Den's Tea Inc.
Den's Tea is a Japanese Green Tea specialist dedicated to supplying the freshest and the most authentic Japanese Green Tea in North America. All teas - loose, bagged and powdered - offered by Den's Tea are manufactured by our parent company, Shirakata-Denshiro Shoten in Shizuoka, Japan with 90 years of experience in Japanese Green tea. We hope that we can be your source of both information and quality products.
The discovery of tea is steeped in legend and there are quite a few stories. One of Den's favorite legends is a story of Emperor Shen Nong in the 28th century BC, China. He was a scholar and the father of Chinese herbal medicine. During his journeys through hills and fields and ate 72 different kinds of plants to find out whether they were medicine or poison. The legend said that he took tea whenever he felt he was poisoned. Although we don't know if he ate a tea leaf or drank a liquid, it's interesting that "tea" began as a medicine.
In Japan, tea culture was brought from China in the 8th century. At that time, Japanese Buddhist monks were studying religion and the latest cultures in China. Whenever they returned to Japan, many new cultures were introduced, and TEA was one of them.
Eizai was one of the Buddhist monks who loomed large in the spotlight throughout Japanese tea history. Eizai studied in China in the 13th century, and upon his return to Japan he brought a completely new style of tea. The tea was made from steamed raw leaves and then milled by a quern into a powder. This what we now call Matcha. Eizai also wrote a book, "Maintaining Health by Drinking Tea", that was the first book about tea in Japan. When he spread the Rinzai sect that is Zen Buddhism, Matcha was a necessity for Zen training and ceremonies. While the Rinzai sect was spreading to the Samurai and upper classes, the tea drinking habit was doing the same. Over the next several hundred years, tea drinking gradually became entertainment, and the tea ceremony, "SADO", was established as an art culture.
In the 14th century, another Buddhist Monk returning from China also brought back lessons of Chinese tea culture. This monk named Shouichi Kokushi, settled in Honyama, Shizuoka. It was on the choicest lands in Honyama that Shouichi Kokushi spread the tea seeds he carried back from China. Shizuoka has since been referred to as "Tea Town". This was the beginning of tea as the beverage of choice for the Japanese people.
https://www.facebook.com/DensTeaInc/
Explore Related Categories
