This is my desert island tea. It’s not fancy, it’s not expensive, it doesn’t have caffeine in any real sense; but the flavour is comforting, sweet, and agreeable in a large variety of situations. It’s a tea that tastes like the 2nd snowfall of the year, when the feeling that winter has actually returned and you’re staring out into the cold from a warm house with incandescent lighting. Perhaps more tangibly it tastes like what you might imagine driftwood would smell like on a really hot day, like the ‘woody/oaky’ notes people describe in whiskey’s, and like the roasted notes you get from sweet potatoes baked in the oven. It tastes like you would want to drink it from a heavy stoneware cup (like the Bizenyaki cups for sale on this site) — and those are precisely my cups of choice when it comes to tea.
When I started studying tea many years ago, I went to a place in Japan that I jokingly said to my wife looked like my imagination of North Korea — it was an agricultural theme park somewhere in Kyoto. For the most part my wife, daughter, and I were the only 3 people in the park other than the staff. When we were leaving we stopped by a farmers market across the street and I saw kyobancha for the first time in my life. In those early days I had a goal to try every type of tea in Japan, and since my first taste of kyobancha I would consider myself a fan.
There are actually several teas in Japan that are similar to kyobancha. They are Mimasaka Bancha, Tosa Bancha, San-nen-bancha, Houjicha in general, and roasted bancha in general. Kyobancha in particular is made from leaves picked from the bush after winter and relies on the sun to inflict significant amounts of UV damage to them (creating sweetness), as well as a roasting process to focus that sweetness and deepen the woody flavor. Since kyobancha is an important tea to me, and it’s extremely cheap in comparison to other teas, and when I visit Japan I live within close proximity to Kyoto; I have had the chance to try a couple dozen different farmers kyobanchas in my life, and this is definitely my favourite one. I feel like once you try this one, the other kyobancha’s out there seem either too astringent, too ‘green’, too smokey, dirty, filmy, etc. Of course, the comparison can only be understood through experience, but unless you’re able to rent a car and travel through Kyoto’s countryside, this isn’t exactly the easiest tea to get your hands on.
One of the problems with teas like kyobancha is the size and bulkiness of the leaf — volume wise 200g of kyobancha is equivalent to 1kg of standard tea, and when shipping it’s the volumetric measurement which tends to dictate cost. Actually, in principle, shipping kyobancha to Canada doesn’t make any sense at all. The tea is supposed to be so cheap that its cost isn’t a consideration, but when shipping it here, it incurs a massive shipping cost, plus importer brokerage fees. It’s precisely that the logistics cost is so great relative to the value of the tea, that things like this don’t often come here.
Houjicha is known around the world, it tastes similar to kyobancha, and costs much less to import due to volumetric differences — so the world is used to houjicha. I’d like to say that (both if you drink coffee, and just to make a sweeping generalization) houjicha is the dark roast bullshit that everyone was sold for years because frankly, people didn’t know better. While kyobancha is a more respectfully roasted (light to medium) product that allows for a great deal of leaf flavor to come through instead of just smoke and carbon. It’s important for me to showcase the world of roasted Japanese tea because of its iconic flavor, and to do so in a way that fits with the theme of this shop (gangster stuff)
As someone could tell from reading a few product articles on this site, and looking around at prices of things — there isn’t a lot of everyday tea available here. This is the closest thing to everyday tea I think I’ll ever sell. It’s not going to change your life, but it will make your days slightly better. It also allows me to ensure my friends in Japan can keep doing what they do, and because of my love for this tea, I have developed a personal connection to the farmer.
Trenches dug to allow wind to come through at low trajectory to help alleviate rots and fungus
This kyobancha is made by a friend of mine named Shin who I had an opportunity to visit for the first time in October 2022, but have supported since 2013. He’s the longest running farmer that I’ve worked with, and an interesting fellow who loves the modern concrete minimalist architecture in Japan. I’ll say a few words about my visit.
Hands off. No artificial fertilizer, no pesticides — minimal human intervention tea and completely organic. Stay off the mountain when you don’t need to be there, and be thankful to the mountain deity for allowing your visit when you do. If you follow these rules, the tea grown on the mountain will be good. That is what Shin believes — and you’d be hard pressed to find many science based thinkers who agree with him. Shin’s agricultural philosophy is more like a religion, and him and his wife are part of a group of farmers who adhere to it, religiously. The products they create on their mountains are mostly sold and traded within their ‘network’ and rarely gets exposed to the outside world. Science tells us that tea is a nitrogen loving plant, and that nitrogen fertilized soils will create a vastly superior product. The ‘easy way’ — or ‘standard way’ is to add nitrogen to irrigation systems but here is Shin, spreading cow poop around the ground. If it doesn’t rain, the tea doesn’t drink. Hands off. Bugs, animals, and mountain deities do a lot of the hard work.
His operation is quite small, and it’s maintained by just him and his wife. Not to rain on his parade, but he makes a lot of stuff he believes is much more interesting than his kyobancha (his leftover tea from winter essentially) but I would disagree with him there. His teas outside of kyobancha can’t really hold a candle to other tea that I know, and they’re about as far removed from the quality conversation as other kyobancha producers are from him. When I went to visit he gave me so much stuff. I had to carry a 5kg bag of rice with me for 9 days straight because my trip to Kyoto was at the beginning of this longer domestic trip within Japan (the rice was great). As I was leaving his farm, he mentioned that I would need to say thank you to the mountain deity. I asked him how I would do that, and he said he’ll do it for me, and that I should just come with him off the road and kneel down in the mud. As I was kneeling, I had my eyes closed and head bowed for maybe 3 minutes as he was saying inaudible words across from me while manipulating the mala beads in his hands. At the time I recalled a conversation I had with my wife earlier in the day:
“So you don’t know anyone you’re travelling with today?”
“Well… not really, I mean I know them online, this guy runs so and so store, etc”
“You know, it is Japan, but people still get kidnapped and killed here”
“I’m not that worried about it”
Louder than his chants or the sounds of the beads clacking against each other, someone was pacing around in the gravel next to me. I could hear bugs chirping, the sound of the wind cutting through the trees, and seemingly pointless walking. Why was someone walking? Where were they going? and then I had this thought — this would be a very good opportunity to hit me in the back of the head with a shovel and drag me into the forest so sacrifice me to the mountain deity. As often as my wife is right, I hope today isn’t one of those times. Of course nothing happened, the visit ended beautifully, and I feel even more motivated to get this guys tea out to the world.
