It's a new season which means my Kyoto Obubu Tea Farm member packet has come in. These packets are sent as one of the perks of being a patron of this farm. It's not necessarily cheap, but the quarterly shipments provide for most of my tea-drinking besides a yearly order from Floating Leaves Tea and the local Young Mountain Teas. I stocked up quite a bit at 2023 Eugene Tea Festival, too! But Obubu's shipment will always be the highlight.
This season there are some really great first-flush Sencha which I will avidly dig in to tomorrow; they brought me the 2023 harvest of my favorite teas:
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I'm looking forward to comparing this year's Kabusecha and Wind Sencha to last year's especially. These are Aracha (荒茶), "farmer's tea" which are each harvested from a single field, the same field each year without blending or unifying the flavor. It's a real treat to see how the terroir develops over time.
Each shipment comes with a tea journal with information about the Tea that has been shipped to us, updates about the farm and their fields, and interviews with residents of Wazuka:
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When I first started to get them in 2018 or 2019 they were 100% Japanese-language but because of the success of their international outreach they are coming with translations. I am still in my Japanese Study to be able to read these well some day...