Locally grown black tea in the country of green tea ”Mariko Black Tea”

Good tea leaves make delicious milk tea

”If the tea doesn’t taste good, the taste of milk would overwhelm it.”
As he said this, Matsumura served us ”Benifuki” milk tea which is ”one of the best tea from Mariko Tea”, according to him.
We sipped the tea. We can smell the strong aroma of the tea within in the sweetness of the milk, and the scent passes through our nostrils. Even Nakata, who does not usually drink milk tea, quickly finished off his cup.

Mariko Tea produces pure domestic tea leaves.
Perhaps English black tea is most famous with the world renowned brand ”Lipton”, and areas such as Ceylon and Assam in India are known for producing the tea leaves. Black tea produced in Japan might not be familiar.

Committed to creating purely domestic black tea

The production of black tea leaves in Japan started when a man named Genkichi Tada brought the original Assam tea tree to Japan at the beginning of the Meiji era. Genkichi was already producing tea in Mariko, so he started black tea production from there.
The effort came to fruition as he succeeded in exporting black tea, and it started to be grown all over Japan.
However, with the turmoil of World War II (日本で戦争というと、第2次世界大戦のことですが、外国では色々な戦争があります。なので、ここでは第2次世界大戦と明記しています。）and the liberalization of black tea import after the war, domestic production of black tea declined, and the Assam trees in Mariko almost disappeared. It was at that time when Niroku Muramatsu who served us the milk tea, took up the effort to protect the original Assam tree and restarted the domestic production of black tea.

Muramatsu flew to Sri Lanka many times. He learned about the technology for more than 10 years from 1989, and finally reached the present form of Mariko Tea.
He succeeded in obliterating the impression that Japanese black tea was too light in color and had a weak taste by developing a tea with a strong and deep flavor and aroma.
There are three types of teas; ”Benifuki”,”Benihikari” and ”Honyama”. Among those, ”Benifuki” is rather expensive, but the black tea connoisseurs remark consider it to be quite exquisite, placing a lot of faith in its taste and quality.

Expanding pure domestic black tea

Muramatsu flies all over Japan in order to spread the technology he acquired, and holds presentations and instructs other producers about the technology.

”Our president does not keep the technology a secret. Instead, he teaches it to everyone.”, one of the employees told us. The original tree which he continues to protect, and many years he spent on research, has been utilized in many regions to create an even better tasting Japanese black tea.

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Mariko Tea Factory, Niroku Muramatsu: Shizuoka-shi, Shizuoka