As you may know, we recently received our 2025 harvest within the last month. This is a typical pattern for us: we offer the largest selection of teas around June and July, but options dwindle as the year progresses. This is because, in Japan, the only harvest that truly matters for high-quality matcha is the first Spring harvest. But why is this the case? Let's take a look at what makes Springtime so special in the world of tea!
What's special about Spring?
The tea plant is an evergreen shrub, so technically it could be harvested throughout the year. And indeed, in warmer climates, it often is. There are some very pleasant Summer, Fall and Winter harvests in the more subtropical tea-growing regions, like Southern China.
Japan, however, is not one of these regions. With cooler weather, the tea plants may keep their leaves year round, but they do not vegetate as vigorously as those grown in warmer climates, meaning they take longer to regenerate between harvests. While Summer harvests do happen in Japan, these are almost always regarded as being inferior in quality, and the truth is, as much as I like to see how much the status quo can be challenged, I haven't yet found a Summer harvested matcha that comes anywhere close to the quality of the Spring harvests.
The general consensus across all tea-growing cultures remains that Spring is the best because, even though tea is evergreen, its growth slows dramatically in Winter, and the plant enters a sort of dormant state. During this time, the plant stores the molecules it needs to keep itself nourished throughout the Winter, accumulating nutrients within itself that are at their maximum concentration by Spring. When new growth starts back up again with warmer weather and longer days, these nutrients are directed into the young leaves.
This is not just a folk tradition, as research has confirmed that the Spring harvest is quite a lot different than later harvests. In general, the Spring harvest just has more. More caffeine, more amino acids, more catechins, more aromatic molecules.
There's also a complex drama unfolding as the leaves mature. This has a parallel in the world of wine. For grapes, you need them to accumulate enough sugar to ferment into alcohol. This sugar accumulation happens over time as the grapes are exposed to sun and heat. The hotter the climate, the faster sugar accumulates. At the same time, you want the grapes on the vine long enough to develop "phenolic complexity." The longer you can go without harvesting the grapes, the more flavor and aroma molecules they accumulate. This leads to some tough decisions; you want the grapes to ripen (have enough sugar) around the same time they are at their most complex, but these events do not always line up, especially in increasingly warm climates where the grapes are ripe well before they are complex. And you can't just leave the ripe grapes on until they're complex enough - the sugar levels become too high and drive down the acidity level of the grapes, which negatively affects the flavor. (You can maybe tell I'm nerdy about grapes as well as tea).
Anyways, a similar sort of dual "ripening" process happens with tea leaves. On the one hand, you want to pick the tea leaves when they are young. If the tea leaves are young, they are tender and more pliable, with higher concentrations of key compounds like caffeine and L-Theanine. But in the world of matcha, you can't just pick the tea leaves at their youngest state. You need time to let the shading process work its magic - to make the leaves dark green, brittle, and extra savory. Farmers in Japan are very hands-on in the Spring, amending the soil in addition to shading the tea plants, because they want to use these means to manipulate the tea while the leaves are still young.
So, basically, farmers need a way of getting the tea leaves to have the flavors they desire before they have matured so much that they lose out on critical aspects of their freshness. If the leaf were to become too mature, not only would it lose complexity, but it would be thicker and difficult (or impossible) to mill into a fine powder such as matcha. The main way you balance things, therefore, is to focus all of your attention on the Spring harvest, before the weather gets too warm and the leaves mature too quickly. The cool, wet weather of Spring lengthens the window of time farmers have to work with in order to manipulate the tea before it needs to be harvested.
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Anyways, that's the advantage of Spring harvesting in a nutshell. It also sheds light on why cooler, foggier climates tend to make more prized tea - which is something I'm sure I'll touch on again in more detail. For now it's time to go enjoy some fresh Spring tea!
Thanks for reading and happy sipping,
Simon