Organic Hojicha from Mighty Leaf Tea

Green tea, Tea reviews

Hojicha. Prepared in our new Tokoname teapot.

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 , a relatively recent invention, dating back to 1920. The rise of mechanical harvesters had meant that there was an excess of tea stalks after harvesting. Seeing the waste, a Japanese merchant in Uji took the stalks and started roasting them. Hojicha was born.

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.