Yellow Kukicha
Tasting notes: Sunflower seeds, pine nuts, toasted sesame sweetness.
This is, without exaggeration, the best thing to ever happen to stem tea. Processed as green tea, stems can sometimes give off rough astringency; as a red tea, they can come out weak, albeit sweet. Yet, as a yellow tea, stems offer up a uniquely rich, nutty, sweet, and roasty taste. The closest analogue in the tea world is Japan’s Hoji-kukicha, but the balance between sweetness and roastiness is unrivalled. There are no sour or sharp notes lurking below the surface. Being a stem tea, it is naturally lower in caffeine though it still contains some.
Price range: $12.50 through $95.00
The “factory” of production is really just a father-son duo that has converted their two story village home and backyard into a mini reprocessing plant for the twigs. Hu Jiahong heard about the market for heavily roasted, yellowed twig tea in the early 2000’s. He learned how to make it after some experimentation, and began visiting Shandong and Shanxi in 2008. His son now permanently lives in Shanxi’s Hongtong County, and has been storing and shipping out tea after an industrial accident left him disabled.
In China, stem tea like this is consumed in a relatively limited geographic area, mainly Shandong and Southern Shanxi. It is an affordable, hardy tea that is perfectly suited for the conventional mug-brewing of these areas. This tea works as well cold as hot, and would be a perfect dessert tea.