Introduction:
Ashikubo Tea Works is a company and region that has a special place in my heart. They were the first Japanese farm I started importing from directly, the first farm I visited in Shizuoka, the first tea farm my daughter and wife have been to, the first micro region I made a specific map for, and they created the first sencha that I thought was worth me putting my reputation behind. When my family visited them in 2022, we returned to Canada with one of every product they carried. I made some discoveries by doing that which unexpectedly steered my preferences towards what I’m bringing in for the 2023 year. I’m excited to share with you all 2 single origin and mono-cultivar sencha teas made from the strains Okumidori and Yamakai. These teas create a totally different experience than what many people have experienced in ‘boring old sencha’.
How the ‘Ray of Hope’ Yamakai tastes:
If we taste the same thing, and you follow my recommended brew to a T, I would say an apt word to describe this tea is ‘profound’. It leaves you in a sort of thoughtless awe, there is a significant mental gravity to it. You’ll need a stopwatch and scale to hit that special brew, but outside of that “narrow band of profoundity“, it’s like Kernels Rainbow Popcorn and Candied Rhubarb stalks — and that sounds pretty great to me.
Why ‘Ray of Hope’ ?
I think teas like this are Japan’s best weapon to battle against the nearly inevitable death of their specialty tea industry. The cost is low, the flavor is something that only Japan can create, and it has relatable sensory notes that the western world can appreciate. A few of my trial brews into this tea I noticed a sort of recurring scenario playing in my mind. On a sunny day, it would be nice to sit in a clearing of trees and drink this on a stump. There is a lot of precision/tightness in the flavor compared to the other sencha this year (the okumidori, which is very creamy and loose~). It’s like a beam of light is shining on the flavor. It reminded me of a ‘sword in the stone’ concept that you’d see in games like The Legend of Zelda. So I imagined a tea cup with a beam of light in that context, and everything manifested itself from there.
Why does it taste like that?
Yamakai is a cultivated variety of Japanese tea, it’s a child plant of Yabukita. Yabukita is THE variety of Japan, used almost everywhere in the country, and can be considered the gold standard. Yabukita has a lot of pros, very few cons. Someone can carelessly brew Yabukita and almost always get a satisfying result. Yamakai on the other hand has a very high capacity for interesting and atypical aromatics when brewed well, but can smell weird AF (mostly when brewed carelessly) and is a little astringent. So it’s about brewing… and the average person isn’t a tea sommelier, so it turns out that the average brew of yamakai shows negatives, thus general interest is low. You’re not an average person, if you’re reading this. With just a little effort, yamakai can pull off some amazing things. It’s thanks to the cultivar, and where it is grown.
Two towns in central Shizuoka have historically created some of the best sencha in all of Japan, these towns are called Ashikubo and Tamakawa. They can create such magnificent teas thanks to a concept called terroir; essentially meaning there are beneficial climactic conditions created by the mountains and river systems, morning fog, water drainage, elevation, and so on. These attributes are conducive to creating fine tea, and these towns are blessed with many positive traits (and very few negatives). There are lot of spiders there though.
I think it would be fair to say that most Japanese green tea in the connoisseur market boasts a high level of an amino acid called l-Theanine. l-Theanine contributes the umami and perception of sweetness in brewed tea. l-Theanine is a fundamental building block for the tea bush, it’s used to create the ‘machinery’ that allows it to grow, thrive, and survive. In the early 1600’s it was observed (and recorded) that tea from mountains often seemed to taste better than tea from the plains. Mountain tea seemed to have a better colour, more caffeine, and less tannin. After isolating variables in terroir one by one, it was determined that a significant portion of teas flavor comes from sunlight or lack thereof. Mountains naturally have more shade than plains, and in the Northern Hemisphere, the North West facing slopes of mountains get the least amount of light available. In an area with a lot of shade, tea will struggle to grow, but it’s because of this struggle that preferential flavors in the tea will form and/or remain. The Japanese acknowledged this hundreds of years ago and as a result created the purposely shaded styles of teas that we know today as kabusecha, gyokuro, and matcha. With modern diagnostics, we have found that the abundance of l-Theanine is one of the main reasons why things like high quality sencha, matcha, and gyokuro taste like they do. By definition, sencha is a young leaf tea that grows without any artificial shading (though it’s not uncommon to see modern famers shading their sencha for a few days before harvest). When the tea bush has access to sunlight, it will suck up nutrients from the ground, create l-Theanine, and use the l-Theanine to build photo cells, leaves, lignen, etc. in order to grow. If the bush is forced into shade, it cannot produce the machinery it needs to, and it supposes that the problem is that it doesn’t have enough chlorophyll, so it focuses on creating light-catching receptors (but it’s never enough… ha ha ha) and accumulates l-Theanine. It’s an interesting phenomenon that strangely it seems only Japan really takes advantage of in the world. Due to the terroir of Ashikubo and Tamakawa, nature will create a tea that without any human intervention will have shade cover and umami levels comparable to those ‘purposefully’ shaded teas. Ashikubo is indeed a very special place, the teas heralding from there dubbed ‘natural gyokuro’.
Notes about Shizuoka:
These days Shizuoka is the major tea-producing region in Japan. It sections off into 4 main areas: Western, Central, Fuji, and Izu. Fuji and Izu aren’t really major players in the tea game so we can forget about them. The western plains area makes the volume, and the central mountainous area makes the quality. All of the best Japanese teas I’ve had in life come from Shizuoka’s central area along the two major river systems; the Warashina and Abe Rivers. The best teas in Japan grow along the tributaries which form these major rivers; these teas are dubbed ‘hon yama cha’ or ‘authentic mountain tea’ and have been famous since the Shogun’s ruled Japan. The most renowned of which feed into the Abe river.
The Hon Yama teas along the Abe river system come from the areas of Umegashima, Tamakawa, Ashikubo, and Hirayama. In Umegashima is where the Abe river begins and merges with the Daiya river. As it flows South it first meets with the Tamakawa area which includes the rivers of Senmata, Nakakouchi, and Nishigouchi. As it continues South it meets the Ashikubo area which consists of just Ashikubo river. It might not have relevance to tea but there is no dam on Ashikubo river; in my mind, the minerality flows from the top of the mountain to the Abe river unhindered, that might just be a romantic thought though. It’s right around the same latitude North where you’ll find Hirayama, but Hirayama is quite a ways East of the river. Ashikubo was the first area in Shizuoka to be planted with tea and has been famous since the Kamakura Period (1185–1333), the well-known Shogun of the Edo Period Tokugawa Ieyasu also had a preference for Ashikubo tea.
The best teas from around the Warashina river come from the major ‘Oku-Warashina’ area which includes the minor areas of Oma, Morokozawa, and Okawa and their tributaries the Morokozawa River, Tochizawa River, Kuruzeno River, Hi River, Sakamoto River, and Kuromata River. The Kuromata river flows south and breaks off into another wonderful area of the Warashina river system: The Asahina River area of Fujieda. This place is amazing for gyokuro, and I truly hope to have a gyokuro from Asahina for sale here one day.
The Hon Yama teas experience an important climate phenomenon which is surely a major reason behind their quality, this is called a diurnal shift. A diurnal shift is a big swing in temperatures from day and night, generally that the day is very hot and the night is very cold, this will slow down the growth of the tea bushes and cause them to produce less quantity of a higher quality leaf.
Notes about Ashikubo Tea Works:
Ashikubo tea works is a cooperative of about 50 tea farmers who are trying to keep the interest of tea alive in Japan. It’s a very youthful company. In the processing of tea every step benefits from ‘specialty experience’ and thus the coop has ‘chashi’ (tea instructors) to lead teams through the picking, steaming, rolling, and drying processes. I had first tried one of their products called ‘Mine no Kaori’ in Feb 2020 as the April 2019 crop (so nearly 9 months old) and the quality was quite exceptional. ‘Mine no Kaori’ is among their flagship products and when I drank it for the first time I decided that this should be the tea that kicks off my selection of Japanese teas.
Through my wife’s correspondence with them, I found out that we’re the first foreign buyers to deal with their company directly. What a special honor for me to show this to us in Canada. From my experience with Japanese tea over the years, I have found that as famous as Uji tea is — Shizuoka is better. I have extended family in Uji and although they don’t seem to know any tea farmers directly (as friends) they do have a strong opinion as to who is their favorite producer/company. I often get these teas as gifts when I go to Japan, they’re great BUT man would it be nice if they lived in Shizuoka instead!
Sad things:
In general, Japanese tea is not cultivated in the middle of the mountains because farming tea on flat land is much more cost-effective and viable, and thus most of Shizuoka’s tea is created in the Western plains of Hamamatsu, with its glorious full sun. In an area with full sun, tea will naturally develop bitterness. That makes unappealing sencha, to me.
But alas, we’re not living in the 1600s, and tea farming is not the ideal life for today’s youth who would rather live in a metropolitan city rather than amongst tea bushes in rural mountains. So no one knows this kind of thing anymore. Ashikubo Tea Works is a CO-OP of farmers about 50 strong who pool their land together with a mission to preserve the heritage of the Ashikubo name. In the entirety of the Ashikubo area, there is another farm with about 8 staff, and a few small family-run, local producers (basically husband-wife duos). 25 of the 50 staff working for Ashikubo Tea Works are over 70 years old, so in the coming years, things are going to change significantly for the area as a whole.
Guys, can we help save the Japanese tea industry or what? Buying these teas and spreading awareness is how we’ll do it. Thank you!
