What the M Standard is

Look at the whole

Appraisal starts before any water is involved. The first pass is the whole pile: color, luster, shape, and the quality of the stems. Do the stems look hard, or soft? From this alone, a rough grade.

Three sencha, side by side. At actual selling prices as of July 2026, these three sit at around 300 yen, 500 to 600 yen, and 1,000 yen per 100 grams, from left to right.

You can read much of that difference right here.

Color: from a dull, yellowish olive on the left, toward a deep dark green on the right. Depth of color tracks the youth of the leaf. And there is a reason the cheap pile turns yellow. A mature leaf is hard, so it needs longer heat, usually longer steaming, before it can be processed. That extra heat is what yellows it. A young, soft leaf needs less, and keeps its deep green. Fukamushi sencha is steamed long too, but by choice and with young leaf. Design, not necessity.

Luster: good leaf carries a quiet shine across the pile. A dull, matte surface usually means older material or rougher handling.

Shape: lower grades come out flat and broken. Higher grades roll into fine, tight needles. The reason is the hardness of the leaf. Think of cardboard and copy paper. Rolling cardboard into a tight curl is nearly impossible; it creases and snaps. Copy paper curls easily. A young, soft leaf from a plant grown for quality over yield rolls thin in the same way.

Stems: the same logic. A hard stem is thick, pale, almost woody, like a tiny twig. It means the harvest cut into mature growth. A soft stem is slender and green through and through, picked young along with young leaf.

Uniformity: as a rule, the more even the leaf, the higher the quality tends to be. And at the very top, beautifully even leaf is the signature of a careful farmer. It means the buds were harvested at the same stage of growth, and the machines were adjusted again and again through the day.

One caution about fine particles. Fine particles are not automatically a defect. Some teas, like fukamushi sencha, are designed to be fine, and that fineness carries their character. What matters is whether the fineness comes from design or from damage.

Now, one honest note. The tea on the left is not ours. mirume does not carry that grade; we sourced it elsewhere, as a reference point for this page. Measured at farm-direct prices, meaning the price a tea farm charges when it sells its own tea to you, nothing below the 500 to 600 yen class per 100 grams enters our shelf. That is the gate, working.

Then look at this.

Two teas from the upper range: 2,000 yen on the left, 3,000 to 3,500 yen on the right, per 100 grams, at actual selling prices as of July 2026. At this level the reading gets harder, but color still speaks first. Look for the deeper green and the stronger luster. That is the right pile, and it is the higher grade.

Focus

Then the eye narrows.

To be clear, these trays were staged for this page. In real appraisal, nothing is picked out. What these photos show is where the appraiser's eyes go: from the whole pile down to single leaves inside it. The exact shade. The luster. Whether the leaf is rolled thin and tight. The stems again, hard or soft.

And it is not only the eyes. Through this whole stage we handle the leaf and smell the dry leaf, reading with the fingers and the nose at the same time.

Hot water hides nothing

Next, hot water, poured straight onto the leaf.

When you drink, you brew to let the tea show its best face. When you judge, you brew so the tea cannot hide anything. Boiling water opens the leaf completely and extracts everything at once, flaws included.

We smell first. The stale note of poorly aged leaf, called hine-ka. A faint machine-oil smell. Any negative aroma ends the story here. Depending on the tea, we taste at this stage too.

Then the opened leaf itself. In lower grades it is a mixed crowd: large mature pieces, broken fragments, stems, each extracting differently. In upper grades the opened leaves match each other. Same size, same youth, picked together. And youth becomes unmistakable here. Young leaf opens small, soft, vividly green, and whole. Mature leaf opens large, fibrous, coarse at the edges, and duller. Rolling can disguise this in the dry leaf. Opened, it cannot.

One note on the photographs: for the camera, we brewed longer than actual appraisal calls for, to open the leaf fully and make these differences visible.

The final judge is taste

Last, we brew at the proper temperature for the tea, and judge the taste itself.

Umami that is strong and clear. Astringency and bitterness that stay gentle. Sweetness that lasts after the sip. With teas past the fresh season, we also check the length of the finish that careful maturation brings.

Two of these signals need no tasting vocabulary at all. Notice when the taste stops: a cheap sencha ends when you swallow, a good one keeps going, a sweetness that sits in the back of the mouth and slowly fades. And count the infusions: lower grades give everything in one or two brews, upper grades keep producing a third and more.

A tea that passes every step is a tea we carry.

Green tea is the tea of taste. Not aroma. Taste. Aroma is where the defects show themselves. Taste is where the quality lives.

That is the M Standard. Every tea in our shop has passed it.