Jasmine, muscat, peach, chestnut, corn, roasted soybean, herbs, spices, tomato, milk, mayonnaise, seaweed.
These are all aromas I have found in green tea.
Green tea contains over 200 distinct aromatic compounds. Black tea and oolong carry more than 600. These molecules braid together in ways that shift with every harvest, every cultivar, every degree of oxidation — and the result is a scent profile as layered as anything in wine or perfume.
We tend to talk about tea in terms of taste. But as much as 80 percent of what we perceive as flavor actually comes through the nose. Tea, at its core, is an aromatic experience.
A drink to be enjoyed for its scent. That idea led us to Imura Tea Farm in Shimada City, Shizuoka Prefecture — and to a producer who has spent 15 years learning to steer the aroma of tea leaves wherever he wants them to go.
150 years on the northern edge of Makinohara
Shimada City straddles the lower reaches of the Oi River. Follow the river upstream and you reach Kawane Honcho, one of Shizuoka's finest mountain tea regions. Head south and the land flattens into the Makinohara Plateau — birthplace of fukamushi deep-steamed tea, and one of the largest tea-producing areas in Japan.
Imura Seicha sits at Makinohara's northern edge, in the Kikukawa district. The family has been growing tea here for six generations — roughly 150 years.
Imura Norio, the current head, is the sixth in that line. But his focus sets him apart from nearly everyone else on the plateau. While most Makinohara producers make deep-steamed sencha — the region's signature style — Imura-san has built his reputation on aromatic teas. Black tea, kamairicha (pan-fired tea), scented green tea. Teas defined not by body or umami, but by what rises from the cup before you take the first sip.
At this shizuoka tea farm, aroma is the point.
Cultivar, cultivation, oxidation
Three factors shape the scent of a finished tea.
The first is cultivar. Every tea variety carries a different aromatic fingerprint — what the Japanese tea world calls hinshukou, or cultivar aroma. Some cultivars lean toward clean, grassy simplicity. Others carry floral or fruity notes. A few have something stranger — milk, herbs, toasted grain. These scent signatures belong to the plant alone. No amount of processing can invent them from nothing.
The second is cultivation. Shading tea plants under cloth for two to three weeks before harvest — a technique called kabuse — adds a distinctive marine, seaweed-like fragrance known as ooika, or covering scent. It is considered a mark of quality in gyokuro and high-grade sencha. In black tea, a different cultivation trick exists: allowing small insects called unka (leafhoppers) to feed on the young shoots, which triggers a defense response in the plant that produces a sweet, honeyed aroma known as mikkou.
The third — and the one that changes everything — is processing. Specifically, oxidation.
What oxidation does to a leaf
Green tea, black tea, oolong tea. They all begin as the same raw leaf, plucked from the same species of plant. What separates them is what happens next.
The moment a tea leaf is picked, oxidizing enzymes inside the cell walls begin to work. Catechins break down. The leaf darkens — from vivid green to copper, then toward reddish-black. And as the chemistry shifts, new aromatic compounds emerge. Floral notes, malty sweetness, fruity depth. The longer oxidation continues, the further the leaf travels from green tea toward oolong and, eventually, black tea.
Halt oxidation early with heat — steaming or pan-firing — and you get green tea, with its original grassy brightness mostly intact. Let it run to completion and you get black tea, with an entirely different palette of scents. Stop it somewhere in between and you are in oolong territory.
Imura-san works across all three of these worlds. And he navigates between them by feel.
A late start, a steep curve
Imura-san began making black tea about 15 years ago. Before that, he had never attempted it.
"I'd never made anything like it before," he says. "My father didn't know how either, and there was nowhere to study. But there was a man — Takeda-sensei — who'd written a book on tea cultivars. He knew a lot about the process, so I learned what I could from him."
From that uncertain beginning, Imura-san taught himself the rest. Trial and error, season after season. In recent years, his work has been recognized at the Japanese Tea Awards and the Domestic Black Tea Grand Prix — placing him among the top producers in the country.
The day we visited, the factory was mid-production on a black tea batch. The air inside carried a scent I can only describe as apple crossed with freshly cut leaves — fruity and green at once, warm and lifting. The tea was partway through its transformation, and the building smelled like the space between two states of being.
Watching a leaf become black tea
The first step is icho — withering. Freshly picked Yabukita leaves, spread across troughs, slowly losing moisture. As the cells soften, aromas that were locked inside begin to surface. A mellow sweetness appears — something the same Yabukita would never show as a green tea.
Once withering is complete, the leaves move to a rolling machine. The pressure cracks open cell walls, releasing enzymes and accelerating oxidation. The leaf surface darkens. The scent deepens.
Then comes the oxidation itself — leaves resting in still air, turning from bright green to reddish-black as the hours pass. The aroma grows more complex with time, building toward something floral and layered.
Knowing when to stop is where the craft lives. Temperature, humidity, how the buds grew that season, the weather in the days before picking — all of it matters. Imura-san checks by hand, lifting the leaves and reading their scent as it shifts minute by minute, degree by degree.
Watching him work, I caught a glimpse of what 15 years of accumulated intuition looks like — the quiet confidence of someone who knows exactly what his nose is telling him.
The dense, sweet fragrance filling the factory that afternoon was something I have not encountered anywhere else. It belonged to that room, to that batch, to that moment in the oxidation curve.
The aromatic green teas
Two years before our visit, Imura-san had started a new project — aromatic green tea, made from two cultivars: Sayamakaori and Saeakari.
Green tea is technically a non-oxidized tea. The standard process applies heat — steaming or pan-firing — almost immediately after picking, shutting down oxidation before it starts. But if you deliberately allow a brief period of withering before that kill step, a different category of scent emerges. Floral, rounded, with a complexity that conventional sencha does not reach.
Some people call this style "the third sencha" or icho sencha — wilted sencha. The category is so new that it does not have a settled name, few producers attempt it, and no standard method exists.
"The Shizuoka prefectural tea research station started working on aromatic green tea, and we happened to have pretty much the same equipment," Imura-san says, laughing. "So we figured we'd give it a try. That's it. Not a big reason."
With almost no one to learn from, he has been working it out on his own — adjusting withering times, oxidation windows, firing temperatures, one small experiment at a time.
When I tasted the two aromatic green teas, I was not prepared for how complete they already were. Both had a clear wilting fragrance — soft, floral, hovering just above the cup — balanced against a clean bitterness and a sweetness that arrived in the aftertaste and lingered on the tongue. Neither sencha nor oolong. Something in between, with a gentleness that pulled me in.
Two years. He had been making these teas for two years.
Giving unloved cultivars a second life
Standing among the tea rows, looking out over the fields, Imura-san told us something that has stayed with me.
"Sayamakaori — that one's been unpopular for a long time. High yield, sure, but it's astringent, and the tea merchants never liked it much. Lately it's getting a second look, though, because it turns out to be really good for withering and for shaded cultivation."
"Saeakari, the dealers weren't fans either. They don't like the beany quality. As a straight green tea, I don't think it'll ever get much recognition."
Both cultivars are green tea varieties, but both carry baggage. Sayamakaori yields well and is easy to grow, but its astringency and a lingering sharpness on the tongue have kept it out of favor as a sencha. Saeakari has a sweet, grainy aroma — reminiscent of roasted corn or soybeans — that works well on its own but clashes in blends, limiting it to single-origin use.
Imura-san took these two difficult cultivars and found, through withering, a way to reveal what had been hidden inside them all along. The withering process softened Sayamakaori's rough edges and drew out a floral dimension no one expected. It gave Saeakari's beany sweetness a new context — no longer a flaw, but a feature.
Thinking about it afterward, I realized this is close to what we do at Far East Tea Company. We have always been drawn to cultivars that the blending market rejects — varieties with personalities too strong for blending, but fascinating when you meet them on their own terms. We started collecting single-cultivar teas from producers across Japan precisely because we believed those individual voices deserved to be heard.
What Imura-san does is a version of the same instinct, pushed further. He does not just present an unusual cultivar as-is. He applies a technique — withering, partial oxidation — that unlocks a dimension the leaf was always capable of but never had the chance to show.
The world of Japanese tea shifts a little every year. Teas that did not exist a decade ago appear as if from nowhere. Standing on that shizuoka tea farm, watching Imura-san talk about cultivars the way some people talk about misunderstood friends, I felt the edge of that shift.
"It's getting better and better," he said of the aromatic green tea, almost to himself.
I believe him. And I find myself wondering what his leaves will smell like next spring — what new scent will rise from the cup, unnamed and unexpected, the way the best aromas always do.
