The bag is finished and thrown away, and later the same tea is wanted again. But the name will not come back. Bōcha, kukicha, karigane? Bags of similar price and shape line up, and nothing leads back to the same taste.
This piece works through the label of a stem tea for the clues that can be read with certainty.
Three fields that can be trusted
The table on the back holds several fields of small print. The three that can be read with certainty are the name, the ingredients and the origin.
Everything else appears on some products and not on others. A missing line does not mean a lesser tea.
The sources show that those three are the fields every bag carries. The name field comes first.
The name does not say stems only
Open a bag labelled kukicha and torn bits of leaf lie among the fine stems. The name field does not claim the contents are stems alone.
The industry's rules define stem tea as tea containing a high proportion of stems and leaf stalks. An older study of a shop-bought stem tea found it was about half stems by weight.
That was a single product, but it shows how wide a high proportion can be. The sources show that the share of stems cannot be read from the name. Next, one maker's shelf.