Kukicha - Reserve Stem Sencha

The Story

Kukicha, sometimes called twig tea or stem tea, is a sencha variant where the stems of the tea plant are used along with the leaves. Some kukichas use the stems alone, but this master-blender kukicha uses an elegant mix of leaf and delicate stem pieces for a very well-balanced cup.

This tea brews very easily and whether your water is a little hotter or cooler, and whether your steeping time is a little shorter or longer, we always get a great result regardless. It also makes fantastic mizudashi (cold brew) and a sublime koridashi (ice brew).

An interesting thing about this tea is that the first pour will be a glowing, translucent green-gold, and it's the second pouring that comes out the shockingly vibrant, deep green seen in the pictures. You can see the pretty amazing difference in the last images that show the color of the first pouring vs the second pouring.

The reason for this lives in the stems - the stems are, in a sense, always shade-grown, covered as they are by the tea leaves. Because of this, they store amino acids that intensify their sweetness, and in the second pouring especially, release their sweetness along with deep green color.