Hello and welcome to the Tezumi YouTube channel. I'm David and this will be the first in our series of videos where we explore different aspects of Japanese tea, tea culture and teaware. Today, I'll start off with a simple sencha brewing video To do this you'll need a kyusu, obviously, which is the Japanese word for a teapot. Usually it's these side-handle teapots where the handle comes out of the side at roughly 90 degrees to the spout, which is really convenient and ergonomic for pouring tea. This teapot is a 250mL ( 8.5oz) teapot by Gyokko and it's one of my favourites to recommend for anyone beginning to get into Japanese tea because it's a very versatile size and easy to use shape. And the tea we'll be brewing today is Matsuba, which is a Yabukita sencha from the Honyama region, which is an area of mountainous terrain in Shizuoka Prefecture and it was farmed by Moriuchi-san of Moriuchi Chanouen and it's one of my favorite senchas to get people into this style of tea because it has a very classic, balanced, and easy to appreciate taste. So, the first thing we have to do is preheat our teaware. I have my kettle set to 80° Celsius, which will be perfect for getting everything nice and hot. You'll want to make sure you preheat your teaware so that when you go to make tea in it, the hot water doesn't get cooled by the teaware. Now preheat the teacup as well because if you want hot tea, you don't want the teacup to sap out all the temperature from the freshly brewed tea. The next step is to weigh out the tea leaves. So for that, I'm going to use a little scale. These are really handy, especially when you're getting into tea. So I will tare that to the weight of the teapot and measure out 3g per 100mL. This cup holds about 100mL so I'm gonna use three grams. This is just a starting point. This is what we recommend people to start with. You can always go stronger or weaker, depending on your taste. I usually like things a little stronger because I'm a tea crazy person. So I might actually use four grams today. Let's see. There we go, four grams. I'm gonna tare that again. So now we're at zero and add in 100mL of water. This says to use 75° Celsius water. So I have a temperature control kettle here that I've set to 75°C So I'll weigh 100mL of water and start the timer. This scale has a timer If you don't have a scale with a timer, you can use your phone or a clock or a stopwatch... or an hourglass, or you can count... as long as you have roughly one minute. So I'll let that brew for a minute and we'll be back when it's done. So it's just about 60 seconds, so I'm going to start pouring it into the cup. Make sure you pour it nice and slowly, just enough for the water to come out and not dribble down the spout. If you pour too quickly, the leaves can clog up against the filter of the teapot. You'll want to make sure to pour out as much of the tea as you can. Any tea that's left in there will continue to steep and it'll get really strong. And also these last drops contain the most flavor. So you'll want to make sure you get as much of these out as you can. Sometimes you see people shaking the teapot to get these drops out, but usually I recommend not doing that because it will agitate the leaves and it'll also cause the leaves to fall from the bottom of the teapot here where they are against the filter, which can clog the filter and make things harder to brew. So there we go. There's our first infusion. I usually like to take the lid off the teapot when it's not brewing so that the steam doesn't over-steep what leaves are in there. It doesn't make that much of a difference. It's just a personal preference. And you also get the benefit of being able to *sniff* smell the freshly brewed leaves, which are very nice and vibrant and green and fresh. Here's the first infusion, let's give it a taste. So the first thing I like to pay attention to, other than aroma, is texture. This style of tea from Honyama, Shizuoka has this fresh, vibrant, almost zesty texture with a little bit of astringency called shibumi in Japanese, which is this sort of slight drying sensation in the mouth, especially after you swallow the tea, a little tingliness on the tongue. And this gives the tea a lot of structure and complexity: it tastes kind of flat without it. The same way that like a good red wine should have some tannins, a good sencha should have a little bit, at least of this style, a little bit of that astringency. After you've had some time to sit with the texture of the tea, you can focus on the flavour. This style of tea, and this one particular, Matsuba, is very bright. It's not particularly super umami, not like some senchas from Kyoto or Uji, which are much stronger in their savory, umami, seaweed-y, those sort of tasting notes. This is a little brighter, fresher, think of like mountain air in Shizuoka. This style is really elegant. It's not as powerful as like a fukumushi sencha or as buttery as an Uji sencha. For the second infusion, we'll use the same temperature water and the same amount of water, 100mL but instead of waiting for 60 seconds, we can pour the tea out straight away. So we get to 100mL And again, pour nice and slowly. And you can see that the tea is still plenty strong without waiting for a full minute. And again, we'll try and get as many of these last drops out as we can. So the second infusion of a sencha is usually a little cloudier than the first one. This is because as the leaves open up, a lot of the smaller particulate will be released into the tea. And this gives it a little more of a stronger mouthfeel, a little more of that like thicker texture. So let's give it a try. It's definitely a little more bold than the first infusion. It's not quite as light and airy, as elegant, but it's sort of more balanced in a way. Instead of those really bright notes, you're getting a little more of that powerful green taste, for lack of a better word. This area in Shizuoka where the tea is from, Honyama, has long been famous for tea since the Tokugawa Shogunate back in the Edo period had picked it out as being one of the best places to grow tea. It's not quite as famous as Uji in Kyoto, (which is really famous for matcha) but Shizuoka is the largest tea growing province in Japan. And Honyama produces some of the finest teas from that region. There are a lot of different regions within Shizuoka that grow tea. Some are flat plains like Makinohara, which produce a lot of commercial teas, because on these flat plains, you can use tractors, you can use more fertilizer, more chemicals. Whereas Honyama (本山), which means real mountain or true mountain, is a mountainous region, it is much harder to use mechanical tractors and large scale agriculture. So the tea there is a little more handcrafted. And because of the natural shading that mountains provide, because they block the sun, on account of being mountains (duh) and the higher altitude that they grow at, they are a little more sweet, a little less bitter, a little less astringent, and overall much tastier. For most good senchas, you can get three good infusions out of them. So for the third infusion, let me get my scale back out again. And we'll keep the same temperature for the water. But for this time, we're going to brew for about 45 seconds. So I'll start my timer. *stares intensely into the teapot* All right, it's been about 45 seconds. So I'll put the lid back on and pour. Completely personal preference, if you put the lid on or leave it off when brewing, all this does is let some of the heat escape if you take it off. But I like doing it sometimes so you can see the leaves as they brew. And here's the third infusion. It's amazing to see how the tea changes over just three infusions. The first one was really light and airy. The second one was more balanced. And this one is a little more punchy and the texture has changed as well. It's not quite as thick as it was in the first two infusions. And it's a little more fluid. And there's a bit more astringency, but it's a different type than there was in the first infusion. This is a little more of a drying and less of a tingly astringency. And that was it, that's how you brew sencha in a kyusu. I hope you enjoyed the video. And if you have anything to say, let us know in the comments. I'll put the links to the different teawares and the teas as well as the full write-up about the different brewing parameters over the course of the three infusions. If you want to see more from us, you can check out our website at tezumi.com, And if you want to see more videos from us, please let us know. Please like and subscribe. Ja ne! All right, that's it. I'm done.
