The Star of todays review is O-cha´s Daily Sencha.
An absolute budget Sencha. It´s on the market for about 10$. Being a second flush tea, the first i had for a very long time, i didn´t know what to expect. Well, maybe I did. To be honest, not too much.
Daily Sencha is a blend of two breeds. Yabukita and Sayamakaori-Oolwase, grown in the Shizuoka area.
O-cha´s website calls it a good starter if you are new to green tea. And i found out why..it´s just so easy to brew. A very forgiving tea.
But to start with: What´s in the bag? Not very surprising, always remembering this is second harvest tea, you´ll find a lot of small leafs, heaps of broken ones and teadust too. Here and there some big leafs.
But all that counts is performance, right? So i gave it a shot.
Infusions. As i said before, it´s a forgiving tea. Which means, you don´t have to get too excited about your water being too cold or too hot. With the first infusion i used slightly hotter water than i´d normally do (about 80°C). Using 1 heaped teaspoon of leafs with my 10 oz Kyusu being half-filled. Steeping time was no longer than 90 seconds.
So there it was in my cup. I took the first sip….and well, not too bad…actually surprisingly good. What comes to mind first, is a sweetness i had never experienced on a sencha before. It´s wasn´t Gyokuro but what it was i didn´t know. Maybe compareable to the taste of sweet potatoes, somewhat nutty, but for sure delicous. Once that flavour disappears, there´s a very nice grassyness that stays on your tongue for quite a while. The tea itself looked very yellow-green in the cup, the liquid wasn´t really clear, but slightly murky.
The second infusion, came along more mellow. Now there was almost only that sweetness with just a tiny bitterness left. That cup was only dark green and murky. Almost like a Fukamushi. I guess, that is due to all the broken leafs and that dust.
I didn´t try a third infusion, expecting the tea to be too weak then.
Conclusion. After being so sceptic at the beginning, this tea really surprised me. It´s for sure better than the rest you could get for the same value of money. It´s not noble but unique. It might actually be good for beginners, because it´s so easy to handle. And plus, it tastes good. I wouldn´t have guessed this to be a second flush without having a look at the leafs.
If you´ll like it or not, is going to depend on your will to downgrade and if you´ll be enjoying its special sweetness.
Tea: Sencha Daily
Vendor: o-cha
Price: 10.95 $
