Sencha is Japan’s everyday tea and the one that shows the grower’s hand most plainly. Grown in full sun, steamed within hours of picking, then rolled and dried — no shading to soften it, no roasting to cover anything up. What you taste is the field, the cultivar and the steaming time.

Ours comes from the same farm as the matcha: Otsukaen, in Kawaminami, Miyazaki. Miyazaki sits in the warm south of Kyushu, which brings the harvest early and gives the leaf a fuller, rounder character than the sharper senchas of central Japan.