Pouring everything to create the ideal tea
Their goal is to create a tea with a strong flavor and a hint of sweetness. The flavor and sweetness are absorbed from the soil. So, tea needs to be grown in soil that has a lot of flavors. What they came up with was using something that is a part of the Japanese daily diet, dried bonito flakes. The bonito is caught in Makurazaki, Kagoshima Prefecture. They sprinkle the freshly caught Bonito onto the tea fields.
Nutrients from the mountains are returned via the ocean
Bonito contains many minerals from the ocean. These minerals also come from the mountains. Those mountain minerals are washed away by rain, flows into rivers and eventually to the ocean. The minerals are then absorbed by small fish, which in turn become food for larger fish such as the bonito. In other words, the minerals from the mountains end up condensed in the body of the bonito, and returning the fish to the mountains is, in a sense, creating a cyclical system that connects the mountains and the ocean.
Nutrition: essential for all forms of life
Nutritious bonito is a favorite food of insects. Pesticides are used to prevent the tea leaves being eaten by insects attracted by bonito flakes. In the fall, all the pesticide-covered tea leaves are removed and disposed of. After the winter, only the new growth from these plants, now free of pesticides, are picked and processed into tea. It is an ingenious way to make tea that is delicious while creating a taste that cannot be achieved with natural cultivation.
A mere 5mm can make all the difference.
Tea leaves that grow in the summer are pruned in the fall. This is in preparation for growing new shoots in the spring. Adjusting the length of the pruning requires technical skill and experience – adjusting every 5 mm – to keep the thickness of the branches consistent. Tea leaves are harvested using the same bud length to ensure a uniform taste. If the tea is overgrown or undergrown, the desired flavor will not be achieved.
Rice grains for people, straw for tea
There is a paddy field next to the tea farms. In spring, tea is harvested twice. After the second tea harvest, sanae rice shoots are planted in the paddy fields to produce rice, the staple food of the Japanese people. When the golden crop is harvested in the fall, the rice straw is spread on the tea fields as an organic fertilizer. Both tea plants and people can benefit from the nutrition provided by rice.
Waiting for spring
During the summer, the tea plants store amino acids and sugars to withstand the cold of winter and it is these acids and sugars that give the tea its flavor and sweetness. To prevent the early spring frost from damaging the leaves, fans spin to blow air around the plants and prevent frost from forming and sprinklers spray water on the tea leaves to keep them from freezing solid. The tea farm waits patiently for spring, when the beautiful yellow-green shoots sprout.
The finishing touch: blocking sunlight
Two weeks before the tea leaves are picked, a black cloth is draped over the Okumidori plants. By blocking out 90% of the sunlight, the tea leaves are prompted to store nutrients in their leaves instead of using those nutrients to produce new growth, which makes the leaves even more flavorful. However, once exposed to sunlight, the leaves return to their original state, so they are harvested as soon as the covers are removed. Gōda-san’s wealth of knowledge in tea farming guides his tea farm through a year of farming to harvesting, and the final phase of the process; steaming, bruising and drying the leaves begins.
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