Tea Information:
Leaf Type: Green
Where to Buy: Simple Loose Leaf
Tea Description:
This high grade Japanese Sencha Green Tea boasts beautifully dark, wafery leaves and a strong, sweet grassy flavor. The brewed leaves provide a slight vegetal, seaweed flavor with a perfect balance of nutty, rice notes. Best served hot, in the traditional fashion.
Learn more about this tea here.
Learn more about Simple Loose Leaf’s Selection Club subscription program here.
Use this code: SISTERSELECTION25 to get a 25% discount when you sign up for the selection club. This discount is not applicable on the retail selection of teas, and is only good for the selection club subscription.
Taster’s Review:
When I opened this sample packet from my May Selection Club box from Simple Loose Leaf and took a sniff, I was pretty sure that the aroma would be vegetative. This is a Japanese Sencha and I’ve experienced many different Sencha teas from Japan. And while there are many different Sencha teas out there and they all have their own unique qualities to them, the fragrance has been, for the most part, “vegetal”.
And so it is with this Japanese Sencha Saga Green Tea from Simple Loose Leaf. But, I noticed something else in the aroma too … a sweet flowery note, gently floral. The scent evokes imagery of sitting on a lawn that has just been mowed, and in close vicinity to the lawn is a beautiful flower bed filled with fragrant flowers. The breeze floats through those flowers, picking up their bouquet, and the air is now gently perfumed with the scent of the flowers with the dominant smell of the grassy vegetation.
I love it when I come across a tea that is familiar – a Japanese Sencha, like this – and I find something unexpected about it like that!
This green tea is sweet. The vegetal notes are sweet – not savory, not bitter, not even bittersweet. Just sweet. Beautifully, deliciously sweet. The texture is soft. I often describe a Sencha tea’s texture as “brothy” but this is not quite that thick, it’s more of a soft, smooth texture … I imagine that the texture here is what it would be like if one were to drink liquefied silk.
Although I’m sure that this tastes better! I’d much rather taste the brewed liquid of the leaves from Camellia Sinensis than the liquefied fibers from a worm’s backside, wouldn’t you?
The flavor is strongly vegetal, somewhere between the flavor of grass and kelp, but, without the savory notes grass or kelp. As I said, this is pure sweetness! It really is one of the sweetest Sencha teas I’ve yet to taste.
I taste layers of flavor beneath the top note of vegetation, hints of flower and whispers of fruit. Almost an apple-y sweetness without the apple-y tart. Creaminess that I wouldn’t call ‘buttery’ – it’s more like a subtle vanilla tone.
I’ve tasted many Sencha teas, and I’ve enjoyed many that I’ve tried (I can’t think of any in the recent months that I’ve tried that I’ve not enjoyed) … but some are definitely better than others. This one is one of the better ones!
