Country
South Korea
Korea makes very little tea and almost none of it leaves the country, which is why it is so poorly known and so distinctive when you meet it. It grades green tea by the date it was picked rather than by leaf shape or grade letter, its tradition pan-fires rather than steams, and a good part of the best material grows semi-wild on temple land in the far south rather than in planted rows.
What grows here
Green tea, overwhelmingly, sold under the four picking-date grades: ujeon, sejak, jungjak and daejak. Alongside it sits balhyocha, a partially oxidised leaf that has no clean equivalent in the Chinese or Japanese systems, known in Hadong by the dialect name jaksal. There is also a small surviving tradition of pressed tea, tteokcha, the coin-sized cakes, which centres on Jangheung in the south west rather than on the famous green tea districts. Hadong and Boseong are the two mainland origins that matter, with Jeju island as the third and most industrial.
The ground
Korea sits at the cold northern edge of where tea will grow, so the crop is squeezed into the southern tip of the peninsula and onto Jeju, and winter kill is a real constraint rather than a theoretical one. Hadong's gardens run up the Hwagae valley into the skirts of Jirisan, steep, shaded and often scattered among trees rather than terraced. Boseong is the opposite picture, the photogenic contour-planted hillsides, and Jeju adds deep volcanic soil and a milder maritime winter.
The bushes
Much of Hadong is jaeraejong, seed-grown native populations descended from very old plantings, which is unusual for a modern industry and is the main thing local producers sell on. Boseong and Jeju plant far more clonal material, and a good deal of it is Japanese in origin, Yabukita included, a legacy of who laid those estates out. The practical result is that Korean tea can taste either quite Japanese or nothing like it, depending on which half of the industry you bought from.
Harvest seasons
The grades are the calendar, and the calendar runs off the solar terms rather than off the leaf. Ujeon is picked before Gogu, the grain rain around 20 April, and is tiny, expensive and scarce. Sejak covers the fortnight from Gogu to Ipha, the start of summer around 5 May. Jungjak comes later in May around Soman, and daejak later still and usually machine-cut. Because Korea is cold, that first window is genuinely short, and a producer who claims ujeon is claiming a few days of work, which is worth remembering when the price is not much above the sejak beside it.
How it is made here
The traditional method, deokkeum, is pan-firing in an iron cauldron alternated with hand-rolling on a mat, round after round. You will see this quoted as 'nine roastings and nine rollings', which borrows the phrase gujeungpo from herbal-medicine practice, where it means nine steamings and nine sun-dryings; Korean scholars argue about whether it ever described leaf tea at all, so read it as an ideal rather than a count. The aim is a soft, rounded, low-astringency cup and a loosely curled leaf. Steamed Korean green tea does exist, mostly out of the larger Boseong factories built on Japanese lines, and it tastes accordingly.
What to look for
The four grade names describe when the leaf was picked, not how well it was made, so a carefully made jungjak beats a careless ujeon and costs a fraction. Korean tea costs more than comparable Chinese or Japanese leaf, off a national crop of only a few thousand tonnes, so treat a cheap one with suspicion about where it actually came from. Temple provenance and wild-grown claims are the local romance and are worth about as much as any other unverifiable story: ask for the village and the maker instead.
How it got here
The standard account dates tea's arrival to 828, when the envoy Kim Daeryeom brought seed back from Tang China and King Heungdeok had it planted on Jirisan, which is why Hadong claims the oldest gardens. Tea was central to Buddhist practice through the Goryeo period, then contracted sharply across the Joseon centuries until it survived mainly around southern temples. The nineteenth-century monk Cho-ui is credited with the revival, the first large modern plantation was laid out at Boseong in 1939 under Japanese rule, and the domestic market that supports the industry today is largely a creation of the last fifty years.
Places in South Korea
Named places inside South Korea. The ones with a page of their own are links.
Styles from South Korea
Tea styles tied to South Korea or to somewhere inside it.