Organic Sencha green tea

The finest green tea in Japan!

Prized by the elite and prepar through a formal ceremony, Sencha is a smooth green tea with broad leaves, which are steamed, rolled and dried directly in the sun.

POWDER brand Sencha green tea is organically grown. With is yellowy-gold color, our tea offers an exceptionally delicate sweetness and an mild astringency effect.

DESCRIPTION

The tea plant (Camellia sinensis (L.) (Kuntze) is a shrub from the Teaceae family that grows in the wild in the tropics of Asia (1). Its perennial leaves are oval, dark green and shiny, and have small, whitish, somewhat drooping, solitary flowers (2).

There are 4 types of tea (white, green, black, oolong) with different varieties according to the origin, the size of the leaf and the harvest season.

Sencha Tea is a green tea, whose leaves, selected from the first flush (from late February to late May) (3), preserve their colour thanks to a vaporisation process that inactivates the enzymes and prevents their fermentation. Other famous green teas are Bancha, Gyokuro and Matcha (4).

Along with water, tea is the most widely consumed drink in the world (2). It began to be cultivated 2,500 years ago in southwest China.

Shennong, who founded agriculture in China and the Emperor Huangdi were both regular tea consumers (4).

In the East, where green tea is preferred to black, Sencha is the best-known variety. Its name means ‘boiled or infused tea’ and it was the most exported product to the United States between 1859 and 1941 (4). In Japan today, Sencha consumption is part of a ceremony called the senchado (‘the way of the Sencha’), which is reserved for distinguished visitors (3).

COMPOSITION AND BENEFITS

The chemical composition of green tea is complex, but not all its active principles pass into the infusion. Only its low-weight molecules are passed, including polyphenols, caffeine (in a lesser quantity than coffee or black tea) (5), the amino acid theanine, vitamins and minerals (1).

The combination of these substances gives green tea its source of antioxidants (6).

Most of green tea’s polyphenols are catechins: epicatechin, epigallocatechin, epicatechin-3-gallate and epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG) (1, 6). 

USE, DIRECTIONS

Sencha green tea can be drink as an infusion. To prepare a cup of tea, pour 200 ml of water heated up to 70-80ºC for 2.4g of Sencha green tea (approximately one teaspoon) and leave to infuse for 2-3 minutes.

The flavour of Sencha tea improves according to the quality of the water, which should be pure, fresh, filtered, odour-free and untreated. To avoid increasing the tea’s bitterness, water should not be boiling (7).