This was one of the best senchas I've had from a tea company that is not a Japanese company.

It smells amazing! The dry leaf is incredibly aromatic, and the aroma is rich, sweet, and very interesting. It has sweet vegetal notes which quickly develop into a warm, mellow, nutty, and slightly toasty aroma, hinting at porridge or hot cereal. Wow. Also, the leaf looks very beautiful...it's very fine and long, narrow pieces of leaf.

Brews a rich and thick cup, very full-bodied even with a short steep. This tea has a lot of fine particulate matter than I find slips through even a relatively fine tea infuser. It might clog the finest mesh infusers so I recommend using a coarser infuser. Bold flavor: quite bitter, also strongly savory (umami) and moderately tangy, with a light sweetness as well. More richly savory than most sencha, reminding me of top-grade teas like Gyokuro. The aroma of the brewed cup is slightly more seaweedy and vegetal than the dry leaf, and not quite as toasty.

Feels pretty strongly caffeinated. This would be a good pick-me-up tea if you wanted to wake up or boost your concentration.

Steeps very fast. I recommend a first steep of 1 minute or less. 45 seconds still produced a cup that was plenty strong for me.

The tea changes flavor and aromatic character a lot on the second steep. The second steep I found was less sweet and umami, more astringent. It was much more vegetal, with a strong, earthy vegetal character reminding me of soil and fresh green spring growth of twigs and vines, it reminded me of working in the garden in spring. It was also slightly floral (a quality absent from the first steep).

Overall, a delightful tea, very good quality. The leaf stretches very far. I always steeped twice, with a full teaspoon of leaf and careful fast pouring you could probably get three or more steeps easily. The big trick is that it's easy to oversteep the first cup. I liked using less than a teaspoon per cup because it was so potent, it would still produce a very strong first cup and the resteep was still plenty aromatic and flavorful (with about a 5 minute steep).

Pricey, but with the quality to back it up, this is about what you typically need to pay to get a top-quality sencha like this.

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