Requiem: Chapter 16

He already had five cups of tea or yunomi ocha from the kyûsu , the typical Japanese teapot poured. His choice fell, as always, on the most delicious type of tea, the gyokuro . A tea that required water of around 55 degrees Celsius, much less hot than other species. Five cups wasn't really much for him. Tea was a new discovery for him. Somewhere inside his head, in a room that was barely accessible, sometimes another word sounded through. Something other than tea, southern and black, as black as the souls of sinners. He read the word coffee in his mind and it didn't tell him anything, he would never taste it. Cha , the Japanese word for tea in front extended with the o meant literally and figuratively to him 'your venerable tea'. He couldn't get enough.

Without realizing it, he did not know where he had ever learned these facts, but apparently he could tell a lot about tea and tea making. The facts just popped up from his memory. One of those facts was that many teas usually came from the same plant, namely Camelia Sinensis and that the different varieties arose because of the amount of sun that the plant got. Also the plucking of the leaves in several seasons could cause a testable difference in taste. Even after the harvest, during fermentation, an enzymatic oxidation process, there were still differences in taste, depending on the amount of juices extracted from the leaves. Fermentation was stopped by heating the boiler in which everything is happening or adding steam to it.

But that wasn't all. If one did this at an early stage, one obtained the ' sencha ', a very light fermented tea. One also had the ' bancha 'where the leaves were picked in late summer. This tea is therefore usually a less appreciated type. The gyokuro, on the other hand, a more expensive type of tea, whose plant thrived best in the shade or in a less bright environment and whose first leaves of the spring harvest were used, was his personal favorite.

For this species, you usually used two tablespoons of leaves in an amount of 120 milliliters of water, but you could brew tea with the same amount of tea leaves several times. You also had ' genmaicha 'a mixture of tea leaves and roasted brown rice and' hojicha 'a species that consisted of tea leaves that one roasts. However, for the Japanese tea ceremony, well known to everyone, a kind of powder tea was used. One was called this' matcha ’. All roaring names that had no secrets for him, as it were,.