Tea Rebellion's Yame Sourcing Trip: Inside Japan's Gyokuro Heartland

Once or twice a year, this job takes me somewhere that reminds me exactly why I started Tea Rebellion. This trip was one of those times. Fukuoka Prefecture invited a small group of us — representatives from Tea Rebellion and TENCHA — on a four-day inspection tour of the Yame tea-growing region, visiting five producers back to back. It's the kind of trip that leaves your head full of cultivar names and your heart full to the brim and you can draw on this for months afterwards.

Here is what happened on our 3 Day Yame Tea Buyers Tour. Fair warning: you'll want to add Yame to your next Japan trip if you're a big time loose leaf tea lover.

Wednesday: Landing in Hakata

We landed in Fukuoka and made our way to the hotel in Hakata, where the group gathered for the first time — a short introduction, a run-through of the schedule ahead, then free time to shake off the jet lag before three packed days of farm visits began. 

Thursday: Kakuda Seicha and Kumaen

The first proper day started early — hired car, lovely translator up mountain roads, and our first stop, Kakuda Seicha. It wasn't the easiest visit, as the family was in mourning and we only visited the tea fields. But we did grab some samples at a local store and enjoyed their Houchija over lunch.

From there we moved to the Yokomachi Machiya Exchange Center for a boxed lunch and an hour-long Yame tea study and tasting session, run as a workshop for the hospitality trade — brewing techniques, serving temperatures, the kind of detail that matters as much on a restaurant floor as it does in a shop. A good pause to reset the palate before the afternoon, and useful food for thought on how we present tea to our own wholesale and hospitality customers back home.

Then on to Kumaen — a name I already knew before we arrived. I had come across the founder previously at the London Tea Leafies Events, where her farm has picked up awards for several years running, so it was a real pleasure to finally stand in her fields.

Kumaen is tiny — just 4.5 hectares — but punches enormously above its weight: award-winning Gyokuro and Matcha, sold out of their premium Gyokuro entirely, and now transitioning to organic. She runs the farm with her cousin, and the two of them have a warmth and can-do energy that's infectious.

The tasting highlight was their Gyokuro — dense, sweet, exactly the umami-forward style that's made their name. There was also a black tea infused with orange that I wasn't expecting to love as much as I did. This is exactly the kind of small, spirited producer leading with outstanding quality that independent tea traders like Tea Rebellion are here to champion.

Friday: Kurihara Seicha and Chiyonoen

Friday morning took us to Kurihara Seicha — a much bigger operation, around 500 hectares, with an impressively deep range of tea. They're transitioning to organic for their Yabukita variety and produce an award-winning matcha that I took home to taste properly. The standout tastings on site were their Genji and a beautifully pure variety covered Sencha (most would call it a Kabusecha) — both premium, both the sort of tea where you will savour every sip and you find yourself thinking about days later.

Lunch and the afternoon belonged to Chiyonoen — one of the loveliest stops of the whole trip, full stop. It's a family operation through and through; I met the farmer's wife and daughter, and the whole place has a warmth that comes through in the tea itself. Six and a half hectares spread across sixteen plots, three factories, and a beautiful little tasting café where we sat for lunch. What sets Chiyonoen apart is its focus on Oolong and black tea, techniques the family learned firsthand in India and China — a real cross-pollination of tea traditions you don't often see in Japan. The whole farm is certified organic, and everything about how they talk about growing tea is rooted in working with nature rather than against it. The tasting centred on their black tea and Hojicha, both carrying that same cross-cultural fingerprint. This feels like a strong candidate for our RegenTea project — I kept coming back to it the whole drive home.

We closed the day with a dinner meeting back at the hotel — over good food we had the chance to properly compare notes on everything we had seen and tasted so far as well as enjoy the Onsen (natural hot bath) afterwards.

Saturday: Takaki Chaen and Farewell to Yame

Our last stop was Takaki Chaen, and it was a brilliant note to end on. The farmer is one of the most engaging people I met all trip — fluent English, several years spent living in Canada, and a real obsession with varietal diversity and experimentation. He has a gift for drawing out distinct flavour notes across Sencha, Gyokuro and Kabusecha, treating each cultivar almost like its own character rather than a variation on a theme. The tasting highlights were a white leaf tea and an iced Gyokuro — the latter one of the best iced teas I've had, full of cold-brewed sweetness and no bitterness at all.

From there we visited Cha no Bunkakan, the Tea Culture Centre, for a final look at the wider story of tea in this region, before lunch and the drive back to Hakata station — and just like that, the trip was over.

The Hospitality Workshop Menu

One of the real highlights of the whole trip was the tasting workshop built specifically for premium hospitality — five teas, one from each farm, each served in a way designed to show restaurants, hotels and bars exactly what's possible beyond a standard pot of green tea. It deserves its own moment here:

• Kakuda Seicha — a cold-brewed Kabusecha (Saeakari variety), steeped for two hours in the fridge and swirled in the glass to release its edamame-like aroma.
• Kumaen — Shizuku-cha, a "drip tea" ceremony using their traditional Hon-Gyokuro (Saemidori variety): near-freezing water coaxes out a single concentrated drop of pure umami, served across two infusions, with the spent leaves then eaten dressed in salt or ponzu.
• Chiyonoen — a hot Oolong (Kōshun variety), organically grown at 400–600m in Yabe-mura, served in a hand-thrown Takatori-yaki "fragrance cup" designed to channel the aroma straight to your nose. They also showed us that even spent tea leaves have a second life — worked into a mini potato salad and folded through cream cheese on tiny financiers.
• Kurihara Seicha — a dessert tea: their spring-picked Benifuuki black tea, cold-brewed for twelve hours, paired with a syrup made from Yame-grown red shiso.
• Takaki Chaen — a sparkling deep-steamed tea made from Fujisui, an exceptionally rare Yame-only cultivar grown by only a handful of producers, carbonated and finished with a Yame Shine Muscat syrup — the kind of thing I could see replacing a Champagne toast.

It was a proper reminder of how far Japanese tea can go in a innovative hospitality setting, and gave me plenty to think about for how Tea Rebellion presents tea to our own trade customers.

The So What?

Five farms, three days, and more tea than I can currently fit in my suitcase ( ook an empty duffle bag in anticipation of the tea haul). What stays with me most isn't any single tasting note — it's the range: from Kumaen's 4.5 hectares to Kurihara's 500, from umami heaven Ghykuro to warming Hochija. That's the thing about Yame — it isn't one story, it's multifaceted. I'm finding it hard to sum up in a few neat takeaways. Here is my best attempt at six key bullets.

6 Key Insights

• Yame's real game isn't matcha — it's Gyokuro. The region has its own tea expertise and heritage built around canopy-shaded Gyokuro, Kabusecha and Sencha. Matcha is grown here too (they already have outstanding canopy tea fields), but it's the supporting act, not the headliner — which, frankly, is a plot twist most of the tea world hasn't caught up to yet. The sign below says it all and made us both laugh and think. These premium Gyokuro fields could easily be milled into Tencha for matcha — the raw material is right there. Instead, the farmers we met are choosing to champion their Gyokuro over the matcha gold rush. An act of rebellion in today's world that befits us nicely.

• The farmers were, without exception, brilliant. Skill, varietal knowledge, sheer dedication to the craft — every producer we met operated at a level that made me want to apologise for the slow Western appreciation for their century old craft, but we are here to change that. And we do like a challenge.
• This region deserves a pilgrimage. Yame has every ingredient to become the Specialty Tea Mecca for canopy-shaded green tea — connoisseurs and buyers alike should be booking flights to find out themselves.
• The quality holds its own against tea royalty. We're talking Darjeeling, Yunnan Silver Needle, Alishan Taiwanese Oolong-level quality. Tea sommeliers, consider this your cue: there's a serious pairing premium loose leaf tea opportunity sitting here, largely still untapped.
• It's beautiful — and blissfully un-Kyoto. Green, lush, misty, tea-obsessed, and refreshingly not overrun with tour buses or gift-shop matcha lattes. It feels artisanal, not commercial. Any tea lover would want to be here; the fact that so few are yet is the point.
• Serving innovation here is properly exciting. Iced Gyokuro, cold-brewed Sencha, sparkling cold brews, new Oolongs and blacks, and a real revival of rare local cultivars including white leaf tea — this isn't a heritage region resting on tradition, it's one actively powering the new space of how loose leaf tea gets served. Watch this space.

Want to Join Our Community to Learn more about What we Do? 
https://tearebellion.com/pages/klaviyo-form

Browse Japanese Teas >  
https://tearebellion.com/collections/japan