What is Yabukita?

Yabukita tea was developed by the tea breeder from Shizuoka, Hikosaburo Sugiyama. Yabukita was tested at the Shizuoka prefecture tea industrial laboratory in 1954, and officially registered as tea agriculture clop No.6. In 1956. After 2 years of register, Yabukita was selected as recommendatory breed of Shizuoka prefecture. The name "Yabukita" derived from when tea was tested for cultivation, he had chosen the area where surrounded by bamboo bush (Yabu) for the cultivation, and after the cultivation, he selected one located at the north (Kita) and named as Yabukita. Until the 60th, the switching from the orthodox tea cultivation to breed tea cultivation was very slow. However, from late 70th switching from the traditional tea cultivation to breed tea cultivation became rapid. In 1774, when breed tea cultivation reached to 23% of total tea cultivation in Japan, 88% farms were already using Yabukita. In 1999, when 95.6% of tea farms were using breed cultivation, 93.9% of them were Yabukita. Yabukita breed can adopt different kind of climates or soils and yet produce fine tea. Therefore, the fairly high profit can be expected from the stable production of high quality tea. That is why Yabukita became so popular. One thing needs to be careful with Yabukita tea is that Yabukita tend to loose its quality when leaves pass the adequate harvest time. Therefore, it is very important to harvest them at the right time. Therefore, at the large scale estate with flat farm should use other breeds tea for some part of their farms as well to avoid the difficult situation that force them to harvest and send large amount of tea at once.