A very special ordinary black tea. Wakoucha Tasting Tea N°18: Obubu Pine Needle Matsuho-no-Wakoucha, Wazuka, 2018

This tea is a contradiction in itself. It is made from the Yabukita cultivar, good for 74% of all plantings in Japan, very productive, very tasty and very early, and so without competition the most popular cultivar for green teas. Here it is produced as a black tea, and this is already an exception, but on top of this it is rolled like a sencha, in needles. I never met a Wakoucha like this before.

The tea is made by Akihiro Kita, the flamboyant founder and president of the Obubu tea farm in Wazuka, Kyoto, where you can follow intensive training programs about Japanese tea. If you check out the video on their website you can even meet the wonderful Laura, my fellow ITMA student. Wazuka is a small town in Uji, Kyoto, and is one of the heartlands for green tea, with about 300 different families making it. The spring harvests from Uji usually fetch the highest prices so the incentive to make black tea is small, and this tea is a second flush.

Akihiro 'Akky' Kito

Kyoto Pine Needle Matsuho-no-Wakoucha, 2nd flush, 2018, Obubu Tea Farm

This tea was a gift from Inge, a most enthusiast tea-teacher (check out her tea and cheese or tea and chocolate evenings at http://www.theetijd.be/). Harvested in July 2018, so a second flush.

August 14th, 2019, late afternoon, raining, a root day. 98°C, 2 min, 3 gram, 150ml, in a kyusu. The dry leaves are remarkably big and rolled like sencha, with colours varying from brown to almost black. No particular smell. The wet leaves however smelled very nicely and rather complex, with mainly floral aroma's, like a flower arrangement of many diferent flower types, and something very sweet. In the background I found notes of a very dark chocolate with a high cacao-percentage. The infusion is light caramel-brown coloured and contained small particles that passed through the filter. The tea has a quite remarkable smell, with first something sour opening, and almost immediately the flowers, without the sweetness. The attaque is beautiful, light and complex and very fine, on a high note. The taste then continues over the whole line but finishes drily, more like a black tea, with the astringency only in the finish.
The second brew (same parameters) was also excellent, flowery and a bit sweeter and less complex. It had a remarkably long finish, longer than the first brew, and it made a beautiful tea.
I used to be a bit sceptical about Yabukita for black tea, but this is an excellent and interesting cup, and I look forward to the next one that passes here.

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This tea is still available at https://obubutea.com/product-category/black-tea/. You have to add taxes to the prices on the website, but ordering from Japan goes usually quite well. There are many interesting teas on the website, and ordering a few more will reduce your average transport cost.

Like forest floor material of a pine wood...

Another year, another tea. Wakoucha tasting, tea N°16: Kawane Koshun, 1st flush 2018, De Theeliefhebber

Tea is a natural product that is made from a plant that grows in an environment. We call this environment terroir. This environment is not a fixed and static thing, it is something rooted in nature and influenced by climate. Just like for wine, a tea plant will behave differently in a dry year than in a wet year, and react differently to a cool spring as to a warm spring. So it is normal that two vintages from the same tea garden will be different from year to year. Of course, during the tea making proces the tea producer has a strong influence to push his product into the direction he wants. As most teas, like most wines, are blends, he can soften extreme weather influences by mixing teas from cooler or dryer gardens with better situated ones. So when I found out that I had Masui Etsuro's Koshun both in the 2017 and the 2018 vintage I wanted to compare them. You can read my tasting notes on the 2017 in the previous post, here comes the 2018.

source: https://teaholics.co.jp/en/2017/01/30/best-brewing/

Koushun, Kawane, Masui Etsuro, 2018, De theeliefhebber: 

10th of August, 2019, in the evening, windy and cloudy and a leaf day. Imported from Japan by De Theeliefhebber, a Belgian company. 98°C, 3 gram, 2 mins, 150ml.

Wet leaves smell like a classic black tea but with a whiff of almonds and vanilla. Coppery red brown infusion. The infusion has a beautiful smell, very pleasant but also complex, with flowers and almond, and very compact. In the mouth a nice body, a nice complexity, but a rather short finish. Very nice sweetness and almost no astringency.

Second brew was nice and sweet, with less complexity, but worth the trouble.

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When we compare the two the most striking difference was the level of astringency that was a lot higher in the 2017. The smell of the wet leaves was also more in the black tea register, with less flower. The colour of the infusion was very different, with the 2017 bright orange and the 2018 darker and more red. As for the taste, the 2017 was more floral and more elegant but with more astringency that gave it structure when hot but was a bit too much when cooler. The 2018 was softer and mellower, with sufficient but less agressive astringency and more spices and more sweetness, a very 'round' tea.

Both teas were recognisable in their Koshun characteristics, the cultivar coming out very clearly but were different in structure. There is of course also the fact that the 2017 is a year older and this could be the explanation for the elegance and less obvious sweetness, but my general feeling was that 2018 is a year that brought more volume and more body, but 2017 more complexity and structure and a far longer finish, and I preferred the 2017. Both are sold out, but you should keep an eye out for Masui Etsuro's 2019.

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.

😊😊😊😊

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/

The colour orange. Wakoucha Tasting, Tea N°13, Benihikari, The Tea Crane, 2018.

As the reader of this blog already knows, the translation of Wakoucha is Red Tea from Japan. In Asia what we call black tea is red tea (it was the water that made the difference), but during my Wakoucha tastings I started spotting a colour that I had not yet really seen in other red tea's: orange.  Some of my Wakoucha's were really red in colour, but a lot had this orange glow. A few even reminded me of  Crodino.

This puzzled me, so I started surfing, and found what I was looking for here: https://www.myjapanesegreentea.com/color-of-black-tea. Depending on the levels of oxydation of the catechins in tea we get theaflavines (responsable for the orange colour), thearubigines (red, like in many Chinese 'red' teas) or theabrownins (black, dark brown, like in Pu'er). Theaflavines and thearubigines have a good reputation for our health, though they should be no mistake: they can not replace medicines and they can not make up for a unhealthy lifestyle. There are rumours that theaflavines can help regulate sugar levels with diabetes type 2, but I think they only bring a positive influence combined with other measures like regular fysical practice and a diet. However, if you still have a cravinf for sweet drinks, many of them taste sweet without containing Sugars and they can make a 'bland' diet pretty exciting...

Benihikari Wakocha, first flush, 2018, The Tea Crane:

Harvested May 22, 2018. 31.2 euro for 100 gram (on the Japanese website). Organic.

The tea comes from the Yama so shita danchi teagarden in Tsukigasé in Nara, 20 acres big, at 250m above sea level. The underground is either sand or clay and the slopes are north and south oriented,  facing each other in a V shape. The garden is harvested only once a year and the last 7 years only vegetal fertilisation. To one side of the garden are prune trees, to the other side organically farmed Yabukita from the same owner. The cultivar is Benihikari, more about it here.

August, 9, 2019, a leaf day, rainy. 3 gram, 150ml, 2 mins, 98°C. The dry leaves were greyish-brown in colour and rather big, quite complete, with some stems. They smelled a bit peaty and meaty but in a very nice and complex way. The wet leaves smelled different, a rather closed aroma, very light, and I saw a mixture of brown and green ones. The infusion was coppery redbrown but with an orange glow, not unlike a Crodino. The infusion smelled elegant and  complex but very timid, and the same went for the taste. On the border between elegant and weak. Retasted it in the afternoon, 4 grams instead of 3. The wet leaves now had a whiff of jam in them, and the infusion smelled like a freshly made and still hot jam (of prunes). Still elegant and soft, and so was the taste, soft and sweet but rather thin, very elegant with a feathery touch of astringency. Very pleasant but very hidden, very much in the background. Very different when tasted in June when it was very fruity. Maybe I stored it not well.

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Still available at The Tea Crane: https://www.the-tea-crane.com/product/benihikari-wa-kocha-black-tea-2018/

My first Wakoucha-experience. Wakoucha Tasting, Tea N°12, Gokase Black Yamanami, 2017, Hotsoup.

This was the second Wakoucha I tasted, and together with the Benifuki of the same importer, Hotsoup, these were the two that woke up my curiosity, and started me on the long and winding path towards Wakoucha heaven, with surprises behind every corner. Looking back now, it is not a big surprise that I fell for this tea. It comes from Gokase, one of the best terroirs for Wakoucha, it was made by the Miyazaki family, famous producers of black Japanese tea, and it was made with Yamanami, one of the 'green' cultivars used for Wakoucha.

Yamanami is a 'Chinese' cultivar, coming from seeds from Hubei in China and developed in the Miyazaki Research Centre (Miyazaki is also a town) in 1965. It is pretty rare and usually used for kamairicha, and it can deliver very fine black teas. The use of green cultivars for black tea is one of the things that make Wakoucha unique.

Gokase Black Yamanami, Miyazaki Sabou, Hotsoup, 2017:

Harvested May 25, 2017, in Gokase, on the Miyazaki Sabou teafarm.
August, 6, 2019, in the afternoon, a root day, warm but cloudy. 3 gram, 150ml, 2 mins, 98°C. The dry leaves are dark and well oxidized, and broken. The wet leaves smell of flowers and sweet jelly, and are dark brown, a few complete ones, oval. Quite a dark brew, briljant and intense. From the cup comes a waft of jam and fruit, including the acidity of fresh fruit and a touch of varnished wood and camphor. The taste is on the thin side, with a light astringency, good acidity, quite refreshing, very nice for a Wakoucha. Quite long. The second brew was good, everything the same but more muted and with a softer finish.
These tasting notes date from the long session of summer 2019, and I'll give you also those of april 2018, my first encounter with this tea.
April 7, 2018: a caramel-coloured reddish infusion. The aroma is sweet and full of temptation. God balance in the mouth, no astringency at all, a very nice fraîcheur. Added milk to it, and then it became extremely yummy and very complex, like a super-cocoa.
April 18, 2018: nice aroma, clear and complex and powerful. Well structured and nuttiness in the finish. With a dash of milk it seems as if somebody draw a creamy line under a nutty-sweet overtone. Addictive. 😊😊😊(😊)

Still available at Hotsoup: https://www.hotsoup.nl/nl/gokase-black-yamanami.html.

Seed-grown is better ? Wakoucha Tasting, Tea N°11: Seed-grown Yamata-midori, 2017, The Tea Crane

The teaplant is usually propagated by cuttings. This technique has several advantages for the farmer. All plants are identical and they are all cloned from that one perfect example, so no surprises on taste here, and when harvesting time comes they will all ripen at the same moment, which is a lot easier for mechanisation. Mechanical harvesting is in Japan nothing to be ashamed for, manual work is very expensive here, and it is the only way of doing it in an economical way. But there are a few disadvantages too… the plants have a shorter life span, are more vulnerable to certain diseases and they all taste the same, which can create a certain blandness (that can be solved by blending).

The opposite are the so-called zairai plants we talked about in a previous blog. Lots of advantages here, but the gardens are a burden for the farmer as all plants are very different and a garden like this is less productive and asks for more work.

The in-between solution is working with seed-grown material. Here all the seeds of a plant have the same mother, but they have different fathers, and there will be small genetical differences between them. This is good for more complexity in aroma and flavors, and the plants are healthier and will live longer. Combined with limited or no fertilisation their root systems also go deeper. As the farmer will still need a degree of uniformity he will plant many seeds but retain only the plants with the desired characteristics and pull out the others, thus combining the advantages of the two systems. Is it more work for the farmer ? Absolutely, but in the end he will obtain robust and healthy plants and he can avoid chemical treatments, and still have the wanted degree of uniformity in his plants. There is a very good videao about this here:

The Yamata-Midori cultivar was created in 1924 as #10 but only got its name in 1953. It is a cultivar for green tea and was discovered in Nara, the old capital of Japan, and it is the only recognised cultivar from this region. It is a late cultivar, only ready 10 days after Yabukita, but it handles cold very well and prefers quickly drained moutain-sides. The leaves grow closer to each other and handle night frost quite well, and the plant is known to develop sugars in defence of the cold.

Seed-grown Yamata-Midori, 2017, Nara, The Tea Crane:

Harvested in spring 2017 at the Tsukigasé Kenko Chaen tea farm in Nara. This is the farm of the Iwata family, good for 7ha and founded in 1974. Since 2001 Fumiaka Iwata is the farmer. They work organical since 1984.

Nara

27 euro for 100 gram. Tasted August 6, early in the morning, a root day. 98°C, 3 gram, 2 minutes, 150ml, in a kyusu. The dry leaves are more dark green than dark brown, broken but rather big leaf, several stems. The smell of the wet leaves is intense and richly complex, with honey, fruit and a wonderful flowery aroma. The incredibly intense smell of the infusion wafts up from the cup, sweet, ich and complex (a wonderful way to say good morning). The colour is a coppery brown. The taste is excellent and has depth and complexity. An almost imperceptible but important touch of astringency gives structure. Very full body, incredibly long and a beautiful returning echo. When the tea cools down it gets even better. At this price this is one of the best wakoucha I know.
Second brew, same parameters. The tea gets very toasty, like fresh bread or brioche, the smell of croissants in the morning in a small French hotel that wakes you up, mixed with the heady aroma of a big vase of flowers next to my bed. The very nice round mouthfeel makes it a pleasure to drink, less intense than the first brew but sweet and very elegant, with a nice complexity in its core. This is a very good tea.

😊😊😊😊

The 2017 is sold out, but the 2018 is now available at https://www.the-tea-crane.com/product/organic-first-flush-seed-grown-wa-kocha-black-tea-2017/