A Tea Addict's Journal

Roasted kukicha

August 16, 2008 · 2 Comments

I was at a Japanese restaurant today, and the tea they served was rather interesting — a roasted kukicha, supposedly aged. I could tell right away it’s an aged roasted tea — tastes just like stuff you can buy in Taiwan, aged a few years and heavily roasted. This is pretty much what it is. The tea itself is not very strong or particularly complex, but it does do the job very well, and confirms two of my pet theories- 1) roasted teas all taste very similar if the roast is strong enough, no matter the origin of the leaves, and 2) aged roasted teas are rather sweet as long as it’s not messed up.

What someone should do now is to buy up a lot of hojicha and then hoard it to make a fortune out of selling aged hojicha, or something like that.

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2 responses so far ↓

  • lewperin // August 17, 2008 at 2:34 pm | Reply

    This is a really interesting post: original thinking, I’d say.

    But I’m not so sure how hard ought to be pushed. I know you have a lot of experience with aged roasted teas by now, and your experience has been quite good on the whole. But I wonder if you have any way of knowing that some really low-quality leaf, with enough heat and time, got transmuted into a cup you really enjoyed.

    Houjicha, like the low-grade bancha they serve in most Japanese restaurants, is a tea I’ve often tried to enjoy, but each time I fail.

    On second thought, though, houjicha is such a common tea, there must be lots of it lying around after being neglected for a decade or more. Your idea can’t be that hard to test right now!

  • MarshalN // August 18, 2008 at 4:34 pm | Reply

    Yeah, it’s very cheap…… so you just need to buy a few bags and test them over time, and I think it’ll be pretty obvious after a few years whether it will work or not.

    Although it probably has to be ok quality hojicha. Otherwise it might be sour.

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