Tea: Sencha Green Tea
Reviewer: Alex Zorach
✓ 1453 teas reviewed
✓ 26 of Sencha
✓ 219 of Green Tea
✓ 3 of MajaTei
✓ 168 from ?????
Review of Sencha Green Tea
January 15th, 2015
Aroma | Flavor | Value | Total |
5 of 10 | 3 of 5 | 3 of 5 | 53 of 100 |
Fair | Fair | Reasonable |
Not the most exciting sencha, but not the worst either. Dry leaf consists of big, intact pieces of leaf, a fairly rich green color, looks a little more like bancha than some sencha though. The leaf is not very aromatic, and this doesn't change much when the tea is steeped.
Produces a cup that is quite weak for a sencha. I normally use a heaping teaspoon for sencha, and steep for 1-2 minutes, but in this case, this wasn't long enough and I steeped longer.
The aroma is very mild and hard to describe. It's slightly herbaceous, perhaps very faintly grassy, there's really not much to the aroma. There is a certain "off" note in the aroma that is a little like cardboard or paper, that I often notice in low-quality sencha.
The flavor is extremely mild, and the mouthfeel average, leaving a slight dusty sensation on the palate in the finish.
The one thing I liked most about this tea is that it doesn't have any overtly harsh qualities; there is little bitterness and limited astringency. I actually think I might prefer a bit more bitterness, but I was already steeping this tea much more strongly than I normally would.
This is inexpensive for a sencha, but I just don't think this is a very interesting tea. Among cheap senchas, I prefer the one from Yamamotoyama; the leaf is more broken than this one, and it may require more care in brewing, but I find it more flavorful and aromatic.