After a long time, I’m easing back into tea blogging with a review of this simple but delicious tea.

If you drink Japanese tea, you’re probably familiar with houjicha, the roasted green tea that was originally created to minimise waste (you can even turn any stale sencha you have lying around into houjicha – that’s what I did). Here, Ohnishi-en goes even further in using up every bit of the tea by making houjicha out of tea stems.

For most teas, stems are something that are an indication of poor quality (think of how highly rated bud-only White Peony teas as an example, there are definitely no stems there). Most of the time, it seems like the stems are unavoidably there because there’s going to be a bit of a stem in a bud + leaf or bud + two leaf situation. However, there is at least one category of tea that is made completely with stems – kukicha (茎茶).

Kukicha, also called Boucha (棒茶, literally ‘stick tea’) is generally made with the ‘leftovers’ of sencha. If we’re talking about the stems of higher quality like gyokuro, then the tea made with stems is called karigane かりがね. Apparently, compared to the leaves, the stems of the tea plant contain twice the amount of theanine as the leaves and it’s supposed to contain less caffeine as well, which makes this tea a good one for those trying to lower their caffeine intake or those who don’t like the bitter notes in tea.

Tea review

The stems here are very thin and a light brown colour, with a gentle roasted scent. It’s really like a typical houjicha, except there are no leaves.

In terms of taste, I found this tea to be very sweet with a strong roasted fragrance. The tea wasn’t bitter or astringent at all, so it was very easy to drink. But I’m not sure if it’s because it’s kukicha, but I felt the tea could only be steeped two times – the third cup was so faint that I felt the stems had given all it could!

Overall, though, this was a lovely tea. I liked that it was low-caffeine because it meant I could drink other teas in the day and not be kept all night, and I would definitely buy this if I went back to Ohnishi farm (this was the last farm I visited when I went to Sayama)!

Next up – I probably won’t be able to resist the black teas from Shimizu-en anymore, but I’m going to try and compare all three of them in the same post so we can see the differences! That might take a while, but I’m looking forward to all that tea.