Excursion: TranquiliTea’s 4th Annual Harney Affair & Kagoshima

This morning I was tickled and honored to sample a tea that TranquiliTea brought into the store by my request. TranquiliTea sent out an email to its newsletter members a few weeks ago asking for recommendations to sample for the 4th Annual Harney Affair. The owner didn’t exactly specify an upper cost limit though, and i named a few super rare Chinese and Japanese teas I found on Harney’s site. Although I’m sure the owner knows her clientele well, she nevertheless purchased enough of one of the teas I suggested to sample at today’s event. For this she totally rocks.

Kagoshima is a sencha of particularly high caliber from the eponymous Kyushu city. Kagoshima is certainly a refined tea, but not overly so–it still has plenty of Japanese-countryside spunk (for rating teas that stand out, I decided the opposite of refinement is “sprunk”). Kagoshima is high antioxidant, with a goodly amount of handpicked sencha aroma. As with many good sencha, Kagoshima has less what you’d call flavor and more of what you’d call texture: in this case a delightful powdery grit. I would also classify Kagoshima as being a highly caffeinated tea, but that’s fairly par for the course of most any rare sencha. Experientially, I’m rating Kagoshima a 90% satisfaction, marked down only because I wasn’t able to see or smell the raw tea.