Since I had three wakoucha (Japanese black teas) from The Tea Crane around AND I was still thinking about Toucha (having translated two toucha sessions), I thought it would be fun to combine the two!
The video embedded is pretty much all I planned (although I did not plan to show everyone my messy kitchen) but I realised that quite some information was left out so here I am with this post.
The form of my Wakoucha Toucha
At its core, toucha is a guessing game that relies on your sense of taste. The original Toucha competitions relied on players to be able to distinguish between tea from Togano/Uji and tea from other prefectures. Modern-day Toucha competitions may ask players to distinguish between types of Japanese tea, between cultivars of tea (what we did with the Sayama Toucha games), and between teas from different areas (this is most similar to the original form of Toucha).
From what I can tell, all three wakoucha came from different farms and were different cultivars, so I had the advantage of cultivars and terroir changing the taste of the tea. The teas that I tried were: Benihomare, Benifuki, Benihikari
Step by Step Instructions
In an ideal world, I wouldn’t know be making the tea or if I did, I’d be making the tea from unlabelled bags. But, all I had were three labelled bags of tea so this is what I did:
- Weigh out 3g of tea into the tea bowls
- Brew with freshly boiled water for two minutes
- Remove the tea leaves from the tea bowls and taste the teas once.
- Leave the room while someone else switched the bowls around
- Go back and try the teas. I should have made a guess after tasting each tea (you’re not actually supposed to be able to change your mind after choosing an answer), but I’m playing against myself so I tasted all three teas and then fixed my answers.
Further Reading
If you’re interested in learning more about toucha, I’ve written two articles:
- Playing the Brew-Tea-ful Game with Sayama Tea (on Japan Rail Times)
- The History of Tea Competitions (a broader look at tea)
If you would like to know more about the wakouchas I used, here are my reviews for them:
Well I am impressed!
Though I mostly just watched the video in hopes that you would say the phrase “Wakoucha Toucha.” 🙂
Hahaha thank you!
This is so cool!
Thank you!! It was a fun experiment (though I would not do that with the green teas – too similar for me!)