Kyoto Obubu Tea Farms

Wow… this tea smells so nice! It’s a toasted, popcorn scent. The green tea is long and thicker than I’m used to. I had to taste the dry tea as I love to eat the American Tea Room’s genmaicha. It wasn’t as great for eating, unfortunately, and I’m not familiar enough with the different kinds of green tea to be able to point out the difference.

I don’t know the exact temp, boiling, then waited a few minutes for the water to cool down. I steeped it for a while as I wanted it strong. About five minutes. It’s excellent! It’s nutty, rich, not bitter (which I had worried about a bit, being a green.) The green tea is so nice. It’s strong, yet smooth and fresh. It’s a great combination of flavors that create a very different, very delicious type of genmaicha.

I’ve been wanting to try this for a long time, so I finally ordered some sakura tea from Obubu Tea.

The tea has a very delicate cherry scent, with a salty undertone, and tastes similar. The taste is much stronger than I expected from a single blossom: uniquely floral and refreshing, mildly sweet, with a hint of salt. You can also add the salted water you soaked the blossom in back into the tea to taste, which makes the flavour stronger and saltier.

If you have glass teaware, I recommend using it with this tea so that you can watch the blossom unfurl itself when you pour on the hot water. You can get several infusions out of each blossom – I’ve drank this tea several times now and usually get four or five infusions out of a single blossom.

I got the sampler from Obubu. I went for this tea first, since it was perfect for making into iced tea. The leaves are very interesting. They are very rough looking. I brewed the recommended away. It’s very thick tasting, so I added more ice. It has a nice, strong flavor. I chugged the sample in less than 2 minutes. Rebrews 2 more times.

It seemed lightly grassy. I would drink this again, though I am more interested in what else they have to offer.

Another fantastic Sencha from Obubu. So smooth, sweet and with a lovely fruit note that hits the palate toward the end of the sip. Beautiful.

Very nice. I think this is only the 3rd genmaicha i’ve had, but this is easily the best. The toasted rice isn’t too overbearing, like has been the case in the previous genmaichas. Very drinkable.

So far so good. Nice and sweet, but with a backbone of complexity and depth. Looking forward to figuring this tea out and really getting it to sing.

This is a fantastic Sencha. Each time I try a tea from Obubu I am impressed by the flavor. No exception with this tea.

There is an earthiness to this Sencha that I don’t think I’ve experienced in another Sencha. It also has a charming spice note to it that is quite good. Certainly one of the most interesting and unusual Sencha teas I’ve tasted recently, and I am really liking it.

Off to write a review!

I really enjoyed this Sencha. Rather than the sweet, buttery notes that I sometimes get from a Sencha, I am getting an interesting bittersweet taste with a nutty undertone. The taste is fresh and exhilarating.

Very nice!

Doing a double shot just to do a SIPDOWN! Still VERY nice! Buttery on the tongue! YUM!

I think this is REALLY incredible! This has all of the ‘right amounts’ of all of the stereotypical green flavors in it without any one flavor dominating the others. It leaves a sweeter after taste that is really wonderful!

If you were to put the song “I’m a little bit Country – I’m a little bit Rock N Roll” up against this tea…well. it would be the tea equivalent to that song!

A little bit of EVERYTHING GOOD in a Green Tea! Totally YUM!

Backlogging my genmaicha experience.

Obubu’s Genmaicha is a flavorful, well-balanced combination of Japanese sencha and roasted sweet mochi rice. The tea it produces is flavorful and light, with a wonderfully aromatic smell of roasted rice without a trace of bitterness. There is a slightly sweet, peppery aftertaste that adds layers of depth and complexity to the tea. For my full review and pics: http://www.leafjoy.com/2011/01/review-genmaicha-obubu-tea/

YUMMMMMMMM – see my previous note!

Thanks Brian for this one!!!

This is wonderful! I really like this! It has a fresh veggies type smell before infusing and after it smells like steamed asparagus! The taste is like a creamy-basil-pesto type taste which I LOVE as a taste in food and think it’s delightful in tea as well!

I had to try an ice brew method with this one, because I know it is so successful and wanted to give Obubu’s highest quality tea the best shot possible.

I may not have needed to do so, because every steeping was really delicious and overall the tea seemed pretty unique (in a refreshing way!). I’m surprised it is aracha, because it seemed to be only leaf (small whole leaves and broken pieces). There were so many small pieces in the dry leaf, I’m also surprised it wasn’t a chu or fukamushi.

I couldn’t figure out why I liked it, but it didn’t have the typical gyokuro flavors (nor the typical sencha ones)… it wasn’t strongly marine flavored or vegetal, or super sweet or bitter, or fruity, and yet somehow it was full of flavor and gave 5 good infusions.

I’ve finally finished the sampler from Obubu, and overall I wasn’t too impressed, but they do carry a couple that I found to be pretty good – this and Sencha of the Earth I can think of off the top of my head. Those might be good enough to pick up 100g some day. If they sold them in 50g sizes, I would definitely put them on the shopping list, because it would not only be cheaper in that amount, but 100g is just a lot of tea! (I get tired of the same one after a while, so it’s nice to have something different to try, and 2 – 2.5oz seems like the sweet spot for me).

I’m having trouble rating this one because while I enjoyed it, I couldn’t tell the difference between this and any other houjicha… it seemed somewhat bland.
The dry leaf smelled very good and even had a hint of green (not much but the wet leaves looked more amber colored instead of that dark brown, like raw umber). The smell reminded me of Tencha-Kuki-Houjicha by Den’s Tea, which is a lightly roasted tea that I really like.

The flavor, as I said, was fairly unremarkable, at least in my opinion. I was hopeful that I would really like it, because I hoped more of the green characteristics of the tea would come through. Instead, it seems, that neither the green, nor the typical roasted flavors came through. It is solid, but it seemed average.

This tea is fascinating and very much worth trying. It’s a really marvelous experience to drink clear, sweet nectar scented with cherry blossoms.

The flowers arrive salt-pickled and must first be soaked in warm water before use. The unsoaked salted sakura blossoms smell like a sweet candy. It reminds me a little bit of the smell of salted plum candies from the Chinese grocery store. While the liquor produced from steeping the sakura blossom is clear and virtually colorless, it has a very distinctive sakura taste, like honey, sugared plum and melon. Steeped as recommended, the flowers bloom exuberantly in the hot water and reveal a very sweet and floral taste with a complexity of flavor.

I also used this to flavor my everyday genmaicha and it tasted delicious. It really adds layers of complexity and sweetness to the tea!

The steeped flower is gorgeous, check out my photos here: http://www.leafjoy.com/2011/01/tasting-sakura-cherry-blossoms-from-obubu-tea-includes-pics/

So far, none of Obubu’s teas have really made me think, ’I’ve got to try that again some day (or rather, order a bag of it at some point)’.
But this one will make me reconsider. Nice to have Steepster, so I can look things up that I enjoyed.

The dry leaf smelled faintly peppery and sweet. The wet leaf in the pot was fantastic — it smelled more strongly of pepper, which quickly dissipated, then gave way to creamy notes and I even smelled what I would describe as plantains.
The tea itself was delicious – it had a light, almost playful sweetness up front, like sweet cream (and yes, the creaminess in the aroma was present in the taste!), then was perhaps fruity, like the smell of apricots.

The 2nd steeping, the wet leaf smelled like pesto — olive oil and basil are probably the best ways I could describe it. The taste had less creaminess to it, but was still sweet and more strongly like apricot again.

I tried an ice steeping as well, and it had more of the traditional balance of slight bitterness, marine, vegetal, and sweet that I’m used to, but it was good as well.

This is quite a unique sencha and I wish Obubu had a better description of it. It sounds somewhat bland or uninteresting from their website, but I still hoped it would stand out (I guess because I’m down to my last samples, and I was hoping this other of their higher quality teas would be really delicious). Well, my hopes weren’t for naught.

The wet leaf smelled incredible — strong notes of chocolate, with cherries and cigar smoke also in the aroma.
The taste, while nicely sweet, lacked depth (for me at least) and didn’t have all the flavors or aromas the wet leaf seemed to promise, so that was a bit disappointing.
I do like it, and it is slightly difference from regular houjicha, so I’d almost be tempted to seek it out. But the sample wasn’t quite convincing enough to put it on a list for when I’m looking to get houjicha.

It’s somewhat impressive that Obubu puts out 4 different kinds of houjicha. I wonder how difficult it is to have consistency of roast — what’s the difference in the roasting process between light, basic, and dark? Seems it could be quite difficult to do it consistently.

While I enjoyed this cup, the wet leaf smelled like pickled peppers. Now, I liked pickled things (be it peppers, kim chee, or cucumber), but that was a strange smell to get from tea.

Stranger still was that this was actually present as a flavor. I did like the tea, but it was strange. I don’t remember what else it tasted like, but I don’t think there was a lot there. I’m rating it this high simply because I enjoyed it, but in terms of good quality bancha, I’m sure there’s better out there.

Also interesting was the fact that this had really long twigs present (1" – 1.5"!) that really looked like twigs from a tree, rather than the very small, reed-like kuki in a regular kukicha.