Green Tea

Japanese green teas are defined by one decisive step: steam. Within hours of picking, the leaves are steamed rather than pan-fired, locking in a vivid emerald color and a flavor found nowhere else in tea — fresh-cut grass, spring vegetables, and the deep savory note the Japanese call umami. It's a craft refined over centuries, and this shelf carries its range: sencha, Japan's beloved everyday cup; genmaicha, mellowed with toasty roasted rice; and kukicha, the light, naturally sweet brew of tender stems. If Chinese greens are a warm afternoon, Japanese greens are the first bright morning of spring — brisk, vivid, and bracingly alive.

The craft behind Chinese green tea begins with fire — specifically, the wok. Within hours of harvest, fresh leaves meet hot metal in a step tea makers call shaqing, 'killing the green': the pan-firing that halts oxidation to lock in freshness while coaxing out the warm, nutty, chestnut-sweet character that defines the Chinese style. Mastering it takes deep knowledge of how leaf and heat behave together — every day's picking differs in moisture and tenderness, so the tea master adjusts temperature, timing, and pressure by feel, often judging the wok's heat with a bare palm. Each famous style then takes its own shape. Dragon Well is pressed flat against the wok into smooth jade blades through ten traditional hand movements; gunpowder is rolled into tight little pearls that unfurl dramatically in the cup; mao feng is gently curled to protect its downy tips. The finished leaf wears its making in its form — you can read the craftsman's hand before you ever add water — and that care carries from mountain garden to cup: toasty, mellow, and quietly sweet. The warm afternoon to Japan's bright spring morning.

Experience the most fragrant tradition in green tea: jasmine scenting, an art perfected in China's Fujian province over centuries. It begins with a paradox — the tea is spring-picked and set aside, while the jasmine waits for late summer, when the blossoms are at their most perfumed. And unlike almost everything else in tea, the crucial work happens after dark: jasmine flowers open only at night, so each evening fresh blossoms are layered with the waiting leaves, breathing their perfume into the tea until morning, when the spent flowers are lifted away. Each batch of our jasmine tea repeats that patient ritual — the finest grades are scented five nights or more with fresh blossoms each time, until the leaf itself carries the flower's soul and needs no petals left in the tin to prove it. The best-loved form rolls those scented leaves into little pearls that unfurl as they steep, releasing perfume in slow motion. Whether you're a devoted green tea drinker or simply chasing the most beautiful scent in the shop, jasmine tea offers a taste of one of China's most romantic tea traditions.

Experience Dragon Well — Longjing — the most celebrated name in Chinese green tea, cultivated on the misty hillsides ringing West Lake in Hangzhou, a landscape so beloved that Chinese poets spent a thousand years running out of words for it. The tea takes its name from a real place: an ancient well in Longjing village, where legend held that a dragon dwelt in the depths — and where, after rain, the mingling waters still swirl at the surface as if something stirred below. Distinguished by its flat, smooth, sword-shaped leaves — pressed by hand against the hot wok until they gleam like little jade blades — this is the tea by which all other Chinese greens are measured. Our Dragon Well is picked in the first days of spring, one tender bud and leaf at a time, when the earliest lots are dated and prized like vintages. What awaits in the glass is what tradition calls the tea's four wonders: emerald color, an orchid-fresh fragrance, a beautiful leaf, and above all that signature taste — toasty roasted chestnut melting into a soft, sweet finish that lingers long after the cup is empty. One sip explains a millennium of devotion.