About 2025 Yame Gyokuro - Oishi Kenichi - Yabukita - 40g

About

Gyokuro from Yame, in the hills of Fukuoka, where the tea sits between two rivers and the valleys hold fog through most of the morning.

The fog is the reason the region matters. Yame's growers work with cool nights, warm days and light that arrives filtered rather than direct, and the plants respond by growing slowly and holding their amino acids. Roughly forty percent of Japan's gyokuro comes from here, and Yame has taken the top production-area prize for gyokuro at the national tea competition every year since 2001.

Oishi Kenichi covered these Yabukita rows for twenty days before picking them in the first week of May. Twenty days under cover is the full commitment. The leaf stops converting its L-theanine into catechins almost entirely, the astringency disappears, and what is left is sweetness, weight and a marine depth that no unshaded tea reaches.

Yame steams its leaf a little longer than most regions. The result here is a cup with no edges at all: citrus peel on the aroma, a clean sea-air note through the middle, and a melon sweetness that stays in the mouth long after the swallow.

The Producer

Oishi Kenichi grows in Murooka, on the Yame side of the Fukuoka hills, in soil laid down by old volcanic activity and worked by generations before him.

Yame has been growing tea since the Muromachi period, when the Zen monk Eirin Shuusai brought seed from Ming China and planted it at Reiganji temple. Cultivation spread widely from the Edo period onward. The region kept the traditions that other places set aside.

About Gyokuro

Gyokuro (玉露) means jewel dew. It is green tea grown under cover for twenty days or more, at the far end of a practice that begins with kabusecha.

Deprived of light, the plant slows its conversion of L-theanine, the amino acid behind umami, into the catechins that give green tea its astringency. Twenty days takes that as far as it goes. The leaf darkens to a deep emerald, the bitterness leaves entirely, and the cup becomes sweet, thick and unmistakably marine.

Gyokuro is brewed differently from other tea: Much less water, cooler temperature, and  very slowly. It rewards patience.

Water temperature.  Gyokuro brewed hot too hot tastes like a different and much worse tea. If you have no thermometer, boil, then let the water stand in an open vessel for eight to ten minutes.

Storage. Airtight, away from light and heat. Refrigerate or freeze if it will not be finished within a month, and let a chilled bag return to room temperature before opening.

Teaware Pairing

Gyokuro needs the smallest pot you own.

A shiboridashi or hōhin.