What Is Sencha? Why Steaming Time Decides the Cup

Sencha is Japanese green tea made from leaf that is steamed, rolled and dried, and the word names the standard process rather than a grade or a region. It accounts for roughly three quarters of Japanese tea production.

Steaming is what separates it from Chinese green tea, which is pan-fired, and sencha sits on the Japanese side of that division. What green tea is sets that division out.

Sencha at a glance

What it is

Steamed, rolled Japanese green tea. Three quarters of Japan's production

The one variable

Steaming time, from about 20 seconds to about two minutes, and producers differ

Water

70 to 80 C. Boiling water ruins it comprehensively

Steep

45 to 60 seconds light-steamed, 30 to 45 deep-steamed

Cloudy cup

Deep-steamed, not badly made

Keeps

Three to six months opened. Among the most perishable teas here

Why steaming time is the variable that matters

The time in the steamer, counted in seconds, decides which of three styles the leaf becomes.

Longer steaming breaks the leaf down. Fukamushi leaf is partly shattered, and the liquor is cloudy because fine particles are suspended in it rather than dissolved.

If your cup is cloudy, the sencha is not badly made, because it is deep-steamed and the cloudiness is the point rather than a fault.

Steaming exists at all because the first step in making any green tea is to stop oxidation before it starts, and Japan and China solved that differently. Steam penetrates fast and evenly, arresting the enzyme within seconds and preserving the fresh, marine, vegetal character, where pan-firing is drier and slower and develops toasty, nutty notes instead.

So Japanese green tea tastes of seaweed and cut grass while Chinese green tea tastes of chestnut and toasted rice. Neither is a quality difference, and a drinker who dislikes one often likes the other.

How to brew sencha without making it bitter

Sencha is the least forgiving tea on this site, and temperature is why.

Starting point

Water

70 to 80 C, and lower for higher grades

Steep

45 to 60 seconds for asamushi, 30 to 45 for fukamushi

Leaf

4 g per 200 ml

Second steep

Hotter and shorter, around 30 seconds

Boiling water ruins sencha comprehensively, and the reason is set out in why green tea tastes bitter. Steeping temperature is the variable to settle before any other.

Whole-leaf sencha is not finished after one steep, and because the leaf is already open and hot by the second, that steep is brewed differently: use water slightly hotter than the first and cut the time to about thirty seconds.

Making sencha covers the vessel and the pour in full. A third steep is usually possible with good leaf and asamushi in particular, at hotter water again and a slightly longer steep.

Deep-steamed fukamushi, by contrast, typically gives two good infusions and little after that, because its broken leaf released most of itself immediately.

A small vessel helps more than technique does here, since brewing in a gaiwan or a kyusu lets you decant completely in two seconds, which is the only reliable way to stop a 30-second steep at 30 seconds.

How to read a sencha packet

Sencha labels carry more useful information than most tea packets do, and the words that matter on them are processing terms rather than the region or the grade that a Chinese tea would lead with.

The words that matter

Asamushi

Lightly steamed, typically 20 to 30 seconds. Clear liquor, needle-like leaf, delicate

Chumushi

Medium, typically 30 to 60 seconds. The middle ground and the commonest

Fukamushi

Deep-steamed, typically 60 to 120 seconds. Cloudy, broken leaf, full and sweet

Aracha

Unrefined, with stems and dust still in. Rare outside Japan, and cheap

Shiage

Refined and sorted, which is what nearly all retail sencha is

Tanicha, single cultivar

One variety rather than a blend. A sign of a careful producer

Fukamushi is the one to recognise by sight. Its leaf is visibly broken and much of it is small fragments, which looks like poor quality to anyone used to whole-leaf Chinese tea and is a processing choice rather than a fault.

• Look for the steaming grade: asamushi, chumushi or fukamushi.
• Check the harvest; first flush and shincha are noted when they apply.
• Prefer a stated region such as Uji, Shizuoka or Kagoshima over just Japan.
• Buy small quantities, since sencha fades faster than almost any other tea.
• Expect vivid green leaf; dull or yellowing leaf means age.

If the packet you pick up gives none of these, it is almost always chumushi, which is the safe default and what most blended supermarket sencha is.

The brewed cup then confirms it. A cloudy green liquor means fukamushi, a clear pale yellow-green means asamushi and usually a careful producer, and a brown or dull yellow cup means the leaf is old or the water was too hot.

Where sencha grows, and which cultivar

A few regions account for most Japanese tea, and one plant variety shapes much of the flavour.

Kagoshima's warmth means its harvest starts weeks before Shizuoka's, so the earliest new-season tea each year is almost always southern.

Cultivar matters alongside region. Yabukita accounts for roughly 70 per cent of Japanese tea acreage, and its dominance is one reason much of the sencha you try tastes broadly similar.

A stated cultivar is a sign of a careful producer, because blending is easier and cheaper. Single-cultivar sencha is worth trying once to see how much of the sencha taste is actually Yabukita.

Which harvest you are drinking

Sencha comes from four pickings a year, and they do not taste alike.

Through the season

First pickLast

1. IchibanchaLate April to May. Sweetest, most aromatic, least astringent
2. NibanchaJune. Noticeably more astringent, less sweet, much cheaper
3. SanbanchaJuly or August. Coarser still, often used for bancha or hojicha
4. YonbanchaAutumn. Usually processed rather than sold as sencha

The plant accumulates amino acids over winter and spends them on the first growth, so ichibancha is sweet and later flushes are not. Sencha's caffeine can also vary with the pick.

Most of the sencha you meet in a supermarket is a blend weighted toward nibancha, which helps explain why a cheap sencha tastes harsh next to an expensive one. The later flushes are not badly made, only picked from a plant that has already spent its reserves.

Later harvests still find a use, since sanbancha is exactly what hojicha is roasted from, and roasting turns the astringency that spoils it as a green tea into something warm and nutty.

Shincha, and when to buy it

The first harvest is sold as a seasonal product, and it behaves differently from the sencha on the shelf all year.

Shincha is the same leaf sold immediately after picking rather than after the usual months of resting. It arrives in late April and May and is gone within weeks, and it tastes greener, sweeter and more aromatic than the rested version of the identical tea.

Most producers hold sencha for several months because the flavour rounds and deepens, so resting is not a compromise, and shincha is prized for exactly the sharpness that resting removes.

Shincha is also the most perishable tea in a perishable category, and because the qualities that make it worth buying are the first to go, a small quantity drunk quickly serves you better than a stock kept for the year.

Kabusecha, and where matcha begins

One neighbouring category explains a lot about sencha by contrast.

Kabusecha is sencha grown under shade for one to two weeks before harvest. That short shading raises the amino acid content and lowers astringency, producing something sweeter and rounder than ordinary sencha and rather more forgiving to brew.

Extend the shading to three or four weeks and remove the stems, and the leaf becomes tencha, which is milled into matcha. Sencha and matcha are the same plant at two ends of one continuum of shading.

Gyokuro sits between them, shaded three weeks and brewed at 50 to 60 C, which is cooler than green tea generally asks for. It is the sweetest and most expensive of the steeped Japanese greens, and it tastes closer to matcha's flavour than to sencha's despite being brewed the same way.

Shading works by starving the plant of light, which stops it converting theanine into the catechins that taste astringent. The sweetness comes from a conversion that does not happen rather than from anything added.

How to cold brew sencha

Sencha gains a lot from cold brewing, and the overnight wait pays for itself in a tea that is otherwise hard to brew forgivingly.

Mizudashi sencha

Leaf

10 g per litre

Water

Cold, straight into the carafe with the leaf

Time

3 to 6 hours in the fridge, and up to overnight

Character

Sweet, thick, no astringency at all

Keeps

Covered in the fridge once the leaf is out. Discard at the first sign of mould, gas or an off smell

Cold water extracts the theanine that makes sencha taste sweet and very little of the catechins that make it astringent, so the result is a different balance rather than a weaker version. A tea that is difficult hot is often excellent this way.

Asamushi suits it best because its whole leaf gives up its contents slowly and evenly, whereas fukamushi cold-brews faster and can go cloudy and slightly muddy if you leave it overnight.

Water quality shows more here than in a hot brew, because nothing is masking it. Brewing water with a heavy mineral load flattens a mizudashi in a way it does not flatten a hot cup.

How to store sencha, and what to spend

Sencha is among the most perishable teas, and it has the usual four enemies of stored leaf.

Unopened and vacuum-sealed it holds for a year or more, which is why Japanese producers vacuum-pack and often freeze it. Opened, three to six months is realistic before the sweetness noticeably drops away.

The first thing to go is the fresh green aroma, and the last is the astringency, so old sencha reads as harsh rather than merely faint. That is a fading problem rather than a brewing one, and no adjustment to how you brew recovers it.

Storing sencha covers the containers, and storage matters more here than for black tea or pu-erh, because there is far more left in an unoxidised leaf for air to change. The general case is under storing loose leaf.

Where the money goes

Least worth itMost

1. A large bag on offerThe second half is past its best before you reach it
2. Competition gradeAudible side by side, and little else
3. Supermarket blendThe baseline. Usually nibancha, usually chumushi
4. Named single cultivarThe largest single step in quality for the money
5. Shincha in seasonNot better, genuinely different, and worth buying once a year

On price, the curve is steeper at the bottom than at the top, and where money is genuinely wasted is on quantity. Fifty grams is around twelve cups at the dose above, and a 200 g bag bought on price will spend its second half past its best.

Sencha among the Japanese greens

Sencha is the reference point, and the family around it is worth placing.

Every one of those starts from the same plant, and most start from leaf that could have been sencha. The category is defined by what was done after picking, which is why the processing terms on a packet matter more than the origin does.

That is the opposite of how Chinese tea is usually organised, where oolong and white tea are named for oxidation level and region carries much of the identity, so the two tea cultures put two different things on the front of the packet.