Chapter 5 · 1 / 5
Temomi-Tea Will Change Your World
A thousand years ago, the tea called an elixir of long life was all hand-rolled. Why bringing hand-rolling back into daily life means bringing back tea itself, and tea culture with it.
The lessons are narrated in Japanese.
How to turn on English subtitles
- Start the video and click the CC button to switch captions on.
- Open Settings (the gear icon) → Subtitles/CC → Auto-translate.
- Choose English.
These are machine-translated from the Japanese captions, so expect some roughness — particularly around tea terminology. The text on this page is a proper translation, so read the two together.
Have you ever drunk tea rolled by hand — temomi tea?
The very idea of tea being made by human hands may be new to you. Most of what we see in supermarkets and convenience shops today is produced with machinery handling the bulk of the process.
Before mechanisation, though, nearly all tea was made by hand. Hand-rolled tea, sitting somewhere in the distant memory, is not merely nostalgia. Hand-rolled tea is what tea originally was.
More than a thousand years ago, in the age when tea was thought of as medicine — as an elixir of long life — the tea in question was unmistakably hand-rolled. Every tea culture there is takes hand-rolling as its premise.
To think about hand-rolled tea, and to bring it back into modern life, is to call tea as it was, and with it tea culture, back into daily living.
Hand-rolled tea is also, we believe, the tea that holds the most qi — that is, the most life energy, the most vitality. Careful processing that puts the least possible stress on the leaf draws out the most flavour, the most nutrition and the most vitality. Savour, aroma, texture and qi: hand-rolled tea is the tea in which all of these are preserved. The technique of hand-rolling, which produces leaf overflowing with energy, deserves to be called alchemy.
In an age without controlled air conditioning or electricity, hand-rolling was the ultimate solution wrung out by people who faced tea in earnest.
In Japan in particular, the technique developed rapidly during the Meiji period, when there was a national push to raise the quality of tea. Through competitions and judged events, craftsmen across the country improved their skill by contending with one another.
As we have seen, hand-rolled tea, holding all that preserved energy of the leaf, gives the drinker a particular experience. And for the maker, the work of producing it is itself a meditative experience. Hand-rolled tea offers a particular world both to the person who drinks it and to the person who makes it.
The operation of hand-rolling is at once the most primitive and, for so delicate a leaf, the most favourable means available.
In English, “momu” comes out as roll or knead, but the specific senses it carries in hand-rolling are various. Rolling the leaf back and forth horizontally, again and again. Rolling while pressing down more firmly, working the leaf in. Gathering the leaf so that it lies in one direction in the hand, then rolling it within the hand.
The aim of all of these is the same: to release the moisture from the leaf at the right rate, to draw the savoury compounds out of its cells, and to shape it.
We will look at this in detail in the next lesson.