Spring vs Autumn Harvest: A Year in a Tea Field

A Japanese tea field doesn't get picked once a year — it gets picked several times, and each picking is called a flush. Spring's first flush is the most famous: new growth pushed out after winter dormancy, prized for sencha and gyokuro because the leaf has spent months accumulating amino acids with nothing to spend them on. But it isn't the only harvest that matters, and for matcha specifically, it isn't even the one that matters most. Matcha's character comes from how the leaf is shaded, steamed, and stone-milled — a process applied to whichever flush a farm chooses to dedicate to it, spring or otherwise.

How many harvests does a Japanese tea field get in a year?

It depends on where the field sits. A cooler, northern prefecture might get two flushes a year — one in spring, one in early summer — before the plant needs the rest of the season to rebuild. A warm southern region like Kagoshima, where the growing season starts weeks earlier and runs weeks longer, can support three or sometimes four: a spring first flush, a second flush roughly six to eight weeks later, a third in mid-to-late summer, and in some fields a smaller autumn picking before the bushes go dormant again.

Each flush is genuinely new growth, not a continuation of the last one. After a harvest, the bush is left to recover and push new shoots, and that recovery period — along with the accumulated weather of the weeks before picking — is what gives each flush its own character, even on the exact same plants.

What makes spring's first flush different from the rest?

Timing and dormancy. Through winter, the tea plant isn't growing, but its roots keep working, and the plant stores up nitrogen-based compounds — amino acids like L-theanine among them — that would otherwise be spent on new growth. When spring finally triggers that growth, the first flush draws on months of stored reserve all at once, which is why it tends to taste rounder and less astringent than leaf picked later in the year, when the plant is drawing on whatever it's built up more recently rather than an entire winter's backlog.

That's exactly why first flush is so prized for sencha and gyokuro, where a soft, savory, low-bitterness cup is the goal. It's also why first-flush leaf is scarcer and more contested than any other picking of the year — every producer wants some of it, and there's only a few weeks' worth to go around.

Why does the harvest that comes after spring matter too?

Because the plant is still building leaf, just under different conditions. By the time a second flush is ready, the days are longer and warmer, and the new growth comes in faster than it did after winter's slow buildup. What it loses in the deep amino-acid reserve of a true first flush, it can make up in a brighter, more vivid chlorophyll development — useful for a category where color and texture, not just sweetness, are part of the finished product. The volcanic soil of Kagoshima plays into this too: fast-draining, mineral ground changes how a bush responds to each flush's weather, not just to the season as a whole.

Later summer and early autumn pickings tend to produce a heartier, more robust leaf — still usable, though less commonly reserved for the most delicate grades of anything. Most premium matcha production in Japan draws from the first three flushes of the year rather than the last.

Does matcha have to come from the first flush?

No — and this is where matcha genuinely differs from sencha. Matcha's identity comes from the tencha process: roughly twenty days shaded before picking, steamed within hours of harvest, dried flat without rolling, deveined, and stone-milled to a fine powder. What tencha is covers that process in full. Because shading and processing do so much of the work, a well-shaded second-flush leaf, correctly steamed and milled, can produce excellent matcha — the vivid green, the fine grind, the way it suspends in water — without needing to be the single earliest leaf of the year.

This is different from sencha or gyokuro, where the leaf is simply dried and steeped, and where the plant's natural amino-acid content at picking time carries much more of the finished flavor directly. Matcha has an extra layer of processing standing between the field and the bowl, and that layer changes what "best" harvest even means.

Why did we choose second harvest for our matcha?

Because it fit what matcha actually needs. Our matcha comes from a single farm in the Kirishima highlands, and we ground its second-flush leaf — grown through the same shading and stone-milling process as any premium tencha, just picked several weeks after the very first flush of the year. We didn't choose it as a workaround; we chose it because matcha's defining qualities come from the process, not from being the earliest leaf off the bush, and second flush gave us leaf with the vivid chlorophyll and clean grind we wanted without pulling from the same narrow first-flush window that sencha and gyokuro producers depend on most.

It also means we're not competing with our own farm's highest-demand harvest. First flush on a small farm is finite, and a lot of hands want it. Building around second flush let us commit to one farm, one clear harvest window, and a process we could actually stand behind on every tin — rather than chasing whatever first-flush leaf happened to be available in a given year.

What this means for the tin in front of you

The season on the label matters less than most marketing implies. What matters is whether the leaf was shaded properly, processed quickly after picking, and milled finely and recently — the same three variables regardless of which flush it came from. A dated, single-farm second-flush matcha, done right, isn't a compromise version of a first-flush one. It's simply a different, equally legitimate answer to the same question: how do you get a leaf that shades, steams, and mills into something worth whisking.

Every tin we sell carries its harvest date and lot number, so you know exactly where it sits on its own calendar rather than guessing from a season printed on the front.

Reserve a tin and taste the difference the process makes, not just the season.