Japanese Oolong?

If you are following our tea journey for many years, you probably noticed that we’ve been producing Japanese Black Tea “Wakoucha” in the last couple of years.

Also, last year, we produced our very first Oolong Tea here at Obubu.

It is unlikely that you will find this beautiful needle shape in oolong tea anywhere in the world and this is the characteristic of our original oolong tea.

The reason why this has got the needle shape is because we processed the tea at our Sencha factory where there are only machines for Sencha production.

You may have thought that how we did come up with this unique idea which is processing oolong tea by steaming just like regular Japanese Green Tea?

The hint of this needle oolong was taken from something that happened 3 years in the past.

Here at Obubu, we hold a special event on 2nd of May every year to celebrate our first harvest of a year with our tea club members. 3 years ago, on the 2nd of May in 2017, we had the event as usual but that year was even more special for us since that was the first year of having our own sencha factory and the day we had the event was the first day to use the new Obubu’s factory to process our tea!!

While our tea club members were looking after our tea to be proceed as a first time at the factory, very fresh young tea leaves became beautiful needle shape of Sencha.

When the event towards to the end, we finally got to taste the tea we made on that day. As we very excited to taste the tea, we noticed that there was something different.

“the liquor colour is very yellow and the leaves look little red”

Because it was the first time for us to use the new Sencha factory, it was totally different the machines we were used to use. As a result, we could not manage perfectly for the steaming part which is essential for making fine Japanese Green tea and ending up processing lightly oxidized green tea.

However, from that experience we had in 2017, we got the idea of making Japanese style Oolong by minimizing the steam from a steaming machine to keep some of the enzymes active to be able to let the tea oxidize while processing.

And Here it is. Needle Oolong was born!

If you would like to know more about how we processed the needle oolong tea and Obubu’s brewing recommendations, here we have a video for you which is created by one of our staff members, George.

I found it interesting that we never know when ideas come up and sometimes even a small mistake give us a hint to create a new product!

If you haven’t tried the tea yet, you can find it here. For me personally, I like to brew this tea in a quick infusion(5~10sec) with boiling water.

-Marie Roux