Japanese pan-fired green tea
A Chinese fixation at the head of a Japanese refining line. It is the only Japanese green tea route that does not steam, and the tail it keeps is what stops it being a Chinese route.
What makes this route what it is
The fixation is borrowed and the tail is not. Reading it against the Chinese pan-fired route, the head is the same and everything after the rolling differs; reading it against the Japanese steamed route, the head differs and everything after the rolling is identical. Very few routes in the catalogue can be described completely by naming which half of it belongs to which neighbour.
The route, in order
Each note describes what the step is doing in this route. The same operation does a different job in a different chain.
Fresh leaf weighed in, graded and held cool. The Japanese line's front end is a factory operation with paperwork, which is one of the practical differences between this and a workshop manufacture using the same fixation.
The step that separates this route from every other Japanese green tea. Contact heat rather than steam, so the leaf toasts as it fixes, and the roasted, slightly nutty top note of the finished tea is a by-product of the fixation rather than an added flavour.
Rotating drums have largely replaced the inclined pan in commercial production. The heat transfer is the same in kind; the difference is capacity and consistency rather than character.
Rolled and dried in alternating passes, and deliberately not worked into the straight needle that steamed Japanese tea is shaped to. The leaf is left curled, which is the visible signature of the route and the origin of the name guricha.
- 4.
Drying
The aracha is finished here. It is saleable, it is not a product, and in the Japanese trade it will now change hands.
Cutting, screening, de-stemming and separation into fractions. This is the operation with no counterpart in any Chinese green tea route, and it is why one intake here becomes several named teas.
The final firing, applied by the refiner rather than the grower and adjusted to a house style. It sets shelf life and it sets the roast register the customer meets, so two lots of one farmer's aracha can arrive on a shelf tasting noticeably unalike.
How it differs from its neighbours
A route described on its own teaches very little. The useful fact is always which other route it is nearly identical to, and where it leaves it.
One position in the route is filled by a different named method. The shape of the route is unchanged.
One slot, and the only structural difference between the two Japanese green tea routes. Steam contributes nothing of its own and leaves the marine, vegetal character intact; contact heat toasts the leaf surface as it fixes. Everything from the refining onwards is the same operation performed by the same trade in the same buildings.
The two routes are the same tea up to a point. Everything before the divergence is shared; everything after it is not.
The two pan-fired routes are the same manufacture through the drying and then part completely. The Chinese route finishes with a staged drying and a sort; this one hands a half-made tea to a second company that cuts, screens and re-fires it into several products. A reader who thinks kamairicha is Chinese green tea made in Japan is looking only at the first half.
Where it goes wrong
Drum fixation is fast and unforgiving on the thin, tender leaf a Japanese pluck produces: run hot, the leaf scorches at the edges and the batch carries a burnt note the refining cannot screen out. Run cool, the fixation is incomplete and the tea yellows in the bag over months, exactly as an under-fixed Chinese green does.
In full
Almost all Japanese green tea is fixed with steam, and the small minority that is not is genuinely a third thing rather than a Chinese tea made in Japan. The head of the route is Chinese in principle: leaf is fixed by contact with hot metal, in a rotating drum or an inclined pan, so it toasts as it fixes and picks up the roasted-grain note that steam contributes nothing of. The tail is entirely Japanese. What comes off the line is aracha — a half-made trade good, not a product — and it is then refined the way every Japanese green tea is refined, cut and screened and separated into fractions, and given a final firing that is a separate commercial operation often performed by a different company in a different town. That refining stage is the thing a Chinese pan-fired route has no equivalent of, and it is why the same fixation method produces a Longjing at one end of the sea and a kamairicha at the other. The rolling is also different in kind: rather than the needle shape that steamed Japanese tea is worked into, pan-fired leaf is left curled, which is where the curled-tea name guricha comes from.