What is hojicha? How it differs from kukicha and genmaicha

Different names at the same height

Pick the packets up and they all weigh about the same in the hand. Yet the five names do not sit at the same level at all.

Each name points at a different layer. One names a method, one a part of the plant, one something added, and all three kinds are mixed together on one shelf. A name says which layer it belongs to, and no more. What those layers hold comes next.

Roasting, stems, toasted rice

Look into a packet of genmaicha and round grains show between the leaves. Hojicha names a method, kukicha a part of the plant, genmaicha something added.

Going by the national government's account, hojicha is named for roasting, kukicha for the stem, genmaicha for toasted brown rice. Because the layers differ, a hojicha made from stems is a perfectly sound combination. The fire in the name hojicha is one that arrives after the tea is already made.

The industry's labelling rules also write down the method and nothing else. Tea roasted over a strong fire, they say, with no line limiting the raw material to bancha. The tea roasted in research has been first-flush stems. The documents take us as far as the wording of the definition; next comes where the fire falls in the process.

A fire at the start, a fire at the end

At the end of the shelf sits a packet of kamairicha, pan-fired tea. The idea of firing in a pan catches the eye, much as it does on hojicha. The word may be shared, but the fire falls at a different point.

In kamairicha the fire comes at the very beginning of the making. That heat is what stops the enzymes working in the leaf. The roasting fire of hojicha comes again, once the tea is already finished.

What the sources establish is a difference of position in the process, nothing more. On the finishing side, one more fire is waiting.

One more fire on the finishing shelf

At the back of the businesses that finish and sell tea, there is a fire for drying aracha a second time. Hiire, the finishing fire, sits on the same shelf as roasting.

Hiire dries aracha, the unrefined tea, once more and brings up its aroma. It even has a target moisture figure, which the chapter on where hiire ends and roasting begins sets out. A national research institute describes finishing aracha as three steps: sorting, hiire and blending. The factories that do it belong mostly not to growers but to the people who sell tea.

Roasting and hiire overlap in temperature as well. They are still called separate processes because the time taken, the purpose and the way each is judged all differ. The differences in purpose and judgement come from the stage at which the fire arrives.

The sources show that these are the axes of difference, and that is as far as they go. The figures and where they come from are gathered at the end.