Tea Making

Working with tea trees, we grow highly conscious of each tree’s unique character. And even the same tree may take on a different character depending on its environment. We want you to enjoy all these different flavors that shift and change with tree cultivars, land and environment. This is our guiding principle in making tea.

Known for being indigenous to Uji, the tea trees planted by our founder Shojiro are a now-endangered, ancient Japanese tea tree cultivar. Unlike some more recently developed varieties, these tea trees sprout and grow from tea seeds. They are also known for flowering and producing fruit in autumn. And to emphasize the unique characteristics of these trees, we grow them without pesticides and using only natural fertilizers (wild grasses indigenous to the area around the tea farm).

The trees used for our Goko cultivar at Yamasho Kitamura Team Farm are approximately 35 years old. We carefully determine the amount of fertilizer and the timing (twice yearly — once between February and April in spring, and again between September and October in autumn) to bring out this tea’s rich flavor and refreshing aftertaste.
We mainly use vegetable oil cake, fish lees and meat lees for our fertilizers, and we grow this cultivar using conventional farming methods with both organic and chemical fertilizers as well as pesticides.