The Best Tea, Made With Passion!

The season where cherry blossom flowers dance throughout Japan is when the city of Minami-Kyushu harvests the fresh buds of tea leaves.

When April comes around, the dainty, countless faces of young fresh leaves in the tea plantations peek out and frolic with the wind. Standing at the top of a hill overlooking the plantations, it’s almost as if you’re looking at a big green carpet, one just like Aladdin’s magic carpet.

Right now as the buds are peeking out in Minami-kyushu, we’re preparing our exhibition teas for the National Tea Fair and the Prefectural Tea Fair. Thanks to the special fertilization management used by tea farmers and their families, who pour their hearts into making those exhibition teas, the fresh buds that they raise like their own children are carefully picked by the families, of course, but also with the help from the prefectural government, JA cooperatives, and even city officials.

The height of the machines picking the fresh leaves is adjusted to the millimeter, and after picking only the highest-quality part of the fresh buds (two leaves per stem), they are subdivided into three kilograms per bag. Once they reach the necessary amount, they are quickly brought to a manufacturing plant for production.

For exhibition teas, you can harvest about 140 kilograms of raw leaves from a 20ha tea plantation, but when you process and reprocess those leaves, you only end up with a mere 10 kilograms.

The manufacturing plant is shrouded in an atmosphere where no mistakes or compromises are allowed from start to finish, calling to mind the traditional Japanese craftsmen.

Minami-Kyushu’s exhibition tea, in the ‘sencha’ green tea division, has won the Origin Award and continued on to win the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Award so far. We’re hoping that our producers’ greatest masterpiece, created just for these fairs, will be among the top finishers this year as well.

The production of this exhibition tea started on April 5th, and will continue until the end of this month.