G e n m a i c h a

This tea is a simple combination of Sencha tea grown in Kyoto, Japan and toasted brown rice. The humble origins of this tea blend comes from post WWII Japan where toasted rice was added to "stretch" a tea during uncertain and difficult times. Over time, it has grown into a popular staple in the tea world served both hot and chilled. Its distinct mildness with nutty and toasted character is refreshing and balanced.

Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, is renowned not only for its rich cultural heritage but also for its important role in Japan’s tea culture. While Kyoto is not the largest tea-growing region in Japan, it is highly respected for the quality of its tea, particularly green teas, which are produced in the surrounding areas of Uji, one of Japan's oldest and most prestigious tea-growing regions. Uji and Kyoto are inseparably linked when it comes to tea production, and the area is known for its historical significance and high-quality tea production.-

This tea offers a gentler option for those seeking the comforting warmth and taste of tea without a pronounced caffeine boost. While naturally much lower in caffeine than traditional black or green teas, decaf varieties still preserve the soothing aromas and subtle flavors that tea is known for. Whether sipped in the early morning or enjoyed as a mellow evening indulgence, decaf tea provides an easygoing alternative that allows tea lovers to savor familiar comforts at any time of day. With each cup, you can relish the same beloved qualities of tea—aroma, ritual, and gentle satisfaction—while keeping caffeine intake to a minimum.

Steamed, Roasted & Popped

Steamed, Roasted & Popped is a process that layers texture and taste, creating a tea that’s both familiar and unexpected. Steaming locks in fresh vibrancy, roasting deepens the body with toasty warmth, and popping introduces a subtle nuttiness that lingers. The result is a brew that’s dynamic yet balanced—bright, savory, and just a little bit wild.

Sencha is a popular Japanese green tea made from steamed and rolled tea leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant. It has a fresh, grassy, and slightly sweet flavor with subtle umami notes and a hint of astringency. The tea leaves are grown in full sunlight, giving Sencha its vibrant green color and high antioxidant content.

The steaming process, which is unique to Japanese green teas, helps preserve its vegetal and marine-like characteristics while preventing oxidation. When brewed properly, Sencha produces a bright green to yellowish-green liquor with a refreshing, crisp taste. It can range in flavor from light and delicate to rich and bold, depending on factors like harvest time and processing methods.

Sencha is often enjoyed as an everyday tea in Japan and is prized for its balance of sweetness, umami, and astringency, making it a great choice for those who appreciate a clean and revitalizing green tea.

Adding roasted brown rice to a green tea blend creates a nutty, toasty depth that balances the tea’s grassy and sometimes astringent notes. This combination, known as Genmaicha in Japan, results in a smooth, warming infusion with a slightly sweet, popcorn-like aroma. The roasted rice rounds out any bitterness from the green tea while adding a fuller body and a comforting, almost savory quality.

The natural starchiness of the rice also softens the mouthfeel, making the tea more mellow and easy to drink. This blend is excellent for those who enjoy green tea but want a more balanced, soothing flavor with a subtle roasted complexity.

613 BOXES

Our year-round rigorous sourcing allows us to have an evergreen blend with a flavor profile of high quality while retaining our commitment to seasonal coffees. This amount of cupping and blending takes a considerable amount of time, but we think it makes the difference and is a system we use for all our blends.

Day after day, producers, roasters, and cuppers alike all spend countless hours of work to produce and roast small, traceable lots that we within specialty coffee call microlots. Ranging anywhere from a few pounds to full containers, this nebulous category refers to a traceable single-origin, producer or even a specific picking date. We work on the producer or exporter level to separate, label, and import coffees that will ultimately end up as single-variety, single-producer lots. This directly works against the grain in a culture of commodification, as the machines turn to build the monolith that is (capital C) Coffee. Long has specialty coffee beat their drum to the tune of traceability, from the first producer's name listed on label, to now where we list prices paid to the producer and countless other details. As an industry, we continually hone in on what to communicate to consumers in the name of traceability. We do so to honor the hard work of producers while adhering to our skills as roasters, knowing that the combination of those two can be transcendent – where we have the lucky role in playing a hand in shifting the consumer perspective from the hegemony of commodity, to realizing that coffee is more complex than they ever realized. Is all that hard work keeping things separate worth it? That is up for you to decide…

Like many popular teas, genmaicha has an origin story rooted in folklore. It has been said that on a fateful morning in 15th century Japan, a group of samurai was meeting to discuss a war campaign. A clumsy servant, called Genmai, was pouring the tea when some grains of rice accidentally slipped from his sleeve into the cup.

Beyond the fable, genmaicha is also found in Japanese history during WWII. When resources were becoming scarce in Japan, both farmers & families would use roasted & popped rice to “stretch” their tea. This would allow any given harvest’s yield the ability to last longer and serve more individuals during uncertain and difficult times. After the war ended, the practice of adding roasted & popped rice to tea was discontinued, as it often reminded families of previous hard times. However, over the course of several generations, Genmaicha has grown to be popular again, and today it is a point of pride for many Japanese people. It is definitely a unique staple of the tea world.

JAPANESE GREEN TEA
In Japan, green tea plants are generally harvested three-four times a year. The first flush harvest in early Spring (around late April to early May) is called ichibancha ("first tea"), and usually brings the best-quality leaves. After plucking, the tea leaves undergo a variety of green tea processes, distinct from the processing that oolong and black teas undergo. The common processing methods for Japanese green tea can include variable rounds of fanning, cooling, tumbling, shaping, roasting, and (most distinctly from Chinese green tea) steaming. Semi-processed green teas, also known as aracha ("crude tea"), are stored in low-humidity refrigeration until they are ordered and ready to be sorted and packaged, at which point the tea is re-fired and refined to increase its shelf life and flavor.

ABOUT THE SACHETS
The pyramid tea sachets are designed to give the tea leaves ample room to unfurl & expand as they steep. These sachets are made from PLA Mesh (NeoSoilon®) material that is derived from 100% non-GMO sugar cane. Each sachet is pre-dosed so you can enjoy a great cup of tea at your convenience.

Green Cost

The price here reflects not only the labor of growing and cultivating the tea, but also the respective farm’s years of skilled handling, quality of regional cultivars, and oftentimes processing work that may include milling, drying, steaming, oxidation process, and more. We partner with friends like Savoy Tea Company to identify quality teas, where within we seek to uphold transparency and quality. Due to the varying weights of each type of tea, at this time, we are listing the rough cost for each tea box.

This tea was purchased at $130 per kilogram.

Transportation Cost

This number represents the cost incurred while the tea was moved from the producing country to Onyx Coffee Lab in Arkansas. The price listed below is the cost we incurred per box of tea via designated express micro-lot shipping by air transport. It varies for each tea based on the overall volume and density of the shipment.

The air transport rate was $50/kg.

Production Cost

The following list includes many of the costs associated with producing this tea. We have always maintained transparency as a principle but have often lumped these things under the label of “production costs” in the past without going into detail.

There is an inherent difference in handling tea versus coffee, where most teas are fully processed at a processing facility in the region or at the tea farm itself. There is intensely skilled labor that comes with the drying, oxidation, rolling, steaming and packing processes. Tea is also physically very delicate, and extra care is taken in handling each dried leaf or bud to maintain the structural integrity of tea.

While the following list isn’t exhaustive, hopefully, it gives you a picture of the work, expense, and investment involved in executing tea at the level that we do. At this time we are listing our cost of production for each pound of tea at around $3.40. There are obviously many other aspects of running a business such as breakage, mistakes, new equipment and maintenance, but this works as an arbitrary cost associated with making one box of tea.

Fixed Costs
These are costs associated with simply having a business. Things like utilities of internet, natural gas, phones, rent, business licenses, fees, etc. These things increase every year. For example, most commercial leases increase by 2% every year. We periodically look at these costs and try to reduce expenses, but work in this area are small moves of the needle as these are mostly the same and usually increase every year.

Packaging
This is all the things that go into packaging the tea to get it safely to your home. There’s the biodegradable bag, the recyclable box, the compostable mailer, different boxes for bulk shipping, the paper that pads the tea, tape, and a few odds and ends. (Read about our new retail packaging HERE). These costs are separate from the tea, but a part of the cost of producing tea that is packed well and ready to ship and consume. We want our teas to arrive in a secure fashion, looking like it did when it left Onyx: with style and design but also keeping the environment in mind. Shipping packages inevitably have waste associated and we’re working towards sustainability at each step.

Labor
At Onyx, we work to make jobs both sustainable and celebrated, and we pay salaries, provide health insurance, and give regular raises to our staff. Often we have a handful of staff that get celebrated, but everyone on our team contributes and is valuable. Likewise, we wish to pay our tea partner, Savoy Tea Co, for all their skilled labor in tea handling (from hand massaging oils to create phenomenal Earl Grey or the careful packaging of each tea box). Onyx is not just a brand or a design or a café, we are truly made by every person we work with.

We all know it takes work to make anything. Savoy’s sourcing approach echoes our own, which has more labor involved than you may think. Because we visit every Relationship Coffee producer, that means our green buying team of Jon and Dakota typically spend a total of six months traveling. We’re committed to visiting and cupping on the ground, this inevitably is an investment of time, of money, of long layovers, of encountering government coupes and protests, and forging some of the greatest friendships and seeing some of the most beautiful landscapes imaginable. We appreciate that in working with the Savoy Tea team, Bill and Kyle, put equal dedication into sourcing these teas.

We have a creative team that helps create all things visible, digital, and print. These folks are very talented and have really helped push the dream of Onyx to the next level. We believe that tea can inherently be great, but having something that looks and feels good helps inform expectations, helps bring value, and tells the stories in this way has tangible and important value.

These are a few of the jobs we feel really have more involvement than might be imagined, but throughout Onyx there are touch points of intentionally positioned team members to help create the best possible beverage experiences.

Taxes
We all know what this is. We set aside and submit money every quarter for taxes along with paying all of the weekly and monthly taxes we are obligated to pay. This can be tough for a small business as there are ebbs and flows in cash flow, and taxes are often not paid in conjunction with the sales season.

Lot Size

Lot size informs us of one thing: the size of that lot. Forming a single farm lot can often take just as much labor and experience as the large regional blends, depending on the level of labor or quality standards applied to each day or week’s pickings.

A great example of this would be matcha powder, which is often a carefully constructed sum of processed green teas that are often grown in different sections of a farm to create a balanced and intentional matcha experience. It may be built up of many different farms. This often signifies that the lot was built to reflect the flavor characteristics or unique cultivars of the region. Meanwhile, a larger lot size of a Yunnan black tea may end up being used in a variety of different teas, based on the final processing and any additional treatments before packaging.