gurdymonkey | Jan. 2nd, 2021

I was thrilled to get my package from Ippodo USA this morning when I went downstairs to throw my laundry in the machine. So I came upstairs and brewed myself a big old bowl of the gokujo hojicha, which turned out to be just the thing for a rainy winter morning.

For the uninitiated, hojicha is what you get when you take mature green tea leaves and stems and roast them. The smell when I opened the packet was heavenly. Brewed 10g/240ml (8oz) in the kyusu at boiling for 30 seconds, then drank it out of Winter Fog, my big grey tea bowl. I have also added Masaru-chan to my tea tray. I can't treat him like a Yixing tea pet because he's papier mache, but he's Darned Cheerful and he deserved to get out of the box he was living in. I picked him up at Hiyoshi Taisha in 2014.

As for the tea, it's lovely. The roasted flavor gives it almost coffee-like notes, only it's not bitter. Warming, nutty, caramelly stuff going on. It does use a LOT of leaves*, but I can get more steeps out of it. I'll probably have another bowl this afternoon. *I bought 100g each of this and the sencha and the sencha package is much smaller because of how the leaves are processed.