The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [20]
This mechanical harvest allows for such economies of scale that Kagoshima produces the cheapest teas in all of Japan. But the scope of these operations also prevents the gardens from making great pure Senchas. Instead of nurturing exquisite Senchas from just one field or cultivar, as Yoshihiro Matsuda can do in Uji with his premium Matsuda’s Sencha, Kagoshima tea makers blend one great Sencha from several varieties of individually inferior plants. One is what’s called a “natural Gyokuro” Sencha. Its leaves flourish entirely in the sun but still produce the extra amino acids of a shade-grown tea. The result of this blending is a lemony Sencha with some of the rich, vegetal brothiness of a Gyokuro.
BANCHA
It’s amazing what a difference a few weeks makes. Bancha is made of the larger, tougher leaves that emerge just fifteen to twenty days after the younger Sencha shoots have been harvested. As the season wears on, the chemical composition of the leaves also changes. By the time the Bancha harvest begins, the better, smoother-tasting polyphenols in the leaves have been replaced by poorer, harsher ones, and the leaves have lost a great deal of their amino acid content. Bancha therefore yields a higher-pitched, more lemony, lighter-bodied tea.
Bancha grows everywhere Sencha does, in Uji, Shizuoka, and Kyushu. But lacking Sencha’s premium qualities, Bancha is not distinguished by grower or region but is blended together under the generic term. The leaves are processed the way Senchas are—steam-fixed, rolled in several stages, and then dried in an oven. Yet the result has a completely different character; Bancha is something of a brassy adolescent next to the mature, restrained Sencha. On a superficial level, tougher Bancha leaves remain whole even if deep-steamed, unlike Sencha leaves, which fall apart into small filaments if steamed for more than half a minute. While still a lovely everyday tea, and a wonderful base for iced teas, Bancha also helps elucidate the comparative finesse and brothy mouth-filling pleasures of Sencha.
GENMAICHA
GenMaiCha is a creative use of Bancha tea and an eloquent unification of the two crops central to Japanese culture: tea and rice. The light-bodied roasted tea is a blend of genmai, or unpolished brown rice, and cha, or Bancha tea. For centuries, the two commodities have been staples of the Japanese diet. In the 1920s, a clever Kyoto tea merchant combined the two to make this blend. Once considered a cheap peasant beverage, GenMaiCha has recently come into vogue among Japanese urban elite and in the United States as a health drink.
The tea comes in many grades and styles but always consists of Bancha and roasted rice. The roasted flavors of the two components complement each other: The lemony Bancha helps sweeten the rice, and the nutty rice helps mellow out the often grassy tea.
HOJICHA
Another creative use of tea by-products, Hojicha is made almost entirely of the leafless stalks that come off with the leaves when tea plants are harvested mechanically. Hojicha did not exist before mechanical harvesters were invented; hand harvesters simply left the stalks on the plants, taking only the leaves. Today, Bancha has to be mechanically harvested three times a year to ensure the best quality of the prime spring Sencha crop the following year. That means a lot of twigs. The twigs can be drunk green or roasted, but I prefer the roasted style.
As with Sencha and Gyokuro teas, the tea-growing region of Uji was the source of this innovation. In the 1920s, an entrepreneurial merchant started roasting twigs and selling them in Kyoto, making a profit from something tea makers had until then considered waste.
Like fresh-roasted coffee in specialty food stores, Hojicha is often set out in many Japanese food stores to lure in shoppers with its delicious roasted aromas. In fact, Hojicha tastes so much like coffee, it might be the ideal