Blends or Single Cultivars

The products we offer—YABUKITA, OKUMIDORI, and SAMIDORI—
are all tea cultivar names.
As their names suggest, these items are produced using a single cultivar.

On the other hand, many matcha products sold by tea shops are made by blending several cultivars.
This blending process is known as “gogumi.”

The purposes of gogumi include:

  • Enhancing or complementing the characteristics of each tea to improve overall quality.

  • Stabilizing quality, as teas from the same field can vary from year to year.

  • Securing sufficient volume and ensuring consistency by using tea leaves from multiple sources.

In short, the main goal of blending is to improve and stabilize the product’s quality,
ensuring that there are no major differences from year to year or batch to batch.

So, what makes single-cultivar matcha appealing?

A few points stand out:

  • It allows you to enjoy the unique personality of the cultivar—something blends often smooth out.

  • It makes selection easier, as customers can choose based on the image or character of each cultivar.

Each cultivar has its own individuality, and naturally, some are well suited for matcha while others are not.
However, for tea farmers, it is not realistic to cultivate only high-end cultivars.

Cultivar characteristics include not only internal qualities such as flavor and chemistry,
but also agronomic traits such as sprouting time, optimal harvest period, and resistance to pests and diseases.
If a farm were planted entirely with a single cultivar, harvest timing would overlap,
and a pest or disease outbreak could potentially wipe out the entire crop—
a very real agricultural risk.

This is why farmers carefully nurture cultivars that may not be considered “premium” as well.
And because of that, we wanted every cultivar to have the chance to shine,
which is why we decided to begin our journey with single-cultivar matcha.

Even with single-cultivar products, we perform blending within the same cultivar to achieve balance.
Otherwise, there would be little meaning in working together as farmer and tea merchant.

We also expect to introduce blended (gogumi) matcha products in the near future.

Rather than deciding whether blends or single cultivars are “better,”
we hope our customers will enjoy discovering the unique pleasures that each approach offers.

GARI