February 2026 Tea Subscription

First, let us enjoy the Japanese green tea. There are 47 prefectures in Japan, of which 44 produce tea. Most of us are over-sold by Kyoto teas. As the tea harvest season nears, let us revisit some green teas. In Japan, tea harvest starts around April at the south, where it is warmer, and move northwards to reach Saitama around April/May time. This month, we are featuring two Japanese green teas - from Fukuoka in the south and from Saitama in the north. 

We start with Fukuoka. Both Kyoto and Fukuoka are famous for their gyokuro teas. In Fukuoka, gyokuro is produced in Yame City (八女市) in the Chikugo area of Fukuoka prefecture. Before the Meiji era, this area used to be called Tsukushi Province (筑紫国) where the north is called Chikuzen (筑前) and the south is called Chikugo (筑後). The Fukuoka region has been inhabited earlier than the rest of Japan since ancient times, given its proximity to Korea and China, and her friendlier climate being at the southern tip of temperate Japan. It was said that the first tea seeds planted in 1191 at Sefuri Mountain (1,100 m) located between Fukuoka and Saga prefectures were brought back by the patriarch of Japanese tea ceremony Myōan Eisai (明菴栄西). In 1423, another monk Eirin Shuzui (荣林周瑞) brought back more tea seeds when returning from Zen Buddhist studies in Ling Yan Monastery (灵岩寺, also called Ling Yan Shan Monastery 灵岩山寺) in Suzhou China. He travelled throughout Japan to preach Buddhism and when he reached Yame, he was struck by the resemblance of her beautiful mountains to where he trained in China. At Kurogimachi Kasahara (黒木町笠原), he built a temple and named it Reiganji Temple (霊巌寺), the same name (in traditional Chinese and in Japanese Kanji) as the monastery he once studied in Suzhou China. He planted tea around the temple which grew well thanks to the suitable conditions of high diurnal range with high day temperatures and cold night temperatures. Fogs and mists form naturally when sun falls, blanketing the tea plants till early morning. This natural shading complemented the sumaki shading today, brewing up the characteristic intense sweetness in Yame tea. It is no wonder this area became the largest tea cultivation area in Fukuoka today. It also has the honour of being the first tea in Japan registered under the national Geographical Indication Protection System.

Our tea is from Hoshino Seicha En (星野製茶園), which is one of the most recognised tea farms in the entire Japan. Japan tea masters are ranked based on their performance in tea judging competitions, with 10-dan (十段) being the highest rank. Hoshino Seicha En has two 10-dan tea masters -  Shinya Yamaguchi (山口真也) and Yosuke Yamaguchi (山口洋介). Their matcha is endorsed by all the tea lineages and sects and used as their ceremonial matcha in their lineage. When tea shops use the 'ceremonial grade' label, it means the best product from that farm. For Hoshino Seicha En, their matcha is truly ceremonial. Even their common grade matcha tastes exceptionally refined and complex comparable to other ceremonial grade teas.

The tea on feature is a Guokuro Houji, a curiously paradoxical concept in that Gyokuro and Houjicha (houji tea, meaning roasted tea) are on opposite ends of tea making. The highest style of Japanese green tea is the gyokuro, which is shaded with a reed mat called sumaki for at least 20 days before harvesting by hand. However, houjicha is not the case. In the olden days, teas that are not the best grade, are broken or are rejects will be roasted heavily for the strong aroma to cover up any visual or flavour imperfections. Today, with the worldwide craze over matcha and other Japanese teas, houjicha comes under the limelight alongside the realisation of tea producers that indeed it could also be a differentiating product in their offering. With this newfound respect, better grade teas are being used in the making of houjicha and houjicha powder. At Hoshino Seicha En, the tea masters are using the best grade of Japanese tea - Gyokuro - to make houjicha. It must be an out of the world experience.

We are brewing this tea in our Parchmen Glass Gaiwan, with 5 gm of tea to 120 ml of 60°C distilled water for 1 mins. The brew is light brown or cinnamon in colour. Departing from usual expectations, the 'fire' roastiness of houjicha is curiously missing. Instead it is clean, light and elegant. This is expected from the look of the tea - dark green streaks of gyokuro alongside lightly coloured roasted tea stems. This is a houjicha which exhibits sweet, and umami note of seaweeds, sesame and roasted nuts, almost like a deeper version of gyokuro. Smooth and round, it is without any astringency or bitterness. We brewed it again at the same parameters to a thinner body but with similarly delicious profile.


Let us now move north to Saitama. We learnt about Sayama teas when we held a tocha (斗茶) session during COVID together with NPO (Non Profit Organisation) Agriculture Support Team in Saitama. In November 2025, we held another Tocha with the same team. Sayama tea is produced in Saitama Prefecture and the western region of Tokyo adjacent to Saitama Prefecture, mainly at Sayama Hills region. Sayama teas - a registered regional trademark - is always in the background of the tea industry and mostly unheard of outside Japan. Despite its low profile, it places an outsized role in Japanese tea history and tradition. In the early years of the 19th century, Sayama adapted the Kyoto Uji technique of firing and invented its own method now known as Sayama Hiire (狭山火入). Within Japan, Sayama teas holds an honour of being one of top three famous Japanese teas, the other two being Shizuoka teas and Kyoto teas. As the saying goes: The colour of Shizuoka teas, the aroma of Uji teas, the flavour of Sayama teas (“静冈の色，宇治の香，狭山の味”). 

Located in the northern tea production region of Japan, Sayama tea plants brave the cold climate including snow, developing thicker leaves which accumulate more pectin and chemical compounds, giving richness of sweetness and a stronger flavour. For the same reason, its production is low and it can only manage two harvests a year - April/May and June/July. The low volume is made worse by the high production cost associated with existing tea lands being located in expensive areas close to cities. This explains why low volume cultivation like gyokuro and kabusesencha are avoided. The high intensity of population within Saitama and the greater Tokyo region are a natural market for the tea, making it unnecessary to market the teas elsewhere, hence explaining its low profile in the international tea market.

This matcha is produced by the tea factory Asuka (明日香) which in 2006 was the first matcha factory in the Kanto (関東) region to be established. It is a cooperative operated by five tea farms (Okutomi-en, Yokoda-en, Asama-en, Kubota-en, Miyaoka-en) to produce matcha. This requires the shading of the tea fields for about 30 days before picking, a high cost method uncommon in Sayama. At Asuka, the leaves are steamed and dried without being rolled. During this drying process, a tall brick chimney called a 'tencha furnace' (碾茶炉) is used. At 12m above ground (four stories high) and 3m below, it is indispensable for producing high quality matcha. To make matcha, tencha (碾茶) is first made, and then finely ground in a milling well (looking like a rotating drum) containing stone pallets. The freshly ground matcha is allowed to mature for several months before it is ready to be used. The process give hints to the matcha shortage of 2025 - tea leaves are not in shortage, but the queuing for the grinding - an inherently slow process - and the deliberate maturation after that limits the scale of production.

In August 2025, Asuka changed its grade convention. Originally on a scale of 6 from #1 to #6 in descending quality, the revised scale is 12 with #1 to #12 in the opposite direction of ascending quality. To Asuka, the drinking matcha is Myosho which we featured in April 2024's tea subscription. The tencha is produced in Asuka but the leaves are sent to Kyoto to be ground, a reason for its low availability. #1 to #12 matcha are called processing matcha by Asuka - they are not meant to be drunk directly but processed further in food or drinks. However, the higher grades are honestly good - in colour and in flavour. While ground sencha now makes it to the matcha label, a proper processing matcha would surely be much better, especially the higher grades. With this in mind, we decide to feature Asuka matcha #10 this month.

We are using a bamboo whisk (chasen, 茶筅) to whisk this matcha swiftly in a ceramic bowl (chawan, 茶碗) to create a foamy and smooth broth, using 3.5g to 60ml of 50°C water to make a thin matcha beverage called a usucha (薄茶) as well as 2g to 35ml of 50°C water to make a thick matcha beverage called a koicha (濃い茶). Without a bamboo whisk or matcha bowl, one can use a small fork in a mug and stir speedily. One is greeted with a luscious green colour, and the nose sniffs nuts flavour - perhaps baked pistachios - accompanied by slight astringency and bitterness that do not linger. The koicha, being thick and rich, is laden with umami it tastes salty. Add a piece of ice to kick up its acidity. The added brightness rebalances the matcha to initiate the new appreciator of the "green espresso".


On the other end of the tea processing spectrum, the last tea this month is a black tea. In the pristine, remote hills of An Hua county, wild tea trees share the forest land with the other flora of the primary forest. Probably untouched for centuries, these tea trees were first discovered by villagers in 1950-60s after which tea picking and making started fervently. Despite this good start, the nascent tea industry ground to a halt shortly under a confluence of factors - remoteness of the county, lack of supporting logistics and infrastructure out from the tea hills, poor market support and interest, and the national policy then to "return farmland to nature". It was not until the late 1970s that the market reform in China opened new doors for it. By then, the abandoned tea farms two decades ago have returned wild. Well rested for a few decades, these wild teas offer tremendous potential in becoming quality teas. 

This tea is from Er Fu (尔福茶业), a tea company that was founded in 1998. It started with a single green tea product, and switched focus to black tea since 2012 when a black tea health craze started gaining steam. Noting that black tea are sold only in tea shops and not in supermarkets, he made the bold move to distribute his tea there. It proved to be a wise move, allowing him rapid growth in capital for his subsequent business expansion. 

To make this black tea, the tea leaves are harvested around Gu Yu (谷雨), a two-week time period in the Chinese calendar from the last week of April to the first week of May. It is special grade, which means an early harvest of fine picking. It is a 'Tian Jian" (天尖), denoting the fine picking standard as one bud and two leaves. There are higher grades - "Ya Jian" (芽尖) and "Bai Mou Jian" (白毛尖), which are mostly tips and rare in the market. The 'Golden Flowers' - a special processed black tea - was designated as a royal tribute tea during Emperor Qianlong's reign in the Qing dynasty (1735–1799).

The tea variety in An Hua are of smaller and medium sized leaves, as compared to the bigger leaf assamica variety in Yunnan Pu'er. For a deeper and bolder flavour in An Hua black teas, older and thicker leaves are needed. However, the featured tea is made using fresh young tips, which turns orange after fermentation. Of the black tea processing techniques, making the "golden flowers" is the most difficult. In fact, the 'golden flowers' are a form of yellow molds (Aspergillus genus, 冠突散囊菌) which are harmless and yet beneficial to human health in many ways. It promotes amino acids formation in the tea leaves, and it forms enzymes and activates existing enzymes in the leaves, producing soluble polysaccharides. Medically, such polysaccharide compounds regulate blood sugars and fats, reduce blood pressure and strengthen gut health.

The unique moist and cool environment in An Hua promotes the propagation of the natural mold which builds a symbiotic relationship with the tea. Found in no other tea regions, the "golden flowers" are a unique feature in An Hua black teas. In making "golden flowers" tea, the black tea is first steamed to rid of unwanted bacterias and mold, while the retained moisture of 25% creates the condition for the growth of the intended aspergillus under exacting temperature (25-29℃) and humidity (70%). The tea needs to include stems (16-20% by weight) so as to allow aeration and catalyse the formation of "golden flowers". The leaves is then loosely compressed and shaped into bricks, allowing the air gaps and also allow easy fragmenting for brewing. They are placed on wooden shelf to ferment naturally for around 20 - 30 days in a special roasting room. Once the mold reach optimal amount, the heat is turned on to stop the formation and dry the leaves before boxing.

Noticeably different from the usual round shape of a pu'er black tea, An Hua black tea usually adopts the shape of a brick or a rod in specific multiples of 50g. (50g is denoted as 1 'liang (两), which is 10% of a 'jin' (斤).) The "golden flowers" smell like a common Chinese herb called 'Fu Ling' (茯苓), which is a fungus called China root), hence this tea is traditionally termed a 'Fu' brick.

This featured tea was five years in the making - first, the tea was made into a normal black tea in 2014 and aged until 2019 when it underwent the "golden flower" process. Already 12 years since the leaves are picked, the many years of aging mellows down the tea, such that there is no astringency even after long and repeated brewing, even at boiling temperature.

We are brewing this tea without breaking it up (in compressed fragments) in a Parchmen Glass Gaiwan, at 3.5g to 130ml of 100°C water for 30 sec continuously for up to 6 brews. The brewed leaves smell clean, with a light woody undertone and a white floral and vanilla overtone. The brew colour is light golden on the initial brew and darkening to amber on the second brew as the fragments start to open up, then lightening to a pale yellow with more brews. Without breaking up the tea, the initial brew is impressively silky and smooth, with clean notes of China roots, in a interestingly monotonous way. It is very balanced, and there is no astringency or bitterness. The second brew is less silky when hot but becomes silky smooth like the initial brew when slightly cooler. The silkiness feels like cream coating the entire palate and the flavour notes open up to China root and white flowers. With more brews, the silkiness reduces slightly but the creamy sensation is still apparent. Curiously, notes of walnut and roasted coconuts come forward at the 4th brew, and the tea tastes sweeter from the 5th brew - there seem to be an acidic undertone that gives an impression of fruity sweetness. From the 6th brew onwards, the tea has diminished aroma but the creaminess and silkiness retain. Similar to the pu'er, this tea is good for digestion, and is perfect as an after-meal drink.


Enjoy your teas of February 2025!

Thank you for coming onboard Parchmen & Co and travel with us to savour our world in a cup!