How to Brew Hojicha at Home — and Roast Your Own

Sencha punishes you for boiling water. Hojicha asks for it.

That one inversion is most of what you need to know. Hojicha (ほうじ茶) is Japanese green tea that has been roasted after it was made — sencha, bancha or tea stems taken over high heat until the leaf turns from green to a reddish brown. What comes out of the pot is amber rather than green, smells of toast and roasted grain rather than cut grass, and has very little of the bitterness that makes people nervous about green tea. It is the tea served in a big pot after dinner, the one poured for children and grandparents, and the easiest Japanese tea there is to brew well.

It is also the one tea you can make yourself, at the stove, in about two minutes.

The short answer

• Leaf: about 5 g — a generous tablespoon. Roasted leaf is light and bulky, so it looks like more than it is.
• Water: 90–100°C. Boiling is fine.
• Time: 20–30 seconds. Short, and that’s the point.
• Pot: bigger than your sencha pot — a top-handled kyusu or a dobin, if you have one.
• Caffeine: lower than its reputation suggests if you brew it strong. Not caffeine-free.

What hojicha is

Every hojicha starts life as an ordinary green tea. The leaf is picked, steamed, rolled and dried in the usual way, and then — the extra step — roasted. The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture’s description of Kyoto’s Uji tea lists hojicha simply as tea “made by roasting sencha or kawayanagi”, the latter a grade made from larger leaves.

In practice, three kinds of base material dominate:

• Bancha — later-season, larger leaf. The everyday hojicha of most Japanese households, and the most common in tea bags.
• Sencha — sweeter and more expensive; roasted sencha gives a rounder, more delicate cup.
• Stems (kuki or bō) — roasted stem tea, called bōcha (棒茶). Lighter, sweeter, very clean. The most famous is from Ishikawa (see below).

The roast does two things. It browns the leaf, and in doing so builds the aromatic compounds — pyrazines prominent among them — that give hojicha its toasty smell. And it changes the leaf chemistry enough that the cup comes out with little of green tea’s astringency. That is why boiling water doesn’t ruin it: there is far less bitterness left to drag out.

Where it came from

Hojicha’s origin is less documented than sencha’s. The story usually told is that it began in Kyoto in the 1920s, when a tea merchant roasted leftover leaf and stems rather than throw them away — but that account rests on tradition rather than any clear record, and some writers suggest roasted tea was being made earlier. What is clear is the role it settled into: a cheap, warming, forgiving everyday tea, made from the parts of the harvest that weren’t going to be sold as sencha.

Kyoto has its own, odder cousin. Kyōbancha (京番茶) is a roasted tea made from large leaves of the third or fourth picking — big, flat and crumpled, and quite unlike the neat brown needles of a typical hojicha. It is very much a local tea, but worth knowing about if you see it.

Kaga bōcha: the stem tea of Ishikawa

If you go looking for good hojicha, you will run into Kaga bōcha (加賀棒茶) — roasted stem tea from Kaga and Kanazawa, in Ishikawa on the Japan Sea coast. Kanazawa is the city where hojicha is the default tea; the prefecture’s food association says plainly that in Kanazawa, tea is synonymous with roasted tea, and with bōcha most of all.

Its fame dates from 1983, when the Kaga roaster Maruhachi Seichajō presented a special hōjicha made from the stems of the year’s first picking to the Shōwa Emperor. That tea uses a careful, light roast — meant to keep the aroma of the green tea underneath rather than bury it in toast — and the maker’s brewing advice is about as simple as tea instructions get: boiling water, 25 seconds. The result should be a clear, bright amber.

Stem tea is an excellent place to start. It’s forgiving, naturally sweet, and the lighter roast makes it easier to taste the difference between one hojicha and another.

What you need

• A larger pot. Hojicha is brewed in volume, drunk freely, and refilled. A kyusu of 350 ml or more is ideal, and the top-handled uwade style is often used for exactly this — we go through handle types in Choosing a Kyusu.
• Or a dobin (土瓶). The traditional big-pot answer: a rounder teapot with a bail-style handle arching over the lid, made for bancha and roasted teas and for pouring for a whole table. Older dobin were made to sit over the fire. Many modern ones are not, so check before you put one on a burner.
• Thick cups. Hojicha is drunk hot, so the stoneware yunomi with a flared hatazori rim — which keeps the hot rim off your lip — is the natural partner. More in Yunomi: The Japanese Teacup.

No thermometer. That’s the luxury of this tea.

The method

1. Boil the water. Fully. Unlike sencha, you don’t cool it.
2. Warm the pot. Pour a little hot water in, swirl, pour it out. Roasted leaf likes a hot pot.
3. Leaf in. About 5 g per 180 ml — scale up for a bigger pot.
4. Pour boiling water straight on. The smell that rises at this moment is half the reason to drink hojicha.
5. Wait 20–30 seconds. Not minutes. Hojicha’s flavour comes out fast, and a long steep turns it flat and woody rather than bitter.
6. Pour it all out. Same rule as sencha: empty the pot to the last drop, so the leaf isn’t stewing while you drink.
7. Second steep, also with boiling water, about the same length. Hojicha gives a good second cup and a weaker third — fewer infusions than a fine sencha, which is part of why it’s brewed generously.

The caffeine question

Hojicha is widely sold as a low-caffeine tea, and it is often the tea poured for children or drunk late in the evening. The roast is often said to drive off some caffeine, and bancha — the usual raw material — tends to carry less than the young leaf of the first and second flush to begin with.

But it isn’t caffeine-free, and the numbers are less dramatic than the marketing. Japan’s official food composition tables list a standard hojicha infusion at about the same caffeine per 100 g as sencha — roughly 20 mg — though they brew it in a different way: 15 g of hojicha in 650 ml of 90°C water for 30 seconds, against 10 g of sencha in 430 ml for a minute. A cup of hojicha brewed light will be gentler than a cup of sencha brewed strong. A strong pot of hojicha is not decaf.

If you need to avoid caffeine entirely, the Japanese answer is mugicha — roasted barley tea — not hojicha.

Roasting your own

Here is the part no other green tea offers. Because hojicha is just green tea plus heat, you can make it at home, and freshly roasted hojicha is noticeably more aromatic than anything that has sat in a bag. It’s also the best possible use for sencha or bancha that has gone stale in the caddy — the roast covers the flatness that old leaf develops.

The traditional tool is a houroku (焙烙) — a shallow clay roasting pan used in Japanese kitchens for tea, sesame and beans. The tea version has a hollow handle that doubles as a spout: you shake the leaf over the flame, then tip it out through the handle without spilling. Clay pans like this were ordinary household flameware — the kilns of Iga, for one, made hōroku alongside donabe and dobin (Iga Ware).

You don’t need one. A clean, dry pan works, as long as it’s never had oil in it — the leaf will pick up anything the pan smells of.

1. Choose the leaf. Bancha or stem tea is the easiest and cheapest to learn on. Sencha works too and gives a sweeter result.
2. Heat the pan or houroku over medium-low heat. Clay needs a gas flame; it won’t work on most induction hobs.
3. Add a small handful of leaf — 10–20 g — and keep it moving, shaking the pan or stirring with a wooden spoon. Never let it sit.
4. Watch the colour and follow your nose. Over a minute or two the leaf darkens from green to brown and the kitchen fills with a roasted smell. A thin wisp of smoke means you are almost there.
5. Stop before it goes black. Over-roasted leaf tastes burnt, and it goes from brown to black quickly. Take it off a little early rather than a little late.
6. Tip it out at once into a dish or onto paper to cool — leaving it in the hot pan keeps it cooking.
7. Brew it soon. Fresh roast is the whole point, and home-roasted leaf loses its aroma quickly — roast small batches, often.

Let a clay houroku cool down on its own before it goes anywhere near water — sudden temperature changes are what crack unglazed clay. And keep it for tea: once it smells of sesame, so will your hojicha.

Cold, and in milk

Hojicha cold-brews well. Its roasted flavour comes through even in cold water, and there’s little bitterness to manage. Try about 10 g of leaf per litre of cold water, a few hours in the fridge, then strain. Drink it within a day.

Hojicha powder — roasted tea ground fine, the roasted equivalent of matcha — is also what most cafés use for the hojicha latte, which has become a fixture in Japan and beyond. Whisked into hot milk it gives a toasty, coffee-adjacent drink with far less of coffee’s edge.

Keeping it

Hojicha is more robust than sencha — there’s less fresh, grassy aroma to lose — but the roast fades too. Keep it sealed, cool and dark, and finish an opened bag within a few weeks. Give it a caddy of its own: hojicha’s smell is assertive, and it will haunt a tin that later holds sencha. Why, and which caddy, in Chazutsu: Choosing a Japanese Tea Caddy.

What to reach for

Building the kit: a larger kyusu, a pair of stoneware cups and a tin that’s just for roasted tea will cover everything here. Browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped tea ware on The Table.

The rule underneath it all: hojicha is a hot, short, generous brew. Boil the water, keep the steep under half a minute, make more than you think you need. If you want the opposite discipline — cooler water, smaller cups, three careful infusions — that’s How to Brew Sencha at Home.

Sources & Further Reading

• Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries — Uji Tea — The Japanese government’s description of Kyoto’s tea types, including hojicha as roasted sencha or kawayanagi, and kyōbancha from the third and fourth pickings.
• Global Japanese Tea Association — Japanese Tea Brewing — The hot-brew parameters (5 g, 180 ml, 90–100°C, 20–30 seconds) the association recommends for hojicha, genmaicha and bancha.
• Ministry of Education (MEXT) — Standard Tables of Food Composition, Beverages — Japanese-language notes on how the official tables brew hojicha and sencha before measuring them, which is why the caffeine figures aren’t directly comparable cup for cup.
• Visit Kaga — Kaga Bōcha Tea Specialist — Kaga City’s tourism site on Maruhachi Seichajō, the 1983 stem tea presented to the Shōwa Emperor, and the light roast behind it.