Place · in Saga
Ureshino
Ureshino is a hot-spring town in western Saga and the place most closely identified with tamaryokucha, the Japanese green tea left curled instead of rolled into needles. Nearly all of Saga's tea comes from here. It is also where pan-firing entered Japan, which is why the one Japanese green fixed in a hot iron pan rather than a steamer is still a Kyushu speciality with Ureshino at its centre.
What grows here
Tamaryokucha in both of its forms. Mushi-sei tamaryokucha is steamed like any other Japanese green and is the bulk of what the town makes now. Kamairi-sei tamaryokucha, usually just called kamairicha, is fixed in a hot pan instead: it is the historic Ureshino tea and today a small minority of output. Ordinary sencha is made here as well. Shops abroad tend to sell all of the curled ones as guricha without saying which one is in the bag.
The ground
A basin in the hills of western Saga, closed enough to hold morning fog, with the gardens on the surrounding slopes rather than on the valley floor. Nothing about the ground here is dramatic by Japanese standards, and Ureshino's own growers will point at the processing before they point at the terroir.
How it is made here
The defining step is a step left out. A sencha line ends with a shaping machine that works the leaf against a heated bed for the best part of an hour until it forms straight needles. Tamaryokucha skips that and finishes tumbling in a drum drier instead, so the leaf dries into commas and hooks. Kamairicha replaces the steamer too, and the Ureshino pan is its own design: a large iron pan set on a slant of roughly forty-five degrees, against the smaller pan mounted flat by the Aoyagi school of Kumamoto and Miyazaki. The tilt is the local signature, and the toasted kama aroma it leaves is what the style is judged on.
What to look for
Guricha, the trade nickname, tells you the leaf is curled and nothing else. The question is which of the two teas you have: mushi-sei, steamed, marine and sweet, or kamairi-sei, pan-fired, toasty and lighter in the cup. Sellers regularly print one term and mean the other, and a photograph settles nothing because both are curled. Kamairicha is much the scarcer of the two, so an unusually cheap one deserves a question before it deserves a purchase.
How it got here
Tea is documented here from the fifteenth century, when a Ming Chinese settler in the local pottery country began growing it, and the pan-firing method is credited to another Chinese arrival in the early sixteenth who brought a Nanjing-style iron pan with him. Ureshino sat inside the Hizen kiln country, so Chinese craftsmen were already living there. Tea spread beyond household use only in the seventeenth century, under a planter who cleared his own land for it, and one of those bushes is still alive on the eastern slope of Mount Kokuzo above the town. It was made a national natural monument in 1926 and is one of the largest tea plants anywhere.
Styles from Ureshino
Tea styles tied to Ureshino or to somewhere inside it.