Even though tea comes in various flavours these days, there are many who love to make it the traditional way. However, it seems that Japan has decided to go on an altogether different path. A postgraduate student at Kyoto University has been making tea with caterpillar excreta.
Chu-hi-cha tea is a kind of tea brewed by using the excreta of caterpillars. The flavour and aroma of the tea vary based on the leaves that the caterpillar eats and their faeces, and this became the basis of Tsuyoshi Maruoka’s experiment of trying 40 different combinations and analysing which worked the best.
According to Japanese media reports, Takeshi stated that the tea from the leaves of sakura or apple trees have a fruity aroma. They have merit as healthy teas, too, and because they don’t need to be heated up during production, they’re better for the environment.
Takeshi has been doing research on the tea in the hope to commercialise it.
Maruoka is currently pursuing his master’s course in agriculture at the university and is about to finish his degree this year. A resident of Kyoto’s Sakyo Ward, the student has raised gypsy moth larvae on sakura leaves using the large stockpile of caterpillars that his senior colleagues had acquired. Maruoka tried pouring boiling water over some of the larvae’s dried excreta and drinking it in May 2021. He realised that the concoction had a similar taste and aroma to black tea, and it gave him hopes of making a consistently flavorful brew out of moth larvae droppings.
Maruoka tried making a fragrant and flavourful tea that would not feel any different from the traditional tea for which he took samples of plants and insects from several areas. He set up his operation with some 20 insect varieties including the Asian swallowtail and seeds from 17 plant species including corn and mikan mandarin oranges. From all the various combinations, Maruoka’s team discovered two permutations that turned out to be “truly delicious”.
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