Sencha Fabric

[Otilia Mojarro]

Averagereceipt times for custom cut fabrics range from 1-3 weeks typically however there can be further delays if fabrics need to come from overseas or need to be milled to meet your order and whilst this is rare, this can take up to 3 months.

Unfortunately we are unable to supply cuttings if you aren't a genuine customer - however if you are a design student many of our suppliers will supply cuttings to you so please contact them directly to discuss this.

We always recommend getting a physical cutting prior to making a purchase as what you see on a screen can vary from reality depending on your settings and the settings of the supplier that took the picture. Plus it's always best to be able to touch and feel fabric!

Whilst we focus on fabric sales online, we still have the knowledge and expertise to guide you on your projects and can even assist with making curtains, blinds, shutters and more via our Material World Stores if needed.

Nestled along the Yabe River on the island of Kyushu, Japan is the village of Yame, an area renowned for redolent green tea and matcha. A region rich in fertile soil, fog-shrouded evenings, and rolling hills, Yame has been perfecting green teas since Buddhist monks brought seeds to the region in 1423. Today, over 1,500 small scale producers craft the region's characteristically sweet teas (known as "Yamecha"), making up just 3% of Japan's tea production. In this region is Hoshino Tea Garden, a tea maker that we represent at Tekuno. Hoshino has spent the past 70 years perfecting their impossibly soft gyokuro, fragrant sencha, and piquant tasting ceremonial grade matcha, inspired by the region's natural beauty and the garden's pursuit of perfection.

Our organic green sencha tea is a delicate, stimulating beverage made from the season's fresh harvest of the first young leaves. These handpicked tea leaves are immediately steamed to retain their peak flavor and vibrant, brilliant, green color.

Brew Instructions

Fill 1 teaspoon of tea in a cloth tea bag or mesh basket and place in your favorite mug. Pour 8 ounces of boiling water over the tea and allow to steep for 1-2 minutes. Experiment with the steep time and quantity of tea and find your ideal cup!

For centuries it has been known that the best tea comes from fields in relatively cool, high elevation climes, on hills and mountain sides, with fog and well-drained acidic soil. The altitude and lower temperature decrease the need for pesticides, and also slow the plants growth, which increases the nutrient density in the leaves, resulting in better tea. Additionally, the mountain/hill and fog provide natural shade from harsh sunlight.

While these locations produce the best quality tea, they have their drawbacks: the sloped terrain and higher elevation mean they are harder and more expensive to manage and harvest, resulting in a reduced yield.

Conversely, low-lying, flat lands which are less desirable from a quality perspective are much easier to work and harvest mechanically, making them suitable for mass-produced low and medium grade teas.

When choosing which cultivar to grow in a tea field, producers take into account aspects such as taste, budding time, yield, and resistance to cold, pests, and disease. For example, Saemidori buds up to a week earlier than Yabukita, meaning it can be put on the market earlier. However, it is less resistant to frost damage meaning it requires a warmer climate or adequate frost prevention measures.

While une-shitate can produce very good teas, the highest quality are grown without this extreme shaping or pruning, meaning that the plants grow more vertically, and are distinct individual bushes, rather than a uniform hedge. This traditional, more natural way of managing tea plants is fittingly called shizen-shitate (自然仕立て - natural tailoring). Because of their naturally uneven shape, these plants must be harvested by hand. They also tend to be picked only once a year and have fewer buds per bush, which means that there are more nutrients packed into each new shoot, producing a better tea.

An often overlooked aspect of tea quality is the fertilisation of the tea plants, which gives them the necessary nutrients to produce desired flavour and aromatic compounds. While most tea producers use a combination of synthetic and organic fertilisers, strictly organic cultivation is increasing in popularity. Tea plants are generally fertilised year-round, with the most important being the last fertilisation a few weeks before harvest.

Like with gyokuro or matcha, shading the tea plants from the sun forces them to produce more chloroplasts and chlorophyll to harvest more sunlight, causing the leaves to develop a darker green colour. These extra chloroplasts switch from producing bitter-tasting catechins which typically protect the leaves from excessive sun, and instead make sweet and savoury amino acids such as L-theanine along with aromatic compounds such as benzaldehyde. The effect on briefly shaded sencha, however, is of course not as pronounced as it is on a gyokuro and is mainly used to slightly enhance the green colour and umami flavour of the sencha.

It is important to note that shaded tea is not necessarily better tea, but merely a stylistic choice by the farmers and producers. Traditionally, the gold standard for sencha was a clear yellow liquor colour and a clean, fresh taste with natural umami and subtle astringency. However, with the rise of fukamushicha and general shifts in market and consumer standards and expectations, there has been a push towards greener coloured senchas with stronger umami, more body, and less astringency.

Of the three main shading methods, only two are really used to produce shaded sencha, with Jikakabuse (as seen in the above image) being by far the most common due to its simplicity and low cost. Kanreisha is also seen, but is generally reserved for incredibly high end teas, such as those being exhibited in competitions.

Jikakabuse (直冠せ): Direct Shading, the simplest and cheapest shading method. Black or white synthetic cloth is draped directly over the plants, blocking out around 70% of the sunlight. A second layer can be added to increase the shading to around 95%. Putting the shading material directly on the tea requires that the plants be machine-trimmed to have an even surface.

Kanreisha (寒冷紗): Shelf-style with Synthetic Cloth, the most common shading method. Here, the black fabric is held in a canopy, or shelf, built over the tea bushes. This allows greater air and moisture circulation and also lets the plants grow more freely. Many shelf-shaded teas are grown untrimmed as shizen-shitate (自然仕立て - naturally-tailored) bushes, meaning that the bushes grow naturally and unshaped, which produces higher quality tea, but also makes them unsuitable for machine-harvesting, requiring these teas to be picked by hand.

Producers must also decide if they want to prioritise quality or yield. Generally speaking, after a certain point, the quality of the new shoots will begin to decline while the yield will continue to increase at about 7-10% each day as the plants grow. Pick earlier and you prioritise quality and sacrifice yield; pick later and you get more tea, but with a reduced quality. Depending on the tea they wish to produce, farmers will take this into consideration. Competition-grade teas are picked at maximum quality as yield is less important, whereas leaves destined for tea bags, bottled teas, and other less demanding destinations would be picked later so that there is more raw material to sell. Most good-quality senchas on the market are picked somewhere in the middle, often just a few days after maximum quality.

Determining the right time to harvest is a matter of skill and experience, with producers relying on the softness and feel of the tea leaves as their best guide. Of course, weather also plays a factor as tea is never picked in the rain.

Hand-picking (手摘み - tezumi) is of course the oldest and most traditional method of harvesting tea. Before the 1950s, practically all tea in Japan was hand-picked. Today, however, this is reserved for higher-grade teas as it is very expensive, labour-intensive, and produces a lower yield. A skilled tea picker can harvest 1-3kg of tea per hour, while a single two-person handheld mechanical harvester can pick 200-250kg per hour. Though it is still uncommon, matcha and gyokuro are hand-picked more often than sencha.

Hand picking produces the highest quality for a multitude of reasons: it can be used on shizen-shitate plants; pickers can be more selective about which leaves to pick and can leave out damaged or hard leaves, leaves are kept intact due to gentler picking, and the picking standard can be met exactly.

There are a few hand-picking techniques, but most pickers use orizumi (折り摘み - bending pick) where the stem below the last desired leaf is bent and snapped off without cutting it with the fingernails. Another less popular method is shigoki-zumi (しごき摘み) in which the lower leaves are stripped off and the top leaves and bud are picked off in one pulling motion.

A bridge between hand picking and machine picking were tea shears, which were specialised scissors with an attached bag which boosted productivity tenfold. While they still exist, they are very rarely used.

The first is a two-person handheld picking machine (earlier one person models also exist, but are rarer), which resembles a sort of specialised curved hedge trimmer. Two people will hover the machine over the une-shitate tea bushes and manually adjust the height of the cutting blades to determine the picking standard (one bud and two leaves, three leaves, etc.). Often, a third person will follow the picking duo holding a white cloth bag into which the freshly picked tea leaves are sent by the machine. While it is almost 100 times faster and more efficient than hand-picking, this style of machine picking sacrifices some quality as some leaves will be cut rather than picked whole, and some damaged, old, or otherwise unwanted leaves will be picked too and will have to be sorted out later.

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