Masui Etsuro, the pioneer. Wakoucha Tasting tea N°15: Kawane Koshun, 1st flush, 2017, Thés du Japon.

Masui Etsuro is one of the pioneers of black tea in Japan. He was born and raised in Kawane in Shizuoka but his desire to see the world and work in a developing country brought him to Senegal, where he worked for many years. After some time in the USA he returned to his native land in Kawane, in the Haibara district. Kawane is a town in the hills of Shizuoka, at 500 to 600m above sea level, famous for its green tea. In 1984 he planted the Koshun cultivar in a corner of the garden that was too cold for Yabukita.

Very quickly he started to experiment with black tea. He was one of the first in Japan and felt pretty lonely in the beginning, with only a tea processing manual to help him. He was lucky to have a customer who was supporting him and after five years he started more or less to know what he was doing. About the same time the Koshun he planted when he came back in 1984 were ready. When in 1988 prices of green tea started to drop his black tea started to make more sense. Before his own mother complained about the waste of good tea leaves on bad tea... From 2000 some other farmers started to follow and the first Wakoucha festival was organised in Tottori. Today mr Etsuro is one of the true pioneers of Wakoucha, and he makes some very good ones !

You can find a great video about this farmer here (https://youtu.be/QpTwBWTznto) and see his teagarden and part of his production process, even if the video is in Japanese. He never uses pesticides, and you can see it in part of the video.

Copyright: https://gurusuguri.com/shop/masuisanchi/masui03/

Kawane Koshun 1st flush 2017, Thés du Japon:

Harvested 23 May 2017. 28.6 euro for 100 gram (excl import taxes). Koshun is a crossing between Kanayamidori and Kurasawa, often used for kamairicha or oolong. Its rather small leaves bring floral aroma's, and almond seems to be typical too for this cultivar.

August 10th, 2019, late afternoon, windy but dry, a leaf day. The dry leaves smell very nice, very elegant, and they are a mix of colours and sizes, from dark brown to light brown and even green-grey, and some are complete and some are broken. The wet leaves smell beautiful and overwhelming, and very complex, with vanilla and flowers. You can see the green leaves in the mix as this tea did not completely oxydize. Koshun does not easily oxydize and the steeming partly stops it too. This brings the elegance and the 'green' elements into the tea and is typical for this Wakoucha-school. The infusion has a beautiful coppery golden orange glow. The smell is delightful and complex, with vanilla and flowers but alos the structure of a black tea. Nice body, very nice structure, with a well developed but controlled astringency that paired perfectly with the sweetness. Very long aftertaste. Brilliant echo. Excellent wakoucha in a very convincing style, marrying Darjeeling to Japan.
Second brew, same parameters: more almond, or is this my imagination ? Less astringent and a pleasure to drink, more charming then the first brew but a bit less interesting. Still a very nice aftertaste.

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The tea comes from Thés du Japon but is currently sold out. 

Akiro Miyazaki. Every discipline needs its champions. Wakoucha Tasting, Tea N°14, Gokase Black Native, spring 2018, The Tea Crane.

Every disciplin needs its champions. They are the men or women who are top of the list and they are the ones whose products you can buy blind because they are the best. They show what can be done with something if you are really really good, and because they are studied and followed they are a vast factor of advance in general know-how. And quite often they are also the men or women who learn young people how to become as good as they are themselves. You have this in wine, but you also have this in tea, and certainly in a relatively young discipline like Wakoucha.

'At Miyazaki Sabou I see it as my function to make sure that the young aspiring tea producers that come to learn tea manufacturing with us can actively learn it in a free and unconstrained environment. This should help them to discover their own strengths and develop an original style.'

Akira Miyazaki on https://www.the-tea-crane.com/manufacturers/akira-miyazaki/

Akira Miyazaki is one of these wonderful people that believe in making the world of Japanese tea better by spreading their knowledge. As their students learn and start their own businesses and gardens the global image of Wakoucha gets better and better. Only people who know what they do can start getting experience and doing every year better, and for us, the consumers, this means more choice, more individuality and more good Wakoucha !

The teafarm of Akira Miyazaki is quite old, from 1930, but the key date is 1983 when a friend of the family became seriously ill and died because of pesticides. As they realised that they too used them (like everybody at that moment in time) and that their tea contained traces of it, they decided to stop the use and also ban chemical fertilizers. This is a decision not to be underestimated, as it takes a long time before a tea garden remembers its true identity and gets rid of all the poison that has been added to it, and in the beginning bad harvests can make life miserable for the farmer. But when the teagardens are healed the job gets easier again and the garden and its environment starts regulating itself, and most of all, the tea gets better and better.

There has recently been some criticism on the price of Miyazaki Sabou teas (they also make some of the best kamairicha from Japan). I think that this is increase is logical and has a positive effect on the Japanese, and even the global tea industry. More money means more investments, a better income for the farmer, more place for experiments and usually better tea. There is also a curious side effect when this happens, as it attracts another kind of customer, and a kind that likes to talk about the excellence of the tea, of which the high price level must be an indicator. This also shows to other farmers that it can be done, and that you can grow and let your customer pay for it, leading to easier access to money from banks or investors. Sometimes there comes a moment when a tea is getting so expensive that one starts paying as much for the reputation and the name as for the intrinsic quality (we are not there yet with Wakoucha), but this is also always the moment where a growing circle around the stars starts creating better and better tea's who 'have not yet made it to the top' but that make the experience of looking for them quite exciting. If you have a problem with the more expensive prices of these teas, follow the students. In this way you support them and you will drink some wonderful new teas.

This picture comes from a beautiful article on the web that tells a lot more about Akira Miyazaki: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/miyazaki-sabo/iQEu_Az4AYI27Q

Gokase Black Native Organic Wakocha, Miyazaki Sabou, 2018, The Tea Crane: 

Harvested spring 2018. 32.4 euro for 100 gram (excl import taxes). Made by Akira Miyazaki with material from a garden in Gokase, no modern cultivar but a field blend (see here).

August 9th, 2019, late afternoon, rainy and hot, a leaf day. 3 gram, 2 mins, 150ml, 98°C. Dark leaves, heavily fragmented, with a beautiful smell. The wet leaves deliver a complex and very full aroma with touches of fruit and honey. The infusion is amber coloured. It has a beautiful and complex aroma, very yummy, very sweet and fruity but with some spices added. The tast is soft and smooth, with a touch of peat like a whiskey, a lovely roast. It has a nice little touch of astringency and a very long complex finish. This is a truly beautiful tea with a wide range of taste elements that make it a pleasure to sip and enjoy. One of the best I had until now from The Tea Crane. Lots of body. A second brew was also delivious, soft and sweet and still with a lot of character.
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Out of curiosity I added a bit of milk to another brew of this tea. This is almost criminal behaviour, but my reward was a hedonistically yummy drink... if somebody can bottle this taste in a milk product he is a rich man.

There still is some stock at The Tea Crane: https://www.the-tea-crane.com/product/gokase-s-black-native-organic-wa-kocha-2018/