Hello! I have recently moved to Japan. I am obsessed with tea and I am running out of what I brought from my home country. I have been searching on Amazon but that hasn’t been very successful – I can do tea bags (Ahmad), but I am curious if there is some, ideally online, shop where one can order a particular tea in a larger amount like 500g or 1kg. I love genmaicha and tried looking on Amazon again for that, but most of them are ridiculously small packaging or with added matcha, which I’m not a huge fan of.
So, to the fellow tea enthusiasts, where do you buy your tea, particularly loose leaf, any recommendations?
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not sure about amount/cost but Mariage Frères, Lupicia, and Gclef all sell loose leaf
It’s kind of expensive, but maybe [enherb](https://www.enherb.jp/shop/default.aspx?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shimei&argument=yVtSDnfh&dmai=a61724f6e312d7&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shimei&gclid=CjwKCAjw-rOaBhA9EiwAUkLV4l723aGPMvdt7PTDJmwpklA-qx4xrSChJ-LuwgSKgbwTUzxD53hwZRoCXUMQAvD_BwE)?
In person, black tea, not some flavoured tish: Gclef.
I ordered some proper darjeeling from [Hojo](https://hojotea.com) before. Pretty ancient site but the tea was good.
Any high end grocery store or a store that stocks a lot of imported food, for example Kaldi will have a good tea selection.
Where do you live? I am near Shizuoka and 深蒸し茶 is the bomb and hella cheap. It’s what all the old folks around here drink. We buy 1kg for 1,000 yen.
Can’t recommend LUPICIA enough. They have delicious teas and if you spend ¥3000 and get a membership card you will get six months of free tea mailed to you once a month
[Obubu tea farms](https://obubutea.com/): directly from the tea farm, loose-leaf straight/unflavored teas like wakocha (Japanese black tea), sencha, gyokuro, genmaicha, etc. etc., also teas like kyobancha and oolongs.
[The Tea Crane](https://www.the-tea-crane.com/shop/): organic, pesticide-free, mostly single-cultivar teas, most from very small, local farmers in various regions across Japan, also loose-leaf straight teas like wakocha, gyokuro, etc.
Larger amounts aren’t listed online for either but you might be able to message and ask. I volunteered at obubu and bought a kilo of genmaicha from them with a volunteer discount.
[verygoodtea](http://www.verygoodtea.com/): I used to visit their physical shop in Kyoto before it closed and it had a good selection of both flavored tea like caramel chai, and traditional tea like genmaicha and soba tea
I’ve had a good one from Mlesna but it seems like all their teas are flavored, nothing like regular genmaicha. Still, quite good and I wanna say the tea is at least sourced in Japan? Lupicia even more so–unless they’ve changed drastically since I went a few years ago they do not have straight unflavored teas.
Edit: also Ippodo is one of the bigger brands that I’m pretty sure is actually pretty decent, others are much more commercialized
Here’s straight Genmaicha available in large sizes via Amazon.com
玄米茶の素 GGG-B (500g) https://amzn.asia/d/gAWFef0
It shows 500g, but they also have 1000g
Or, you could buy directly from their website.
https://genmaicha.jp/
Ippodo might have some Genmaicha.
Depends on what kind of tea you want. You already have some good recommendations here. But, I want to add China town in Yokohama. You can get some really good stuff from there. I’m a sucker for a quality gun-powder.