HANDCRAFTING TEA AT HOME | Summer Bancha, Inspired by Musashi's

September 11, 2024

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Written by Pedro Villalon

HANDCRAFTING TEA AT HOME | Summer Bancha, Inspired by Musashi's - O-FIVE RARE TEA BAR

September 11, 2024

·

Written by Pedro Villalon

Location: Southwest Richmond, BC Canada

Our micro-tea garden has five tea bushes aged 5 - 6 years. They are fertilized every autumn by a giant Western Maple that drops leaves all over our little garden; we also add some manure to the ground every spring, just to give the trees some extra nutrients.

In spring, we harvested leaves to make green (pan fired and steamed) tea, as well as a couple of oolongs. In summer, when the leaves are lushest, we had enough material to create micro-lots of summer bancha and dark tea. This article describes the process that we followed this year to craft summer Bancha.

The five tea plants in this garden are all from very different (unidentified) cultivars. We used all five tea trees for this summer bancha.

1) Harvest the tea by cutting, with clippers, twigs and leaves. We used mostly green twigs, allowing the brown (woody) branches to remain on the plant. We harvested no more than 35% of the material available, ensuring that the tea plants are not over-exhausted.

2) Separate the leaves from the twigs. This allowed us to maximize the space in our (fairly small) wok; it also helps us to craft 'stick tea' (bo cha) as well as leaf tea. We also cut the twigs into smaller (2cm - 3cm) pieces.

3) Fill the bottom 3cm of the wok with boiling water, add the tea leaves and steam them for 10 minutes. Once the leaves were cooked (i.e. softer texture, 'olive' colour), we strained the tea leaves and kept the water in a mason jar. We repeated the process for the twig tea.

4) 'Bruise' the tea leaves, rolling them with both hands like an oolong.

6) Sun dry the leaves. Every morning, we sprinkle some of the water in which the leaves were boiled over our tea; the drying process took 6 days this time.