Sencha — Why the Cultivar Decides Flavour and Quality

Sencha is the largest category of Japanese tea by a wide margin, and the one most likely to be sold to you with nothing on the label but a region and a price. That is a shame, because sencha is the Japanese tea where the plant — the cultivar — is most audible in the cup. Not the region, not the grade, not the year. The plant.

This guide explains why that is, and then walks through the sixteen cultivars we currently pour and sell in Munich. It is built on the national cultivar registry rather than on trade folklore, and it corrects two things we ourselves had wrong until this month.

Why is sencha steamed?

Every green tea has the same problem to solve in its first hour: a picked tea leaf begins to oxidise immediately, and oxidation is what turns green tea into black tea. To make green tea you have to kill the enzymes fast. China solves this by pan-firing in a hot wok. Japan solves it with steam — and that single divergence is why Japanese green tea tastes marine, sweet and vegetal where Chinese green tea tastes toasted, nutty and dry.

Steam is efficient, but it is also destructive. It fixes the leaf, and at the same time it softens cell walls and drives off volatile aromatic compounds. How long you run the steam is therefore a direct trade: structure and aroma against body and sweetness. Japanese producers made that trade into a named decision.

Asamushi or fukamushi — what steaming time actually decides

In short: short steaming preserves the leaf and its aroma. Long steaming breaks the leaf and builds body. Everything else about the two styles follows from that.

	Asamushi 浅蒸し	Chūmushi 中蒸し	Fukamushi 深蒸し
Steaming	20–50 seconds	~60 seconds	60–180 seconds
Leaf	whole, glossy needles	mostly intact	broken, much fine dust
Liquor	clear, pale yellow-green	light green	opaque, deep green
Aroma	high, lifted, distinct	moderate	muted
Body	light, crisp, more astringency	balanced	thick, sweet, silty
Typical terrain	mountain valleys — Honyama, Kawane, Tenryu	mixed	flat plateau — Kakegawa, Makinohara
Cultivar audible?	Yes — loudly	somewhat	largely overwritten

The geography is not a coincidence. Mountain leaf grows slowly in fog and cool air and arrives at the factory thin and soft. It needs little steam. Plateau leaf grows fast in full sun and arrives thick and hard. It needs a lot. Deep steaming was developed to rescue leaf that would otherwise be harsh — and it does that job extremely well. Kakegawa has won Japan's regional tea award a record number of times on the back of it.

But a technique that rescues difficult leaf also flattens distinctive leaf. Fukamushi produces a recognisable house style: thick, sweet, cloudy, deep green — and recognisably fukamushi whatever plant it came from. That is exactly why the specialty single-cultivar movement lives in the asamushi valleys and not on the plateau.

Why does the cultivar matter more in short-steamed sencha?

Because in asamushi there is far less processing between the plant and your cup.

Consider what a cultivar actually gives you. It is a cloned plant, so every bush of it is genetically identical, and each one carries a fixed chemical hand: how much theanine (umami, sweetness), how much catechin (astringency), and — decisively — which volatile aromatic compounds it produces. Those volatiles are the fingerprint. They are also the first thing long steaming removes.

So in a fukamushi you are mostly tasting a process. In an asamushi you are mostly tasting a plant. Same farmer, same village, same thirty-second steam, different cultivar — and you get a different tea. That is not a marketing claim. It is the reason our Yame supplier can sell six separate single-cultivar sencha from one small operation, and the reason we buy them.

Yabukita, and the siblings it buried

One cultivar covers 67% of Japan's tea-growing area: Yabukita. It was selected out of the Shizuoka landrace and registered in 1953 as Cha Norin 6, and its dominance is falling only slowly — 76% in 2008, 72% in 2019, 67% in 2023, by the agriculture ministry's own cultivar-area survey.

This has a consequence people rarely state plainly: "single cultivar sencha" mostly does not mean exotic outsiders. It means Yabukita's own siblings. Of the sixteen cultivars below, every Shizuoka one except two is a child or grandchild of Yabukita.

And there is a second, better story underneath. Through the 1960s the Shizuoka research station raised hundreds of seedlings from open-pollinated Yabukita seed and selected the interesting ones — Yamakai, Shizu-7132, Kurasawa. They were bred as blending stock, meant to lift Yabukita's aroma in a blend. Then the blenders rejected most of them, for a reason worth sitting with: they were too dominant to blend. One part of an aromatic cultivar took over the tank. Production collapsed. Several were never even registered nationally.

The single-cultivar movement from around 2010 onward is, in large part, the rediscovery of plants the industry threw away for being too characterful. That is the honest frame for everything below.

The aroma cultivars

These are the plants whose volatile compounds you can name. They are the clearest proof that a cultivar has a fingerprint.

Shizu-7132 — the sakura one

A Yabukita seedling from the 1960s that was never registered and has no official name. Growers call it Machiko or Sakura Midori. It carries the highest coumarin content of any known tea cultivar — coumarin being the compound behind the smell of cherry blossom and sakura-mochi. It also does something almost no other tea does: its aroma intensifies with age instead of fading.

Our lot, SAKURA SPRING from Tawaramine, reads floral, cotton candy and muscat grape over strong umami. The sakura note comes forward from the second infusion, once the umami settles. Brew it cold overnight in soft water, and drink it from a white-wine glass — a Riesling glass, if you have one.

Koshun 香駿 — the floral one

Kurasawa × Kanayamidori, registered in 2000. Both parents are aroma carriers, and the result is intensely floral — lily of the valley, cherry blossom, muscat, with a long cinnamon-sweet finish and very little bitterness. Brew it around 65 °C. Its propagation is legally restricted to Shizuoka growers, and roughly 90% of it grows in that one prefecture.

Koshun is the best demonstration in our whole range that the cultivar carries and the process only frames it, because we sell the same plant made four different ways: as mountain sencha from Ōhira and from Honyama, as a lightly oxidised experimental sencha from Yame, and as a fully oxidised Japanese black tea from Miyazaki. Fully oxidised, the florals turn into apricot, quince, cinnamon and almond — but the register is unmistakably the same plant.

Kanayamidori — the milky one

Shizuoka Zairai 6 × Yabukita, Cha Norin 30, 1970. Note the direction: the landrace is the mother here, not Yabukita. Japanese sources describe it almost unanimously as milky — a soft, sweet, milk-like aroma.

Our Ōhira lot does not do that. It reads citrus, close to Japanese tangerine, with a long refreshing finish. We are not going to pretend otherwise: Kanayamidori is documented as swinging hard with site and processing, and our lot swung. If you want a single tea that proves terroir and cultivar argue with each other, it is this one.

The umami cultivars

Yamakai やまかい — natural gyokuro

Another unregistered Yabukita seedling (Shizu-7166), named in 1967, now under 3% of national planted area. It carries roughly half the methylated catechins of Benifuuki, the cultivar those compounds are famous in. Growers nickname it "natural gyokuro" for its umami density, but the more interesting note is the fruit: green melon, honeydew, sometimes strawberry.

⚠️ Shading suppresses its aroma, which is a useful corrective to the assumption that shade always improves Japanese tea. This one belongs unshaded. Our SUMMER BREEZE from Tamakawa is best brewed in iced water, which extracts the umami fully while letting the melon note open.

Yamanoibuki 山の息吹 — high theanine, low catechin

Not a cross at all — a seedling spotted growing in the mountains of Nakakawane and cloned. Registered in 1997. The name means "mountain breath". Its chemistry is the whole story: high theanine, low catechin, meaning low astringency and high umami before any shading is applied. We buy it as a ten-day kabusecha from Yame — full-bodied, deeply sweet, faintly nutty.

Okumidori and Saemidori — the two that crossed over

Both are better known as matcha cultivars, and we sell them as matcha too. Okumidori (Cha Norin 32, 1974) is the rare cultivar with no real weakness — it works as sencha, gyokuro and tencha alike, which is why it is planted everywhere. Saemidori (Cha Norin 40, 1990) is the hub of modern premium Japanese tea, and the father of both Kirari 31 and Seimei. As a straw-shaded Yame gyokuro it gives sweet umami with a nutty, vegetal depth and a long clean finish.

The outsiders

Four plants that do not descend from the Shizuoka landrace at all — and the reason the tree above has four separate roots.

Kondōwase 近藤早生 — the Indian genome

This is the rarest tea we sell. It is not a bred cultivar but a private grower's selection, made about forty years ago by Kondō Hiromasa in Mariko, a small community inside Shizuoka City. It has never been registered, and two producers grow it. It is extremely early budding, which usually makes it the first tea picked on Honshū each year.

It also carries assamica genes, and the reason is local history rather than coincidence: Mariko is the birthplace of Japanese black tea. In the 1870s Tada Motokichi brought Assam seedlings back from India and planted them there. Kondōwase is understood to have come out of a natural cross between a Japanese green-tea plant and that black-tea stock.

The cup is genuinely unusual — a sharp bitterness set against a bright floral aroma, lilac and exotic fruit at once. It survives treatment no other sencha would: 2–3 g in 200 ml of boiling water for three minutes, like a black tea. The hand-picked shincha is material from the very first day of the harvest.

Izumi いずみ — assamica, two generations back

A different Indian import entirely, and it matters that these are not merged. Izumi is an open-pollinated seedling of Benihomare, and Benihomare is Cha Norin 1 — registered in 1953 with the origin recorded simply as "a seedling introduced from India". Three separate Indian introductions run through Japanese tea: the 1870s Mariko planting, an Assam seed of around 1923 that became the Shizu-inzatsu aroma line, and Benihomare. They are routinely confused with each other.

As a Miyazaki wakocha Izumi gives citrus and stone fruit, a hint of muscatel, and a mineral finish — light-bodied and clean enough that it reads closer to a fine oolong than to a black tea.

Okuhikari おくひかり — the Chinese cross

Yabukita crossed with a China-type breeding line, 静Cy225, in 1964. It buds five to six days after Yabukita, which is the point: it opens after the late-frost window, so it suits mountain districts. Silky, low in bitterness, bright, with a citrus edge in mountain-grown lots.

⚠️ Most sources give Okuhikari's father as Shizuoka Zairai 16. That is Okumidori's father, not this one — the two are frequently conflated and they are not full siblings. We had it wrong ourselves until this month.

Z1 — the plant that never got a name

Z1 is not a cultivar name. It is a breeding-line designation from the national station at Kanaya, and its own parentage is undocumented in every source we have checked. It was never named and never registered.

What makes it worth drinking is where it turns up. Z1 appears in the national registry twice, as a parent — Meiryoku (Yabukita × Z1, 1986) and Fushun (Z1 × Kanayamidori, 1991). And Fushun is the mother of Seimei, which in 2020 became the only Japanese cultivar ever bred specifically for matcha — a story we tell in full in the matcha cultivar guide and the Uji matcha guide. So an unnamed, unregistered line sits two generations upstream of the most modern matcha cultivar in existence — and our Yame farmer sells it as an everyday morning sencha: sweet, low in bitterness, with a mild round nuttiness.

Zairai — tea before cultivars

Everything above is a clone. Zairai (在来) is what Japanese tea was before that: grown from seed, so every single bush is genetically different. It is not a cultivar and it is not a grade — it is a condition, and it was the normal one until the 1950s. Very little is left. In Kyoto Prefecture the zairai area is down to a few dozen hectares and falling about 10% a year.

Our zairai lot is not a heritage tea but a live experiment: seeds taken from a strongly fragrant garden in Tamagawa and sown in 2019, hand-picked and made as a single product. It is complex and layered in a way that no clone is, because it is not one plant — it is a population. Drink it as the control against which every named cultivar above is measured.

How do you brew sencha?

Cooler and shorter than most people expect. Boiling water is the single most common mistake.

• Asamushi (mountain sencha): 5 g / 150 ml / 70 °C / 60 seconds. Second infusion hotter and shorter.
• Fukamushi: 5 g / 150 ml / 70–75 °C / 30–40 seconds — the broken leaf releases much faster, so over-steeping turns it bitter quickly.
• Aroma cultivars (Koshun, Shizu-7132): down to 65 °C, and give them a wide cup. Heat drives the aroma off before it reaches you.
• Cold brew: 10 g / 1 l soft water, overnight in the fridge. This is the best way to taste a cultivar's aroma with almost no astringency in the way.

Use soft water — Munich tap water is hard and will flatten a good asamushi. A kyusu with a fine mesh matters more for fukamushi than for asamushi, for the obvious reason: there is far more fine leaf to hold back.

Where to start

If you want to hear a cultivar for the first time, take two teas from the same maker and the same steaming and put them side by side — a floral one and an umami one. Koshun against Yamakai does it in one sitting. We keep the current single-cultivar sencha in our tea collection, and we pour them in the gallery in Munich most weeks.

Frequently asked questions

What does sencha mean?

煎茶 literally means "simmered" or "decocted" tea. The name is historical: it distinguished leaf tea that is infused in water from powdered tea (matcha) that is whisked into it. Today sencha simply means Japanese green tea made from unshaded leaf that is steamed, rolled and dried.

What type of tea is sencha?

Sencha is a green tea — unoxidised, and steamed rather than pan-fired. Within Japanese green tea it is the unshaded, rolled-leaf category: gyokuro and kabusecha are shaded before picking, matcha is shaded and stone-milled, bancha is later-harvest and coarser, and hojicha is roasted.

What temperature should sencha be brewed at?

Around 70 °C for a standard sencha, and as low as 65 °C for aromatic cultivars. Water at boiling point extracts catechins fast and drives off the aroma compounds, which is why sencha brewed like black tea tastes bitter and flat. Deep-steamed sencha needs a shorter time than light-steamed, not a higher temperature.

What is the difference between asamushi and fukamushi?

Steaming time. Asamushi is steamed 20–50 seconds and keeps whole needle-shaped leaves, a clear liquor and a high aroma. Fukamushi is steamed 60–180 seconds, which breaks the leaf down and gives an opaque deep-green cup with more body and sweetness but a muted aroma. Asamushi shows the cultivar. Fukamushi shows the technique.

Is single-cultivar sencha better than a blend?

Not better — different, and more legible. A blend is built to taste the same every year, which is a real skill. A single cultivar is built to taste like one plant, which means it varies with the season and can be genuinely strange. Most of the cultivars on this page were originally rejected by blenders for being too dominant to blend.

Which sencha cultivar should I try first?

If you want aroma, start with Koshun or Shizu-7132 — both are unmistakable within one sip. If you want umami and body, start with Yamakai. If you want to understand why the category exists at all, drink a cultivar sencha and a zairai side by side.