What's in a name - Chado Tea House Newsletter August 2024

Perhaps a Tea Eureka Moment!

The weather in Vancouver is autumnal. Meanwhile, a large typhoon, Typhoon Shanshan, is moving through Japan. We hope everybody and everything comes through it OK.

It's easy to say, but we really wish “we had thought of that”.

We wish we had thought of a lot of things. If only we had figured out how to design silicon chips with billions of microscopic components that could ‘do’ artificial intelligence, we would be laughing all the way to the bank. The chances of us coming up with that are a bit of a long shot, though as we do not know anything about any of that.

We know a bit about tea, though, and the effects of the sun while growing it.

As you probably know, teas like Matcha and Gyokuro are shaded from direct sun for a period before harvesting.

In days gone by, most of the shading was done by raised trestles covered by straw. Nowadays, a lot of shading is done using synthetic materials. Like everything else in tea, both methods have proponents and detractors.

Now, some bright spark has come up with something new, and we can’t help but think that we not only could have thought of it, but we should have thought of it. The new idea is to shade the tea plants using solar panels and use the energy from the panels to provide power to the farm.

The panels can be positioned so they do not provide shade during the initial growing months and are only tilted to provide shade when required.

Like most great ideas, this is a simple one. We will continue to follow the trials and see how they work in practice.

Solar Panels used for Power and Shading

What is in a Name?

We get asked occasionally where the teas we sell get their names.

The tea type – sencha, Gyokuro, etc.- is determined by what tea is grown and how it is processed after harvesting.

Sometimes, a farmer starts a growing season intending to produce a fine Sencha tea grown in the full sun. Then, after the tea is grown and harvested, the farmer may decide to process it with an added step of roasting—this would then be a Hojicha tea.

The farmer and/or producer, being the ones closest to the tea in the ground, are the ones who name the individual brand of the type of tea. We respect this tradition and believe that the source of the tea is the best place for its name to originate, as it reflects the essence of what they have produced.

Here are a few teas with names that appropriately describe how the names come about.

 Saemidori Cultivar

The name comes from the cultivar used to produce it. A cultivar is a particular strain or type of tea plant; it may be easier to think of a cultivar as it relates to apples. The Granny Smith apple is a cultivar of the apple plant, and the Fuji apple is also a cultivar. The Granny Smith was developed in Australia in 1868, whereas the Fuji apple was created in Japan in the 1930s from two American apple varieties, Red Delicious and old Virginia Ralls Genet. It is named after the town it came from, Fujisaki.

 'Wealthy' Sencha

SenRyo is loosely based on an old unit of currency. The Ryo was the currency used in ancient Japan, and SenRyo is a thousand Ryo. If you mistakenly took the name Senryo Sencha as an indication of the plant the tea came from, you would get confused quickly—the Senryo plant is a shrub in Japan with bright red berries, and the Japanese do not make tea out of it. In this case, the name has nothing to do with the plant and all to do with the farmers' perceived value and quality of the tea.

Unsorted Sencha.

With this tea, the farmer indicates that it is an unsorted tea—Aratsukuri. The tea is made by utilizing the stems, leaves and buds that are collected when the tea is harvested, an unsorted mixture.

'Very Wealthy' Sencha.

When the farmer produced a similar tea that he thought was better than his SenRyo, he decided to call it ManRyo. This one literally means ten thousand Ryo, so he is indicating that if you liked SenRyo, you would like this one even more.

 Seven-Eleven's Everywhere.