Okumidori Cultivar: The Deep-Green Tea Behind Matcha and Tencha Blends

What Okumidori is

Okumidori (奥みどり) is a cultivar of the tea plant bred in Japan by crossing Yabukita — the country's most widely planted tea cultivar — with a Shizuoka native selection recorded as Shizuoka Zairai No. 16 (静岡在来16号). The cross was carried out at the tea research station in Kanaya, Shizuoka, and the resulting plant was registered in 1974 (Showa 49) under the official name Chanorin 32 (茶農林32号), with the working line name F1NN29 used before registration.

On the bush: a late, deep-green picker

Okumidori is a late-maturing cultivar. Compared with Yabukita in the same district, its buds break about 11 days later, and it is picked about eight days later. That gap is the agronomic point of the cultivar: farms plant Okumidori alongside Yabukita specifically to spread the harvest window and the labor it demands, rather than having every field ready on the same days.

The leaf and the finished tea are both notable for color — a markedly deep, saturated green — paired with a clean aroma and a mild, low-bitterness taste. Several producer pages describe it as having little distinctively "peculiar" flavor character of its own, which is precisely why it turns up so often as a blending tea rather than always being sold as a single-cultivar lot.

Where it's grown

Okumidori's core production is centered in Kagoshima and Kyoto, two of Japan's largest tea-producing prefectures. Its cold-hardiness has also let growers plant it well beyond its origin in Shizuoka: regional surveys list cultivation in Shizuoka, Kyoto, Mie, Aichi, Fukuoka, Saga, Miyazaki and Kagoshima.

It is not, however, one of the small group of cultivars native to Uji. Kyoto Prefecture's own tea research institute lists Samidori, Asahi and Uji-hikari as the region's home-bred tencha varieties — Okumidori appears in Uji-area fields as an introduced cultivar, not an indigenous one.

What it's used for

Okumidori is registered and marketed as a multi-purpose cultivar: sencha, kabusecha (short-shaded tea), gyokuro and tencha — the shade-grown, unrolled leaf that is stone-ground into matcha — are all made from it.

Its role in tencha and matcha production leans on that same deep-green trait: producers going into the shading and grinding process value a cultivar that is intrinsically dark-leafed to begin with, and several matcha vendors describe using Okumidori specifically to lift the color of a blend. Multiple vendors also count Okumidori among the cultivars — alongside others such as Samidori, Asahi and Gokou — that go into house blends aimed at traditional whisked (usucha) matcha, on the strength of its low bitterness and rounding effect on sharper cultivars. That kind of cultivar blend is each maker's own recipe, not a regulated category — for what a grade word like "ceremonial" does and doesn't guarantee on a label, see our explainer on what "ceremonial grade" matcha actually means.

Because Okumidori doesn't carry one loud, identifying flavor note, it's common to see it folded into blends rather than sold as single-origin — though single-cultivar Okumidori matcha and sencha are also widely available from Kagoshima and Kyoto producers.

Okumidori next to Yabukita

Because Okumidori was bred directly from Yabukita, the two are easiest to place side by side: Yabukita is the mid-season, all-purpose standard that anchors most of Japan's tea acreage, while Okumidori is the deliberately later-picked, deeper-green sibling bred to work alongside it rather than replace it. If you're comparing the two on a shelf or a label, our Yabukita cultivar guide covers the baseline plant Okumidori was bred from and is still measured against.

Reading it on a label

A bag or tin that names "Okumidori" as a single cultivar is telling you the tea came from one registered tea plant, picked in its own harvest window — a specific, checkable fact, unlike a marketing grade term. If a product instead says only "Uji matcha" or "Nishio matcha" with no cultivar named, it may well contain Okumidori as one component of an unlisted blend; the cultivar name only shows up on the label when a maker chooses to sell it as a single-origin lot.