Ki No Tea: A Kyoto Gin Built With a 19th-Century Uji Tea House

Japan didn't have a distillery devoted entirely to gin until 2014.

That year Noriko Kakuda Croll, David Croll and Marcin Miller opened The Kyoto Distillery with a single aim: make the best dry gin they could, using Japanese botanicals of the highest quality available.

Ki No Tea is what happens when they hand the project to a tea house.

The Collaboration

Ki No Tea was made with Hori-Shichimeien, a tea grower and blender founded in 1879 in Uji, the region just south of Kyoto that has been the center of Japanese green tea for centuries.

The gin uses tencha and gyokuro, both shade-grown leaves, both expensive, both prized for umami and sweetness rather than briskness. Tencha is the leaf that gets ground into matcha. Distilling either is a serious commitment of material.

The rest of the botanical recipe is specific to Ki No Tea and isn't published.

Where It Sits Next to Ki No Bi

The distillery's flagship, Ki No Bi, is built on eleven botanicals: juniper, yellow yuzu, akamatsu red pine, red shiso leaves, bamboo leaves, ginger, lemon, orris, Uji gyokuro, green sansho and kinome, the leaf of the sansho tree.

Ki No Tea takes that same house sensibility and puts the tea at the front instead of holding it in the blend.

What It Tastes Like

The teas bring intense aroma and real depth, with a sweetness that comes out of the distillation itself rather than from anything added.

It reads as savory and green, closer to how good gyokuro actually tastes than to a "green tea flavored" spirit. The juniper is still there underneath. It's a gin, not a tea liqueur.

How to Drink It

A gin and tonic works, but use a light tonic and don't drown it. Heavy quinine buries the leaf.

Better: a martini, very cold, with minimal vermouth. Or simply over ice with a strip of yuzu peel, which is what we'd pour for someone who wants to actually taste it.

Pair It With

Delicate things. Handrolls, crispy rice, agedashi tofu, seaweed salad.

The savory green quality also does something good next to inaka mushroom handrolls.

Try It at Juraku

Ki No Tea is on the gin list at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side. If you like our Gyokuro shochu, this is the same idea from the other direction.