Shincha 2017: Reservations confirmed by Watanabe, Morimoto and Matsumoto

In the last days we received really good news from Mr. Matsumoto, Haruyo and Shigeru Morimoto and from Mrs. Goto, who works for family Watanabe’s tea garden: All three of them confirmed this year’s reservations of Shincha. So this year (2017) too, chances are good for getting sorts of Shincha as great as we got in the past years.

Making Shincha, you harvest leaves from tea bushes that sprout quite early. For these, the Morimoto family use especially the tea bush variety Yutaka Midori, which is shaded for nearly two weeks. As for the Watanabe family in Yakushima, the bush which sprouts earliest is the rare tea bush variety Kuritawase, which is also shaded for the Shincha harvest.

Mr. Matsumoto on the other hand uses his Yabukita bushes, which do not sprout so early, but he harvests only the youngest and finest leaves. This way he can still harvest quite early and also produce a very special and very fine quality of Shincha. The downside of such finely harvested leaves, which are used for Mr. Matsumoto’s Shincha MOE, is that the amount of harvested leaves is extremely small. Therefore we are very thankful that Mr. Matsumoto confirmed our reservation again this year, even though the quantity of the Shincha Moe produced is not very big.

The Kabuse Shincha produced by the Watanabe family is highly limited, too. In this case it is less due to the small harvest quantity, but more due to the fact that Mr. Watanabe produces a special Kabuse Shincha exclusively for us. For this exclusive Shincha he uses the leaves of his rare Sae Midori bushes. Since he only has five rows of Sae Midori bushes in his organic tea garden, the harvest quantity is only about 15kg. Needless to say, we do not want to take all of the 15kg away from Mr. Watanabe. So, we only expect about 5kg leave material of the sort Sae Midori for our Watanabe Kabuse Shincha. That’s why it is not possible to produce more than 35kg of this Shincha, otherwise the proportion of the single varieties in the final Shincha would change too much. So, this too is a treasured sort of Shincha and every year we are happy and grateful that Mr. Watanabe produces this tea for us.