Foot of a Mount Hakone Black Tea

Brand: Kanagawa Ken Noukyo Chagyo Center

Found at: Bokkusu

Region: Kanagawa

Japanese tea is amazing and you can’t convince me otherwise. There are so many varieties with such a broad range of flavors that you can spend a lifetime and still only drink a tiny fraction of the tea that is out there. Even in the supermarkets, you can find green tea to rival anything you can get in the expensive hipster tea shops back home. It’s an acquired taste, certainly, but I’m crazy about it and I have to stock up every time I visit.

But one thing Japanese tea producers do not do well is black tea. I’m not sure if it is the climate, the technique, or the species of tea plant, but every time I taste a Japanese black tea, I am struck by how inoffensive it is. But offensive is what I look for in a black tea. I like a black tea that can strip paint off the walls. The kind of tea that makes it difficult to taste anything for the next few days. A tea that is basically coffee in a fake mustache pretending to have health benefits. PG Tips or Yorkshire Gold or Assam (if I’m feeling fancy) will wake me up better than an airhorn in a bathtub. This, by contrast, will barely get my eyes open.

This tea is gentle and pleasant and asks to be sipped quietly on a spring afternoon. Which is fine, I suppose, but it just doesn’t suit my needs.

You could say it’s just not my…

cup of tea.                   (I’m so sorry.)