Spring tea is coming. Are you ready?

Zesty refreshment + preparing your seasonal drinking calendar.

A lick of lemongrass

The tea: Lemongrass kamairicha green tea, sold by Tezumi. $28 for 100g.

Sometimes you can look at a tea blend and just know it’s a good idea. There’s only pan-fired green tea and dried lemongrass in here. No chunks of coconut, no chemical flavorings formulated at a New Jersey fragrance factory. Blending can be this simple and this good. The past few weeks I’ve been drinking this zesty tea as a morning pick-me-up to good effect. I spent the past Sunday hungover from a family function and found solace in repeated cups.

Why don‘t fruit flavored teas taste like fruit?

Most Japanese teas are processed with steam to halt oxidation in the leaf. Kamairicha is an older style modeled after Chinese techniques for heating leaves in a wok before rolling and drying. This method contributes a subtle nuttiness to the tea at the expense of the turbo-green umami taste of a steamed sencha. It also makes the leaves tolerant of a wider range of brewing temperatures, and they don’t oversteep as easily. This blend is soothing, refreshing, and positively zesty.

The source: Tezumi (“handpicked” in Japanese) was launched by three young tea nerds in 2019 on Etsy. Brothers David and Michael Lavecchia and their friend Ryan Snowden source a wide range of traditional and experimental Japanese teas, including harder-to-find regional treats like kamairicha and kyobancha. They also have a Youtube channel that’s as charming as it is educational. This kamairicha comes from a three-generation family farm in Kumamoto that specializes in the pan-fired style, which is a waning art in Japan. They also make black teas and oolongs to catch the eyes of curious drinkers in search of something new.

To brew: This is an easygoing—and not too expensive!—green tea. You can play around with the dosage; 4 grams in a 150 milliliter pot (~1g/37ml) is enough to give me a flavorful cup. To cool down the water from my kettle, I pour boiling water into a cup, then slowly dribble it from the cup over the leaves. This brings the temperature down to 175° to 185°F (79° to 85°C) when steeped with the lid off the pot for 1 minute. The lemongrass heightens the tea’s already ample aroma and the tea brings a slippery body to the sweet, citrusy flavor of the herb. Good blending, good tea.

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Your spring tea checklist

The spring tea harvest is underway, which means it’s about to be the busy season for tea producers and buyers. Why all the fuss? Spring teas are celebrated for their sprightly flavors and powerful aromatics, the result of tea plants returning to life after months of winter dormancy. As days lengthen and temperatures warm, sap begins to flow from the plants’ roots to their growing tips in preparation for bud break. This sap brings minerals, growth hormones, and stored sugars into the leaves. But the days aren’t that long or warm yet, so spring growth is slow and concentrated. Harvests from these early days produce small yields of potent tea. As spring transitions to summer, increased daylight, heat, and rainfall will spur vigorous growth in the tea plants. Summer harvests yield more tea, but they’re typically not as sweet or flavorful as spring pickings.

I should note these are broad generalizations. In many tropical regions, tea harvests continue all winter. In other places, spring tea doesn’t necessarily translate to higher quality tea; some oolong lovers in Taiwan prefer the smoother taste of fall or winter harvests. And many tea economies don’t treat spring tea as a separate product. Companies may blend spring harvests with later pickings to achieve a balanced flavor or greater scale. So let’s spring forward with the appropriate context. Here’s how to prepare for the coming season of drinking.