This is not the everyday tea the name would lead you to expect. The leaves are stripped from the branch in the height of summer, every last one of them, then boiled in a cauldron, rubbed, and packed down into a wooden barrel. What happens next is fermentation, the lactic kind that makes pickles, and it is what separates this from nearly every other tea in the country.

Air is the enemy. The makers tread the leaves down with their feet and pound them with a wooden pestle until the mass is solid and airless, and then they leave it alone: one or two weeks in Naka, two or three in Kamikatsu. After that the leaves are spread out in the sun to dry.

So it smells like a pickle barrel, pours pale, and tastes faintly sour. If you come to it expecting tea you will spend the first cup adjusting. By the second cup the sourness has stopped being an oddity and become the reason you are drinking it.

Each family works in its own shed with its own barrels, fermenting with whatever microbes have settled into that particular building over the years. The result is that the tea from one house does not taste like the tea from the house further down the valley. When this was made an important cultural property in 2021, what was protected was not the tea but the making of it.