Coedo Sayama Tea Saison: Why Saison Is the Right Beer for Tea

Brewing with green tea sounds like an easy win and mostly is not. Tea is astringent and bitter, beer is usually a little sweet, and put together carelessly they taste like something went wrong in the kettle. Coedo picked the one style where it actually resolves.

Sayama Tea

Japan has three tea regions that get named together, and there is an old line about them: Shizuoka for colour, Uji for aroma, Sayama for flavour.

Sayama is in Saitama, and it is the northernmost of the major growing regions. That is the whole story. Cold winters mean the plants grow slowly and the leaves come out thicker, holding more stored sugar than leaves from warmer regions. Fewer harvests, more concentrated leaf.

The region also has its own finishing technique, a strong final firing, which pushes the tea toward a rich roasted depth rather than delicacy. Sayama tea is not the subtle one. It is the one with body.

This beer uses hand-picked Yabukita, the cultivar that accounts for the large majority of Japanese tea.

Why Saison

A saison is a Belgian farmhouse ale, historically brewed to be drunk by farm workers through the summer. Two things define it.

It is very dry. The yeast ferments out further than most, so there is little residual sugar left to fight with the tea.

And the yeast throws phenols. Saison strains produce peppery, spicy, faintly clove-like compounds as a by-product of fermentation. That spice is not added, it is the yeast, and it happens to sit in the same register as green tea's own vegetal sharpness.

So the tea is not being layered onto a sweet beer. It is being added to a dry, peppery one that was already going in that direction. The tannin from the tea reads as structure instead of as a fault, and the citrus character of the hops ties the two together.

Coedo's own tasting note calls it a complicated balance of spice, green tea and citrusy hop aroma, which is a fair description of exactly that three-way arrangement.

Coedo

Coedo is in Kawagoe, Saitama, a town whose nickname Ko-Edo means little Edo, after the surviving merchant streets there.

They have built a reputation on taking a specific local agricultural product and building a beer around it properly rather than as a gimmick. We pour several: Shiro, an unfiltered wheat beer with banana and clove; Kyara, a copper lager built on six malts; Beniaka, an amber ale brewed with roasted Kintoki sweet potatoes from Saitama; and Marihana, a session IPA built around hop timing.

The sweet potato one is the clearest statement of what they do. It should be a novelty and it is not.

What to Eat With It

Fried things, without hesitation. Karaage especially. The dryness and the tannin both cut fat, and this is the beer equivalent of the wedge of citrus you would squeeze over it anyway.

It is on draft while it lasts, which for a limited release usually means not very long.