Cultivation

The first Shincha of the year reaches Japanese markets in late March, picked in Kagoshima while tea farms in Shizuoka...

Most Japanese teas are grown with pesticides. That is not a secret — it is written into the regulatory framework that...

Nitrogen makes tea taste like tea. More precisely: the amino acid theanine — the compound behind the savory, umami-fo...

Weeks before the spring harvest, workers drape long sheets of cloth across the tea field. Sunlight dims. The leaves d...

Organic tea certification in Japan is stricter than the label suggests. The word "organic" gets used loosely in tea m...