Many of us are happy Matcha drinkers. But does everyone know how it comes about? Tencha holds the secret. What exactly is Tencha, you may ask. To put it simply, Tencha is the processed tea leaves, intended to become the precious green powder – Matcha. This meaning can be seen directly in the Japanese characters […]
Red Tea from Japan: that is the exact translation of Wakoucha. But we in Europe call it a black tea, and for us black tea comes from India or China or Sri Lanka, not from Japan. And in a nation where the production of green tea is so dominant that for the biggest part of […]
The world of Japanese tea is wide and deep. By now many people know Matcha, Gyokuro, Sencha. Some other teas may not have been in the spotlight but they are also worth some attention. One of them is Kukicha, or stem tea, if translated literary form Japanese. What that means is that Kukicha mostly includes […]
Spring is when some of the most prized Japanese teas are made. Called ‘jade dew’, Gyokuro is one of the highest-grade teas of this season. Rich an umami unlike any other tea, Gyokuro is appreciated in Japan and around the world. But how did it come to be and how is it produced? The story […]
March is the month when winter sets off and tea plants are pruned to be prepared for the incoming spring. The big leaves that came all this way through winter, are the very last leaves of the year. Because very coarse, in some regions are just cut off and used as fertiliser. Nevertheless, in some places […]
In 1874, Japanese authorities invited two Chinese tea experts to teach black tea processing techniques to Japanese farmers. The produced teas were considered a bit of a failure and it was decided that more detailed knowledge was necessary to produce a black tea that would convince the export market. So in 1875, the government sends […]
It comes as no surprise to many that when you leaf through books on Japanese tea, you more often than not encounter only mention of green teas: sencha, matcha, bancha, gyokuro, etc. We mostly associate Japan with green teas. What is not such common knowledge, is that Japan actually has quite a chunk of black […]