The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [17]
While the Chinese draw on an arsenal of methods to fix their teas—woks, wood fires, charcoal, hot air, steam, or some combination, each creating distinct flavors—the Japanese use only hot water. Chinese tea makers manipulate their leaves to form every shape from snail shells to plum blossoms, and invent new forms all the time. Those Japanese tea makers who don’t follow the thousand-year tradition of milling their leaves into Matcha powder follow the more recent Sencha leaf-rolling method—invented in 1740.
Tea first arrived in Japan from China in the 800s but did not take hold until the 1100s, when monks brought tea from the Jin Shan area in China to Japan’s imperial capital of Kyoto. The tea was powdered following a Chinese fashion of the time. This precursor to modern-day Matcha powder was quickly adopted as a ceremonial beverage by both Japanese monasteries and the imperial court in Kyoto. The rest of society adopted a crude pan-roasted tea they called Bancha (unrelated to the modern tea drink of the same name). What we now know as the Japanese tea ceremony was codified by the mid-sixteenth century, an hours-long production involving the careful preparation of Matcha tea. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, with the restrictions on Matcha lifted, a sort of middle class had emerged that was interested in a quicker, more everyday brew. Soen Nagatani, one of the tea manufacturers at Uji at that time, invented a technique of loose green tea production called the Sencha rolling method. This new system produced a brothy, mellow tea, one that quickly became the everyday tea of choice.
The Sencha rolling method is now practiced throughout Japan. After a brief steaming, the damp leaves are scattered on a bamboo surface to begin to dry out and cool off. The cooling leaves are then rolled with increasing amounts of pressure, breaking them up into more slender spears. These leaf fragments are by turns straightened and dried out in several stages. As with harvesting, almost all this rolling is now done by machine; it is still possible to find hand-rolled tea, but it is rare and expensive.
After rolling and drying, the teas are fired in a hot oven. This firing releases a number of roasted aroma compounds that give the teas a slightly sweet edge. The sweetness is extremely faint compared with the honeyed quality of many Chinese green teas. Japanese green teas have something of a caramelized, meaty bite behind their vegetal flavors, tasting a little bit like the crisp skin off of a roasted chicken. The best teas plucked in the spring have the most compounds and therefore the strongest roasted flavors.
Uji is Japan’s oldest tea-growing region, having supplied tea since the 1100s to Japan’s imperial capital of Kyoto and to the area’s magnificent Buddhist monasteries. Uji still creates all of Japan’s finest teas. Now that it is the suburb of an affluent city, its few remaining tea farms are endangered by sprawl; many farmers have sold their gardens to restaurant franchises and shopping malls. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Uji tea farmers created not only the Sencha rolling method, but also the two principal sources of variation in Japanese teas: Sencha sun-grown teas and Gyokuro shade-grown teas.
Who came up with the idea of growing tea in the shade is lost to time, but we do know that shade builds up the levels of both chlorophyll and amino acids in the leaves, while lowering the polyphenols, giving the teas a darker, more vivid emerald hue and a smoother, more mellow and less astringent flavor than teas grown entirely in the sun. The leaves were once covered over with straw, and now are covered with black plastic, for anywhere from a few days to a few weeks before harvest.