Organic Uji Gyokuro Gokou

Lovely!

I brewed this up in my brand-spanking-new little houhin that I acquired through Yuuki-cha. I was SO EXCITED to brew this up! My first gyokuro!

I’ll admit that 000 is correct in the assertion that the leaves are a total mess. They look like they’ve been through a wood-chipper. Even so, the dry leaf smells gorgeously kelpy. Seaweed in a way I like. I have trouble articulating where the line between “good” and “bad” seaweed goes – the best I can do is say that “bad” seaweed is the taste/smell you get in cheaper sushis, kinda overpowering and kinda fishy too. (Different than the fish “fishy”, if you know what I mean.) Anyway. None of that here. It’s GOOD seaweed.

I’ll admit I didn’t brew this in the ideal conditions. The result was a slightly more astringent tea than should have been, though I can still see beautiful potential. I used two teaspoons for my houhin – which holds about 5.5 oz to a reasonable water level. (7oz to the rim, but then it would be one hot mess.) The instructions enclosed with the shipment said to brew a strong gyokuro at 105F for 3 minutes. I couldn’t wait for the water to cool any longer and ended up doing it at 130~F.

The liquor turned out a BEAUTIFUL light jade green. It should have been clear, but there was a lot of leaf debris getting through the houhin’s ceramic filter. Unless I get a pitcher or serve it in a mug, not sure I can use my trusty extra-fine strainer with my tiny little teacups. Even so, I’m sure tea dust would still get through.

The smell of the brewed tea is gorgeous. A vegetal ocean breeze, and just as soothing. It tasted like it smelled – savoury goodness melting into a vivid vegetal sweetness. Beautifully thick flavours, super satisfying! I got 4 good steeps out of it, each one grassier than the last. Unfortunately, the delicious umami note didn’t really carry over to the other steeps, though it’s possible that it’s because I used hotter water than I should have the first time. Definitely a bit too astringent if your water is too hot, treat this tea with care!

Right now I’m having the fifth and last steep, which I cold-brewed over night just to see what I’d get. Grassy water with a hint of kelpy sweetness. One too far!

Can’t wait to try this again, and get it right.

This tea came highly recommended, but did not stack up to traditional teas.

If I were to rate this strictly against other organic Japanese teas, I would give it very good marks. It does not have the biting “oh my goodness, this tea is going to strip the enamel from my teeth” flavor and astringency that other organic Japanese greens often have, but it does not have sufficient body or character to come anywhere near a traditional Japanese gyokuro.

The leaf in the bag has the typical modern organic tea presentation of a dry and broken leaf with excessive twigs and dust. The twigs are represented by the lighter yellow stringy bits (which are not present in true gyokuro) and the dust should be obvious to all. The smell in the bag is pleasantly sweet, but has no depth.

When placed into the warmed pot the aroma does not increase. I steeped this tea both by the method prescribed and by my own cold and warm methods in a 4oz gyokuro pot. On all occasions the tea liquor was very green, but not very aromatic. The flavor was sweet yet somewhat insipid and lacking the character indicative of the varietal for which this tea is named: Gokou. By the third steep there was no flavor at all, but the liquor was still a pleasant shade of green.

The steeped leaf of a true gyokuro should be identifiable as a mostly whole leaf and tender, like spinach, and have no chewy bits. The steeped leaf of this tea was broken. The layer of leaf between the cuticles was mashed up, torn and separated. What there was of the leaf was papery and the bits of stem were unpleasant to chew.

If you are looking for organic Japanese tea, this seems like it may be the best you can find at the moment. If you are looking for good Japanese tea, there are much better, but they are hard to find.

I’ve brewed this two times now, using two of the different suggested methods. Both produced nice tea. This is a briny gyokuro, for sure. I love the sea-fresh oyster-liquor aroma and first taste that hits hard. Really salty. The umami picks up but is immediately counterbalanced by a spinach-like, chlorophyll-heavy sweetness. It’s really balanced and really delicious. The first brew of this tea is insanely viscous. It’s like sweet kelp candy coating the tongue. Later infusions develop a grassy astringency that plays nicely with the glutamate-infused sweetness. In the very end, a whisper of tangerine rind. Stunningly complex tea.