Guides
- The Tea Counter I Keep Going Back To, and What It Changed at Home
Sakurai Japanese Tea Experience in Aoyama has been written about plenty by people who went once. I have been going for seven years. This is not a review — it is what sitting at the same counter changed about the way I make tea in my own kitchen, down to the temperature of the water.
- Umeshu Made With Dark Rum: What Changes When You Drop the White Liquor
Every umeshu recipe tells you to use neutral white liquor. A bartender told me to try aged dark rum instead. I made both, ten years apart, and they are not the same drink — here is the difference, with the jars to prove it.
- Umeboshi Without a Weight, and How to Make the Brine Rise
Every umeboshi recipe in English tells you to press the plums under a weight, and to add more weight if the brine will not rise. I have never used one. Here are ten days in a glass jar, and the trick that made the second batch work at a salt level the first one could not have survived.
- Where I Buy Tea: Cha no Ha, in a Ginza Basement
Under a department store in Ginza there is a counter with fewer than ten seats and a tree growing in the middle of the room. It is where I buy my leaf, a small amount at a time, once a month - and here is why that matters more than which shop you choose.
処暑Shosho · the end of the heat — The heat breaks in the evenings first. Hot tea after dinner starts making sense again well before it does at midday.