Organic Hojicha from Mighty Leaf Tea
A new year, a new tea. Hojicha is a roasted Japanese tea that consists predominantly of the stalks of the tea plant. It is, according to Harney
This is my first experience of hojicha, courtesy of Mighty Leaf Tea, who provided me a small sample for review.
The tea looks like a mixture of stalks and leaves, with a dark bronze appearance. The dry aroma is rich with notes of berries and chocolate. It smells delicious.
I steep the tea for two minutes, which turns out to be just about right. Something tells me that oversteeping it would give it a biting astringency. As it is, the liquor is a greenish yellow and has a savoury, somewhat grassy flavour with berry-flavours still swirling around. It’s hard not to draw comparisons to genmaicha, which has a similar colour and savoury character.
In some ways, I get the feeling that hojicha’s strength is in its aroma, not its flavour. It tastes nice, but not as nice as it smells. It also doesn’t have much of a finish. But then, hojicha seems to more of an every-day kind of tea, and it would make a perfect accompaniment to food.
Organic Hojicha is available from Mighty Leaf Tea.
Georgia wrote:
I’m sold on the aroma: berries and chocolate.
TeaCast wrote:
I would imagine that it’d taste grassy, since it is made from the tea stalk itself! Bookmarked this, so I can come back and look at it later
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