Ever since I was a kid, my Uncle Derrick has been telling me stories about Japan. He would travel there from his home in London for business about once a month. He would tell stories of the food, the people, and being a Brit, the tea.

Ever since then I have had this infatuation with Japanese Green Tea. Why do the Japanese love tea so much, what is with the rituals, and why do Japanese ONLY drink green tea from their country? So when I started my tea journey as the owner of Golden Moon years ago, I started to search for the big boy on the block - Sencha.

I called all my contacts and asked for their best crops of Sencha, the most famous tea of Japan. I must have tried about 30 different Sencha's, finding one I liked and deciding it was the best of the best.

But I was wrong

A few months after I chose what I thought was the perfect Sencha, a little silver packet came in the mail. I had a friend who was traveling in Japan at the time and sent me a vacuum sealed package of a tea he had found while touring farms in Japan.

This tea was leaps and bounds better than anything I had tasted before. It made my Sencha feel, um, inadequate to say the least. It was so much better than my selection of Sencha I actually became quite depressed. I had to find out how I could get my hands on this tea. But the problem was the package had no label on it and my friend (not speaking Japanese) couldn't remember what farms he had visited.

The very next day I starting scouring for tea farmers and specialists that actually lived in Japan. After months of searching I found two specialists (Den and Sarah) where i could order directly from Japanese tea farms. I greedily awaited my next samples, because these people really knew their stuff.

As I finally received a bunch of samples from Sarah and Den, I couldn't have open them quicker. A quick 1 minute steep and I was ready to be blown away.

But I wasn't. Don't get me wrong, this tea was good, but once I tasted a mind blowing version of Sencha there was no going back. This was even worse than before, because I actually know what real Sencha was supposed to taste like. After I talked to my specialists, I think they felt bad for me because they both had asked what was wrong. When I told them that this tea didn't cut it, Den had actually started to laugh. Now I wasn't sure if this was a difference in culture or not.

It turns out is wasn't. Apparently Den has a special selection of his tea that he reserved for the Japanese only. Den had assumed that since I was American/Chinese that I would not be able to tell the difference. Well, he assumed wrong.

After tasting Den's special, Japanese only tea, I had finally found what I was looking for. It was sweet, fresh and danced on my tongue like no other Sencha I had ever tasted. And to add icing to the cake, there were multiple farms that produced this quality of tea, they are just off limits to most American's.

So I have to say that I am proud to provide you with the best every day drinking Sencha found in the US, and maybe even Japan. Once you taste this Sencha, I guarantee that all others will pale in comparison.