Yes, I still have Japanese teas to open and review! This is a wakoucha (Japanese black tea) made from a cultivar that’s said to be suited to black teas and which that has been aged. Sounds exciting, right? I’m especially excited because the first wakoucha I had from The Tea Crane was amazing.

Here’s a description of the cultivar that I found on The Tea Crane:

“The Benihikari cultivar is a variety native to Japan, and generally considered to be best suited to production of oxidised or semi-oxidised teas. The Japanese noun “beni” [crimson] alludes to the color of perfectly-brewed black tea; and infusions from this leaf are indeed a deep (yet bright) transparent red. Its flavor lies midway between astringency and sweetness, and has, in common with certain Chinese varieties, a fresh and pure aroma that escapes through the back of the drinker’s nose.“

First Impressions

The dry leaves are a dark chocolate colour with a wiry shape. Even while dry, the leaves had a rich, woody scent to them and it seemed really promising.

Tasting Notes

I did fairly long steeps for this tea because that was the recommendation (90s to 120s), and the first steep produced a tea liquor with a beautiful dark amber colour. The tea had spicy and woody notes, similar to the dry leaf, and reminded me a lot of the black tea from Hachimanjyu. I can see this being great for cold, rainy days, where you want something warming.

The tea liquor from the second steep was very similar to the first. Now that I’ve gotten used to the flavour of the tea, I could appreciate how smooth the tea was, as there was very little astringency or bitterness despite using freshly boiled water and extended steeping times.

The taste of the tea had thinned out somewhat by the third steep (you can’t really tell from the photos, but the tea liquor looked lighter as well) but it was still pleasantly well-rounded. I managed to get five steeps out of the leaves, and the taste of the tea was pretty consistent throughout – the tea didn’t produce any new notes in the subsequent brews, and just kind of faded away at the end.

And here are the spent leaves. I didn’t notice anything particularly unusual about them except that there was a tinge of green that I hadn’t previously seen. I wonder if it means that the leaves weren’t fully oxidised.

Overall Thoughts

This is a lovely black tea and I cannot wait to compare it to the other two wakoucha that I had delivered with this. Sadly, I’m still not over the Benifuki black tea, so while I liked this, it didn’t stand out in the same way the other one did.