Utena Wakoucha 🇯🇵

Utena Wakoucha
Japanese Black Tea 
From Wazuka, Soraku District, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan

40g Tin
or 
Zero Waste Refill (compostable bag) with discount code: REFILL

This tea is organically grown!

Curled, twisted deep brown leaves and fine golden flecks giving high floral aromas with a honeysuckle-like sweetness. The wet leaf opens nicely giving deep aroma of baked sweetness. 
The deep orangey red tea soup is thick and clean with a high clarity. A bright, clean taste with a clear citrus like flavour, underlining sweetness, pleasant astringency, smooth mouthfeel and lasting flavour in the throat leaving a warming energy. This is one of the best Japanese black teas we have tasted - a truly elegant, highly aromatic and flavourful experience.

Made from the first buds in Spring, carefully and skilfully processed following traditional techniques by tea master Nakao and family.

Megumi Nakao took over the small scale Yoshida family tea farm from her father and since then has been switching to natural organic cultivation and processes, believing in the importance of creating resilient, sustainable tea trees and producing clean, pure teas for the health of her family, the people and the environment. With the aim is produce tea with the natural fragrant flavour of the tea plant.

This Japanese black tea was the catalyst that led the Yoshida family to switch their tea fields to natural cultivation. Her previous experience spent developing abandoned tea fields experimenting with hand picking and hand rolling fermented teas such as black tea informed this change with the realisation that tea made from tea trees grown in unfertilised mountains tasted far better. Her family’s tea fields have now been growing without pesticides and fertilisers for 5 years now.

Wazuka is a tea town in the southeastern area of Kyoto Prefecture. Wazuka has been a tea growing location since the Kamakura period as a main producer following Uji tea processing methods. It is thought that the Kaijūsen-ji temple introduced tea to the area and Zen Buddhist monk, Shonin Jishin was the first to cultivate tea on Mt Jubu and then in Wazuka.