A Surprising Sencha (7132)

A sencha that gets better with age. Yes I did write that, and I am not taking it back, sadly it is off the market and I just opened my last bag so I can not age it much longer. This is a 7132 Asamushi that was offered by O-cha earlier. Kevin the owner of O-cha mentioned that it was only put out on the market later on in the year because its producers believed it got better with age. This lead me to put it to a little bit of a test, I bought a few bags, and opened them up periodically.

Varietal 7132 is an interesting tea varietal which supposedly has a strong sakura (cherry) note. It never quite really seems to surprise though. Abusing this tea to no end trying it all sorts of different ways, it releases a variety of different flavors, but it seems as long as you stay within the reasonable sencha parameters, it is a package full of sweetness, spice, and dried fruits, I do not think I have tasted a sencha anywhere close. But what is this about aging?

Well having just opened up my last bag as I was getting scared keeping a bag of sencha around for so long. In the first bag it was nice, flavorful, but quite mild. The second bag was similar, and I thought the differences had a bit more to do with me a bit more zoned into how to best brew this tea. Third bag opened up much much later than the second one, is now a flavor bomb unlike any sencha I know. I find in my experience asamushi sencha tends to be on the mild side (unless its brewed wrong), but if I had not opened the bag myself, and inspected the leaves, if someone just handed me a cup of this brewed, I would swear it was flavored.

The more and more I get to know different varieties of tea, the more I begin to suspect that every tea can be aged. Whether or not you think it is an improvement is a different question, but every tea can be aged, so that it changes in a controlled fashion, so controlled that the tea does not go bad, but changes into an almost entirely different tea. Now I am not saying go out and hoard sencha to age, but sometimes when people make a comment about how something ages you just need to run a little experiment for yourself.