Minekaori

Almost every cultivar in this collection is a sencha cultivar, or a sencha cultivar that turned out to shade well. Minekaori is neither. MAFF’s registry lists its 用途 as 釜炒り茶 — kamairicha, the pan-fired style made in the mountain districts of inland Kyushu rather than the steamed style made everywhere else in Japan — and the reports on it say plainly that it makes a poor sencha. It is a cultivar bred for one processing tradition and not really usable outside it.

Lineage

• Yabukita ♀ (やぶきた).
• Unkai ♂ (うんかい) — itself Takachiho × Miya-F1 9-4-48, bred at the same Miyazaki station.

Both parents have records here, and Unkai’s own parents are on its record, so the pollen side runs three generations deep inside one prefectural programme: Takachiho into Unkai into Minekaori. The seed side is Yabukita, as it is for so much of this collection.

History

Crossed in 1966 and first selected in 1968, the line carried the trial designation Mi74-41 and then 宮崎3号 through the adaptability trials of the 1970s. MAFF registered it as 茶農林38号 in 1988, with a Plant Variety Protection Act registration, No. 2157, following in 1990.

Its documentation is thin compared with the nationally bred cultivars around it. NARO’s tea cultivar handbook covers cultivars bred with national funding and Minekaori is a prefectural release, so it has no entry there — which is why the characteristics below come from a secondary compilation rather than the breeder’s own publication.

Characteristics

Plucking runs about two days after Yabukita, so mid-season. Yield is reported sixteen to eighteen per cent above Yabukita across several Kyushu prefectures — a solid rather than dramatic improvement, and in a cultivar this specialised the yield is not the argument for it.

Cold tolerance is where it improves on Yabukita specifically: stronger against dry-cold blue scorch and against split-bark frost injury, both of which matter on the high ground it was bred for. Red scorch, general cold damage, root rot, ring spot and mochi disease are all rated medium.

It is planted almost entirely in the Gokase and Takachiho districts of Miyazaki and in the neighbouring mountain country of Kumamoto and Oita — the kamairicha heartland, and effectively the whole of its range.