Ingredients · Tea

Sencha Green Tea

Camellia sinensis var. sinensis · Theaceae (tea family)

Sencha Green Tea
Japan's everyday tea and the most popular tea in Japan — steamed for fifteen to twenty seconds to stop oxidation, then rolled and dried into thin dark needles. The steaming is what separates it from a Chinese green: it gives sencha the grassy, faintly seaweed-like taste and the vivid greenish-gold cup that pan-firing does not. This is Japan's kitchen table rather than its tea ceremony — the ceremony is matcha's business.

What it’s like, and how to use it

The partLeaf
KindTea
CaffeineContains caffeine
Where it is fromJapan
TasteGrassy and vegetal with a touch of seaweed and a clean sweet finish; greenish-gold in the cup
How to brew it
  • 175°F / 80°C
  • 1 to 2 minutes
  • short, and never boiling

How to use it

Around 175°F, 1 to 2 minutes — sencha is less forgiving than a Chinese green and goes bitter fast. Good for two or three infusions, each shorter than the last. Poured over rice with pickles and nori it becomes ochazuke. The base for genmaicha with toasted rice, and for hojicha once roasted.

With food

Rice, sushi and sashimi. Nori and sesame. Steamed vegetables. Grilled fish. Mochi and wagashi. Cucumber and daikon.

With spices

Toasted rice. Sesame. Ginger. Yuzu and citrus peel. Shichimi togarashi, at the table rather than in the pot.

With tea

Blended with toasted rice for genmaicha, with cherry and rose for a sakura blend, or roasted into hojicha.

Its story

Where it comes from

Shizuoka has about 40 per cent of Japan's tea-bush area and grows mainly sencha; in 2024 Kagoshima overtook it as the country's largest producer, a place Shizuoka had held since records began in 1959. Together the two grow about 70 per cent of Japan's unrefined tea. The Yabukita cultivar, bred in Shizuoka, now dominates Japanese planting.

What happened

Tea arrived in Japan with monks. Eichū served it to Emperor Saga in 815, the earliest documented cup. Eisai came back from China in 1191 with Zen scriptures and tea seeds, and gave some to the monk Myoe, who grew them at Toganoo and then at Uji. Sencha itself is much later: a tea farmer of Ujitawara named Nagatani Soen is credited with developing the steamed, hand-kneaded method and creating sencha in 1738. Its champion was a monk called Baisao, the old tea seller — born in 1675, he left his monastery for Kyoto at forty-nine and from about 1735, near sixty, sold tea at the city's scenic spots for whatever people put in his bamboo tube, carrying his kit in a basket he called the den of the sages. He argued for simple steeped sencha against the formality of the tea ceremony, gave up selling in 1755 through old age, and shortly before he died burned most of his utensils so that no ritual could grow up around them.

On the shelf with it

Sold on its own, and in these blends.

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