You might never heard about this, but there is first-grade tea, and second-grade tea, as well.

First-grade tea is famous as "Shincha".You might have heard about this.

But today,let's talk about second-grade tea.

In the first place, why do we call it as second-grade tea? The second-grade tea is made by the growing shoot after picking first shoot.We call the second harvest(tea picking)the second-grade tea. Ingredient of tea is leaves from tea trees.So we repeat this process."Picking tea leaves→Shoots come out" Possibly we pick the first-grade tea, second-grade tea, third-grade tea, fourth-grade tea, and fifth-grade tea. But I wonder if we pick five times.We might give a break for tea trees by skipping tea picking.

By the way, second-grade tea is not"Bancha". Both of first-grade tea and second-grade tea have"Bancha".I will save this topic until next opportunity.

Compared to the second-grade tea(Upper photograph)with the first-grade tea(Lower photograph), the former tea has deeper green in color. First-grade tea has yellow-tinged green, while second-grade tea has blue-tinged green.

Shoot of second-grade tea is stronger than first-grade tea. We finished picking second-grade tea so far, and we cut off all leaves. Our work right now is weeding by machine.