more plentiful giving a larger crop yield.

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Farmer Info

Yoshimitsu Masuda spent the first part of his adult life working in a major farming cooperative where he learned firsthand about the danger of food additives and pesticides. Returning to the family tea farm in 1992 to learn tea making from his father and fellow tea farmers in Shimada, Shizuoka, he was deeply surprised at the amount of pesticides used in tea farming.

Switching to organic farming was not an easy task; insects and disease plagued the first field he was given charge of, crop yield and leaf quality dropped, and he faced criticism from both family and other tea professionals. But he felt it was important to create tea that was safe for his own family to drink first. (Read more about Masuda-san's story here.)

Today, built upon 25+ years of organic farming experience, Masuda-san produces tea that he is proud to call both safe and delicious and is passing his tea-making skills on to his children.

The leaves for this tea is a single cultivar, Kanaya Midori, are picked while they are still very young in spring.

About the Kanaya Midori cultivar

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Farmer Info

Today, built upon 25+ years of organic farming experience, Masuda-san produces tea that he is proud to call both safe and delicious and is passing his tea-making skills on to his children.

Since 2011, Masami Ishizaki has operated the small non-profit, Ashigaracha Labo, dedicated to educating consumers about Japanese tea, and tea from the Ashigara region in particular (Cities of Minami Ashigara and Odawara where Yunomi is based).

For the last several years she has also been renting tea fields from the region's aging tea farmers to try her hand at tea cultivation. She has been at the current location in Ogikubo, Odawara, and is cultivating Yabukita tea leaves without the use of pesticides with her son and the NPO's supporters.

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Flavor Notes

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Steeping Notes

Flavor Notes

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The Miyazaki Sabou Tea Garden, operated by the Miyazaki family, specializes in a variety of single cultivar teas which they process into pan-roasted green tea (kamairicha), oolong tea, and black tea. They have been farming without pesticides since 1983. This standard kamairicha green tea (MY07) is a blend coming from Miyazaki-san, a selection from their individual lots using zairai (non-cultivar) and yabukita leaves. The zairai is Miyazaki Sabou Tea Garden's oldest tea field.

What is a kamairicha? Kamairicha is green tea which is made by heating the leaves in a pan instead of the typical steaming process that senchas go through. It is the common method of producing Chinese green tea, but is quite rare today in Japan. Rather than producing the typical round pellet shape associated with gunpowder tea, the Japanese method gives the shape of a comma (i.e., the punctuation mark). In general, kamairicha is a traditional folk tea from Southern Japan and Miyazaki prefecture is known as the best prefecture for this type of tea! Kamairichas can be a nice change from the senchas one may be used to with the pleasant scent of roasted chestnuts.

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Steeping Notes

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Steeping Notes

Have you ever tried the very first hand-picked tea of the season? This is your opportunity to enjoy Bizenya’s first shincha from their organic tea plantations handpicked only once a year; Nogi-en (located in the famous Sayamacha region: Takahagi, Hidaka city, Saitama prefecture). This tea field is owned and cultivated by Bizenya, with cooperation from other producers / farmers for processing and other work.

Originating from their April 18th morning Fukumidori cultivar harvest, this tea was then processed by award-winning tea farmer and producer Okutomi Masahiro. You are sure to experience a richness that can only be produced with Bizenya's hand-picked tea leaves!

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Farm Introduction

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Farm Info

Farm Introduction

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Farm Info

A careful blending of multiple cultivars from tea farmer Sugiyama Yachiyo, this light-steamed sencha was created to provide a light, delicate flavor and aroma with grassy notes. Sugiyama-san feels that this blend creates a depth and body in the tea's liquor that it would not have otherwise.

Grown on mountain-top tea fields in the remote Kiyosawa Village, in the mountains of Eastern Shizuoka, the clarity of the air and water of this locale shines through with the light steaming production by Sugiyama-san and her husband.

Kiyosawa Village is the old name for the this mountainous region of the Aoi Ward, Shizuoka City, and means \"pure river\". The Kuromata River 黒俣川 runs through the area.

Utilizing early budding cultivars, this is an Ohashiri - (literally \"big run\"...as in run fast to the fields to pick the leaves!). As a shincha or new tea, this is a limited edition version of Osada Tea's Irokamai (A Dance of Color and Aroma).

Steeping Notes

For more steeping tips including cold steeping and ice steeping, please see Yunomi's steeping guides.

Tea: 5 grams. Time: 60 seconds. Water: 70C/158F, 200 ml. Resteep 2-3 times. Cold steeping also recommended.

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About Osada Tea

Steeping Notes

For more steeping tips including cold steeping and ice steeping, please see Yunomi's steeping guides.

Tea: 5 grams. Time: 60 seconds. Water: 70C/158F, 200 ml. Resteep 2-3 times. Cold steeping also recommended.

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About Osada Tea

A single cultivar, single estate micro batch (sub 10kg) carefully picked by the Kaneta Ota Tea Garden and processed into light steamed sencha or asamushicha. Cultivar: Yama no Ibuki.

Growing tea on the steep hills of the Tenryu region in Western Shizuoka for over 50 years, tea farmer Ota Masataka is a master farmer and tea craftsman, producing award winning teas sought after by tea connoisseurs throughout Japan.

Steeping Recommendation - Warm Water Steeping

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Kaneta Ota Tea Garden

Included among the 130+ awards that Ota Masataka, the tea garden master, has won over the years, are the Emperor's Cup awarded as a special honor to the country's top farmers, and the top National Tea Competition Minister's Award...3 years straight from 2017 - 2019 in the 4kg Sencha category.

A single cultivar, single estate micro batch (sub 10kg) carefully picked by the Kaneta Ota Tea Garden and processed into light steamed sencha or asamushicha. Cultivar: Yama no Ibuki.

Steeping Recommendation - Warm Water Steeping

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Kaneta Ota Tea Garden

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Yunomi Specials - Clearance on 2024 Green Tea

(224 products)

QUALITY & BEST BY DATES

As we approach the 2025 harvest season, the spring tea from last year is close to a year old. With modern packaging, they have been sealed tightly for a year and aged - you should taste a more mellow flavor than freshly harvested leaf, but in most cases still quite delicious. The products contained here may be close to their best by dates if we procured them last April or May, so we will extend a Yunomi.life guarantee of quality for a "Yunomi.life guaranteed best by date" until Dec 2025 if the package remains unopened. If you open a 2024 tea before Dec 2025, and you feel it doesn't taste as it should, please contact us for a refund. Older tea is also nice to use for tea blending with other ingredients as well as roasting into hojicha.

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