Introducing Our Japanese Black Tea

We have begun selling Japanese black tea.

At Baisa Nakamura we process mainly sencha, but lately we have been making other teas as well.

Japanese black tea was one we had been making on a trial basis, and it now joins our regular line-up.

The black tea we are introducing is made from a native cultivar from Dosenbo in Kyoto.
A clear red liquor, with a faint muscatel note.
As it cools, a fruitiness comes through.

Dosenbo commands enormous affection among Japanese tea enthusiasts. Within the Uji tea growing area it sits unusually high, at around 500 metres. Its reddish soil, formed from weathered granite, is rich in minerals and yields teas of rare fragrance.

The frozen leaf we set aside especially for black tea came to us through Shin-ichi Ishikawa, who also supplies the raw leaf for our “freshly rolled sencha Gaho, Dosenbo Yabukita”.

His garden of native tea sits just behind his house.

Mr Ishikawa’s native tea garden.
Look closely at the canopy and you can see how uneven and bumpy it is.

Tea comes in cultivar teas and native teas, and almost everything grown in Japan today is a cultivar tea.

Native tea is grown from seed.
Because every plant has different DNA, each has its own character and the garden grows up uneven. That makes the garden harder to manage and harder to harvest by machine, so yields are never stable.

Cultivar tea, on the other hand, is grown from seedlings.
Propagated by cuttings, they are in effect clones, and a garden can be planted entirely with one character — “Yabukita”, “Asatsuyu” and so on. Quality and yield are therefore stable, and the garden is easier to look after.

On the strength of “Yabukita”, born in 1908, cultivar teas spread rapidly after the war, and native tea gardens now account for less than three per cent of the whole.

We came across one of those few remaining gardens, Mr Ishikawa’s, in mid-May 2023.
We had called at his factory to buy frozen leaf for sencha, and mentioned that we were looking for fresh leaf for black tea.

“Well then — shall we try making it with the leaf from the native garden out the back, the one we’ve stopped picking and just cut back?”

“Our native trees must be about a hundred years old by now. My grandfather planted them behind the main house when he was young, I’m told. But these days native sencha fetches no price at market, and with fuel and fertiliser and everything else going up, making it costs nothing but labour and money — so we stopped.”

Mr Ishikawa’s native garden was coming to the end of its working life.

Falling consumption, falling tea prices, soaring fertiliser and fuel costs, an ageing workforce — the reality for tea farmers is hard enough already.
When you have to go on making tea that will fetch a price at market, it may be inevitable that native cultivars are the first to go.

But if we could make a tea that drew on what is particular to a native cultivar, we thought, then those gardens — now under three per cent — might gain a value beyond mere rarity. So we set about making black tea from this leaf.

The raw material for the frozen leaf
Leaf withered in a fresh-leaf container

Grown from seed, native tea plants put down thick, long roots deep into the ground.
They can therefore live on the faint energy the land itself holds, and they make a black tea in which you feel the terroir of the place strongly.

Because no energy is brought in through fertiliser, the plants hold no excess nitrogen, the source of umami. Add to that the altitude of Dosenbo and its mineral soil, and you have an environment that builds up the polyphenols essential to oxidising the leaf. Perhaps that is why, during withering and processing, a sweet scent like honey spreads through the shop.

Rather than a Japanese black tea made on the potential of a cultivar bred for it — an Assam-type such as Benifuuki or Benihomare — this Dosenbo native black tea is made on the potential of the soil, through a cultivar native to Japan.

We do hope you will try it.

We will go on experimenting and making all kinds of tea — not only sencha, and not only Uji tea.

Thank you, as always, for your support of Baisa Nakamura.