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Tea and Terps · Episode 7
Nik and Travis follow a harvest after it is cut: how a flower dries, what curing is for, and why the same resin tastes different as hash, rosin or extract. In the cup is Noma, an autumn hojicha from Maruhachi, one of the best-known makers of Kaga bocha, the roasted stem tea.
The cup
Noma is the autumn hojicha of Maruhachi, a tea maker in Kaga, Ishikawa, best known for roasted stem tea. Hojicha is green tea that has been roasted, and this one is made from the Fujikaori cultivar, a mix of leaves and stems. Nik brought it back from his trip to Japan.
He brewed it Western style for the show, in the thermos he carries everywhere. On air he described a roasted cup, nutty and close to toffee or kettle corn, with a grape-like fruitiness he traces to the cultivar and a quiet sweetness that grows the more you drink.
What Nik noticed
Special notes
Fujikaori’s aromatic character meets the warmth of roasting.
From Maruhachi's accounts of its 2022 and 2023 autumn Noma. The details of the 2026 lot have not been confirmed.
| The name | Hojicha | Bocha |
|---|---|---|
| What it names | How the tea is finished: roasted | What it is made from: stems |
| Material | Leaves, stems or both | Stems sorted from green tea |
| An example | Nik's Noma, leaves and stems | Kaga bocha |
A tea can be both: Kaga bocha is a roasted stem tea. Kyoto Prefectural Tea Industry Chamber; Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.
Chapter by chapter
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The maker's craft
When green tea is made, the leaves are sorted and graded, and for a long time the stems and twigs that came out of that sorting were treated as waste. They were thrown away, composted or fed to animals. In 1902 a Kanazawa tea merchant, Shinbei Hayashiya, began roasting those stems, and his roasted stem tea became popular for its aroma and its modest price. Over the following decades makers in Ishikawa refined both the choice of stems and the roast, and in 1983 Kaga bocha was presented to the Showa Emperor.
Nik tells the story as a lesson in craft. The stems themselves did not change; what changed was a maker who studied the material and built a process around it. Maruhachi, the company behind his Noma, is one of the best-known names in bocha today. On air Nik placed the emperor's cup in the 1970s; the record cited here gives 1983.
if you process it the right way and if you take your time and you develop techniques around it, like, it can turn into something really, really tasty.
Nik
Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Kaga bocha in its record of traditional foods.
Roast and fruit
Noma is roasted, so you would expect the roast to cover everything else: Nik tastes nuts, toffee and something close to kettle corn. Yet the cup also tastes of grapes, and he traces that to the cultivar. Fujikaori descends from an Assam-type parent, and a 2004 study of Japanese tea cultivars detected methyl anthranilate, the compound behind the scent of Concord grapes, in Fujikaori and its relatives. Nobody has tested Nik's bag, so the link is a strong lead rather than a measurement.
The roast decides how much of that fruit reaches the cup. Maruhachi describes roasting its autumn Noma lightly so that the cultivar's fruit and flowers stay. The stems add their own part. When researchers roasted stems and leaves from the same tea plants, the roasted stems carried more of the roasty pyrazines and more of the floral alcohols linalool and geraniol, both familiar to cannabis growers. One of the study's authors worked at Maruhachi.
you have to pair the roasting technique with the specific expression of the cultivar in order to get it to retain its fruitiness after it's been roasted
Nik
| In the cup | Roasted stems | Roasted leaves |
|---|---|---|
| Where they come from | Stems sorted from the harvest | Leaves from the same plants |
| Roasty pyrazines | More: More | Less |
| Floral linalool and geraniol | More: More | Less |
Sasaki and colleagues, 2017, with stems and leaves from the same Yabukita plants. Methyl anthranilate in Fujikaori: Sawai and colleagues, 2004.
Drying
Ask about drying and someone will say 60/60: sixty degrees Fahrenheit and sixty percent relative humidity in the drying room. Travis tried it once, years ago, and it was the only time clean flower molded on him in the dry room. Nik thinks the number is repeated because it is easy to remember, not because every harvest needs it.
Flowers come to harvest in different shapes. Buds from a hot summer flowering room open up and turn airy, dense buds hold their water longer, and some cultivars mold far more easily than others. Nik's advice is to use 60/60 as a reference point, fit the first days of a dry to the flowers you actually grew, and learn how each cultivar behaves over several harvests. The research points the same way: no one drying method is best for every cultivar or every aroma.
there's wiggle room in these these variables. You do wanna have some room to play with.
Nik
| When drying | Treated as a rule | Treated as a baseline |
|---|---|---|
| The starting point | The same settings for every harvest | 60/60 as a reference |
| Airy buds from a hot room | Dried like any other | Watched for drying faster |
| A cultivar that molds easily | Treated like the rest | Watched closely while it is wettest |
| What decides | The number on the controller | The flower in front of you |
Drying methods compared within single cultivars changed which aromas were kept, while cannabinoids changed less (Mallis and colleagues, 2026; Spadafora and colleagues, 2024).
Water
Growers often talk about how wet a flower is as if it were one number. Nik separates three. Water content is how much water the flower holds. Water activity is how available that water is, and it decides whether mold and other microbes can grow. Water potential is how tightly the water is held and which way it will move: always from higher water potential to lower, and that is the force that drives drying.
Keeping the three apart explains a common mistake. If the outside of a bud dries too fast, it turns brittle while the inside is still wet, and the feel of the flower stops telling you much. Stickiness can come from resin rather than water, which is why Nik calls touch a skill but not a replacement for a meter. Published storage standards for dried flower are written in water activity, not in percent moisture, for the same reason.
If you think about water like money, water content is how much money is in the bank, water activity is how much of that money is readily available to spend, and water potential is the driving force that determines where the money flows.
Nik
ASTM D8197-22 sets the water activity of dried cannabis flower in storage at 0.55 to 0.65. Nik gave this range on air as a water potential; the standard states it as water activity.
Drying into curing
Late in the episode Travis asks the question many growers carry: is there a clear line where drying stops and curing starts? Nik's answer is that nobody flips a switch. Freshly cut flower is the wettest it will ever be, and drying moves that water out along a curve, quickly at first and more slowly as the flower nears balance with the air around it. Somewhere on that curve the water stops being a risk to the flower, and that is where he places the turn.
Drying is about the water. Curing is about everything else in the flower, above all the contents of the trichome heads, and about holding a stable setting for them: temperature, humidity, light and the air. Travis applies the same idea to a whole room. He keeps finished flower in a climate-controlled room that he treats as one big jar, and he cares more about the room than about the container the flower sits in.
the path to equilibrium is curved, meaning it's not linear.
Nik
Drying models describe the same picture: water moves from the wet interior to the drier surface, at a speed set by the bud's shape and density (de Melo and colleagues, 2023).
Light and oxygen
Nobody adds new molecules to cured flower or a piece of hash, but the ones already there can change. Nik's favorite example is hashishene. In 2014, researchers studying the aroma of hashish found a rare compound that had not been described before, named it hashishene, and showed that it forms when light rearranges beta-myrcene, one of the most common terpenes in cannabis. The open chain of carbon atoms folds back on itself and closes into two rings.
The reaction needs more than light. Nik explained that a sensitizer, a molecule that takes in the light's energy and passes it on, has to be present, and he suspects that the oxygen flower and hash meet during drying, sifting and handling can play that part. He also pointed out that hashishene forms as a mix of mirror-image forms, which suggests light rather than an enzyme is doing the work. That is his reading of the research; how much hashishene forms in ordinary flower is still an open question.
you basically have two rings that are formed when the carbon atoms kinda fold in on themselves, and it's light induced.
Nik
Marchini and colleagues, 2014, in hashish samples. The finding does not mean that every hash aroma comes from myrcene.
Real structures
Two from the cup and two from the jar, rendered from real PubChem geometry rather than drawn. Pick one to read why it matters, then turn it in three dimensions.
The scent of Concord grapes, and a compound found in Fujikaori, the tea cultivar behind Nik's Noma. It is an ester, not a terpene, a reminder that a terpene test does not cover every aroma.
Structure data: PubChem open chemistry database
A floral terpene alcohol found in both of this show's plants. Roasted tea stems carried more of it than roasted leaves from the same plants.
Structure data: PubChem open chemistry database
One of the most common terpenes in cannabis, an open chain of ten carbons. With light and a sensitizer present, it can rearrange into hashishene.
Structure data: PubChem open chemistry database
The same ten carbons and sixteen hydrogens as myrcene, closed into two rings. Researchers named it in 2014 after finding it in hashish.
Structure data: PubChem open chemistry database
Drag to rotate. Scroll or use +/- to zoom.
Washing and extraction
After harvest, the same flower can go down many roads. It can be dried, cured and smoked as flower. Dried flower can be sifted into kief and pressed into hash, or pressed into rosin. Fresh flower can be frozen and washed in ice water, and the hash pressed into live rosin, or it can go to a solvent extraction and become live resin. As Travis put it, live resin, live rosin, cured resin and cured rosin from the same crop are four different products.
The roads differ in what they separate. Washing in ice water knocks the trichome heads off the plant and collects them whole, so the anatomy of a cultivar's trichomes decides how well it washes. A solvent instead takes whatever dissolves in it. Nik stresses that a hydrocarbon solvent dissolves the terpenes rather than oxidizing them, and yet the same flower washed and pressed tastes and feels different from the same flower extracted with a solvent. Studies of one cultivar extracted in different ways agree that the method changes the chemical profile.
I think solvent extraction is really interesting because it's really asking the question of, like, what is soluble here that I can take out?
Nik
| What happens | Washing in ice water | Solvent extraction |
|---|---|---|
| What it collects | Whole trichome heads | The molecules that dissolve |
| How it separates | By structure: heads break off and are sieved | By solubility: like dissolves like |
| Trichome anatomy | More: Decides how well a cultivar washes | Matters less |
| The chemistry | A physical separation | Dissolving, not oxidation |
One cultivar extracted by different methods gave different chemical profiles (Bowen and colleagues, 2021). How trichomes separate varies with genotype (Punja and colleagues, 2023).
Moments worth rewinding
Moments from the clip archive. Each one plays the full episode from where it starts.
Stems sorted out of green tea were once thrown away or composted. Nik tells how roasting them turned a byproduct into bocha, a tea people now seek out.
Roasted stems from the same tea plants carried more roasty pyrazines and more floral linalool and geraniol than the leaves. One of the researchers worked at Maruhachi.
Springy, brittle and sticky are real observations, Nik says, but stickiness can come from resin rather than water. Touch is a skill, not a replacement for a meter.
Nik treats 60/60 as a baseline: airy buds from a hot summer room or a cultivar that molds easily may need a different start.
Before deciding what a cultivar is good for, look at its trichomes. Their anatomy decides how well a strain washes, while solvent extraction cares less about it.
Dry-sift hash keeps for a long time. Fresh press rosin starts glassy and bubbly, then softens toward jam or batter as soft crystals form.
Once the water no longer puts the flower at risk, Nik says, the focus moves to the trichome heads and to the setting they are kept in.
Keep listening
Episode 7 follows a harvest after it is cut, from drying and curing to hash and extracts.
Episode 6 · The one beforeFlavors and Oriental BeautyHow a plant's chemistry becomes a flavor, over an oolong made from leaves that insects have bitten.
Episode 5Pigments and GyokuroPigments and gyokuro: the colors of a leaf, from chlorophyll to anthocyanins.
Episode 1 · Where it beganCarbon and Fenghuang OolongCarbon, the element plants are built from, over a cup of Phoenix oolong.
