Jagasilk Okumidori Okubo by the Takaki Family

This Jagasilk Okumidori Okubo by the Takaki family is currently unlisted at Jagasilk but was that complimentary tin of freshly roasted and ground on site matcha.  It was milled just days before my order!  It’s from the single estate line at Jagasilk from my absolute favourite matcha growing region- Hoshino.  This was a very deliberate and thoughtful gift and I am so thankful.

 I was educated in matcha initially in the traditional teahouses of South Korea where they most definitely overlook Japanese Tradition for price/quality.  Most Teahouses that I frequented much preferred Yame in this regard.  So I suppose I have a bit of taste for such things as well personally traveling to Yame… so I’m a bit bias… 

I have many memories in Jagasilk’s early days at the Jagasilk tea bar of me trying unsuccessfully to convince Jarred and Miyuki to source from Hoshino when they were, like most Western matcha drinkers at the time, awestruck by Uji .

Here we go…

The powder and prepared matcha is an atypical very dark deep green!

Very chalky mouthfeel with berries and slight cut grass and spinach - layers of berries raspberries predominate.  Nice sweet-bitter-chalky balance that features flavour over bitter or sweetness- mainly chalky with flavour. Qi pooling in the back of head and focused eyes.  Nice matcha as everyday wake-up with its moderate focusing energy! I can’t stop drinking this matcha… so good!

Peace

A New Way of Matcha

 There was a pleasant surprise in my last order from Jagasilk! Jarred and Miyuki sent me a gift of their freshest in house roast and grind just weeks before my order…. What a treat. I honestly am not used to drinking in-house ground and roasted matcha.  It looks like Jagasilk has been doing this since 2018. 

Things have come a long way with matcha consumption in the West and I am still of the old school of ceremony and the main brands Hoshino and Marukyu-Koyamaen (of which all grades can be found on this blog).  Besides a few monastery  matcha that’s all I have consumed!  Actually, my very first exposure to this sort of thing was a free sample that was slipped into my last order of Hoshino matcha at Cultivate Tea.  I just consumed it last month blind without reading the sample package which I threw out and I instantly called my wife over to the bowl in disbelief.

There is now so much information available to the drinker these days- cultivar, location, elevation, blend, competition Score, date of grind… and Jagasilk gives the discerning drinker all of it… this is going to be a learning experience.  Jagasilk reviews are coming next…

Peace

MattCha Shortage? Highlights from the Year Past… And Posts to Come?

 Oh Yes…. I’m alive and well…. And STILL drinking great teas!  I hope you are also alive and enjoying life and, of course, tea!

I fell off posting again abruptly as life became busy… very busy… mainly with my many kids and with career as well… tea is a beautiful respite and it’s been a while since I even did an evaluation session… I’m mainly drinking for enjoyment …. And this year I did!

Some of the highlights of the past year was trying the fresh 2025 line ups of both puerh.uk and Tea Encounter… nothing beats a sampling of fresh puerh once a year…. Nothing.  See these last posts for my tastings…

Also I did a pre-order of Xang Ming Tea Factory puerh from TeasWeLike which had great dry storage on them… all those cakes are long gone in my house… ha!  I wrote up evaluations posts on these but never got to editing them … sad.

TWL have just put up a re- order on these and I can highly recommend the 2007 Manlin Gushu… which won the speed test out of those Xang Ming tea cakes at my house.  It’s a priority for me to post these notes…. 

Also Ordered a bunch of nice Malaysian stored cakes from Liquid Proust… another highlight is always picking up some of his Korean Tea that he sources from Lady Hadong and others… he even sent me some free famous Korean herbal tea blends that are common to support immune health and I definitely needed it this year!

So I’ve been drinking good puerh for sure! I’m sure you have also hit the good stuff lately, no?

I also have been drinking some random free samples from Puerh.uk off and on… One of my best sessions in recent memory is a good experience from their 2011/2016 GuaFengZhi Gold … the right tea on the right day at the right time is some sort of beautiful harmony… so good! The last weeks puerh I had was a sample of 2016 Puerh.uk Ethereal… it’s sort of at an in between stage but nice and smooth in the mind with a certain throaty presence. Last few days I’m sipping a 2013 BHYJ Tong Qing He from puerh.uk…. Brilliant cola and root bear depth with a Spacy high.  These are all hitting soooo nicely this month!

Before I feel off evaluation sampling I was sent a box of samples via Alex of Puerh Blog samples… haven’t gotten to them yet …. Eeeeeee… it’s next on the list. Check!

A huge highlight for me this year was randomly running into Jared of Jagasilk on the streets of Victoria, BC last summer! I had a nice long trip to Victoria where I took a weeks supply of Traditional roasted Hong Kong Oolong!  In Victoria I was absorbed in the family vacation energy…. But fate would intertwine me with Jared!  We had a short but good talk, he put the big invite to have us for tea … but it was the last day and we were heading home but I promised to check out what was new at Jagasilk and make my next matcha order Jagasilk…

As twists go, I fell ill a month or so ago with that damn virus that leaves your taste and smell missing and altered…. Dare I say it gave me an aversion to puerh tea ….. NNnnOOoooooo…. It tasted like rotting!

But on the plus side… and this is strange.. it somehow made matcha taste better than ever!  So I have been making myself some top shelf matcha every morning for a good month or two now!  I’m not joking when I say top shelf because I had tins of the highest grades of Hoshino matcha such as the cloud floating Houju (and then imagine that experience amplified). It was glorious indeed…

I so drank through all my top matcha and was left to re-order when I noticed something super strange…. First thing is that it was very difficult to track down my fav brand of matcha Hoshino… Second the price of replacement of Houju was hundreds of dollars more per tin!?!?!?

In my digging I found an explanation on no other that Jagasilks website!  There was indeed a matcha shortage that has been going on since last year and dealing havoc on the price of matcha!  But I also discovered that Jagasilk has evolved quite a bit since their offering of exclusively Harimen estate matcha. This was their whole brand for the first many years (see here and here and here and here!) but now they were doing so much more! The next posts are on Miyuki and Jarred at Jagasilk’s latest offerings.  They were honestly the first people in the North America as far as I knew that we talking about single estate and freshly in-house ground matcha and 30 years later they are still doing it…. Amazing.

Anyways, my taste for puerh did in-fact return but not before really loving and falling into a daily morning matcha ceremony.  Only a few times a week have I been afternoon steeping puerh at work.  I have been appreciating it more because you never know how good you have it until it’s gone!

I’m back! 

Peace