The other day I was at Uwajimaya buying ingredients for homemade kimchi, about which more later. Near the chef demo counter, they had a big display of shincha tea.

This struck me as odd, because shincha is first-harvest tea, lauded for its fresh, clean flavor (and priced to match). The first harvest for tea is in the spring. And this shincha was only $8. Was Uwajimaya trying to snooker people with leftover spring tea markdowns?

No such subterfuge. This tea was from a place where it’s spring now: Brazil. It’s made by Yamamotoyama, a large Japanese tea brand, grown on their Brazilian plantation. Here’s the package:

The tea looks and smells like deep-steamed sencha. And I’d love it if the punchline of the story was that it was just as good as the shincha I paid $25 for last spring. Unfortunately, it’s pretty mediocre. I’m not sure if this is because it’s from Brazil or because all of Yamamotoyama’s cheap tea is mediocre.

Anyway, interesting experiment, and presumably we’ll all be drinking Brazilian tea from a box next year.