Black Tea Zairaishu

This is another tea company that my coworkers visited during their Japan trip. Well, kind of anyway. There’s a larger tea house with more of a sit down tea experience that another coworker has been to in the past and brought teas back from (I have a few teas in my personal stash I was gifted from this trip), but this time around my workers weren’t able to make it to that location so they went to their sister location which is a little smaller and more just a storefront.

They still brought back lots of interesting teas though, including this Japanese black tea which is very unlike any other Japanese blacks I’ve had previous. I made it Western style for myself and I was shocked (not in a bad way) by how mineral and vegetal the flavour was. It still had natural sugar cane-like sweetness, but it was just very clean and smooth with a petrichor-like earthiness to go along with this mellow, raw vegetable flavour and what I can only think to describe as “the taste of a mountain lake”. Very distinct yet ethereal.

I didn’t exactly immediately love the profile but I was transfixed by it and I haven’t really stopped thinking about it since.