Being forced to breathe someone’s fragrance is like being forced to breathe secondhand smoke without the haven of going indoors. While my sensitivity to fragrance brought on headaches, nausea and an inability to concentrate, thankfully, it’s not triggered by my two favourite smells: roasting coffee and roasting green tea.
In Japan, you’re bound to run into a tea shop with a machine out front roasting hōjicha. (Coffee roasters can be found too, but they’re not as prevalent). You can smell it’s pleasant enveloping aroma long before you see the store. And this is Nestlé KitKat Itokyuemon Hoji Cha, a collaboration between the roasted tea of Uji’s long-established teahouse, Itohkyuemon, and Kit Kat. It’s a regional KitKat limited to Uji in Kyōto.
This KitKat consisted of fragrant wafers sandwiching a hōjicha cream and enrobed in a hōjicha flavoured white chocolate.
From its smell to its taste, there is no mistaking that this is a hōjicha flavoured KitKat. Its flavour was much like a creamy hōjicha latte, with initial sweet notes before a fragrant and rich roasted tea flavour developed in the body with a creamy mouthfeel as the chocolate melts, leaving the roasted tea notes lingering long and pleasantly into the aftertaste. More than green tea flavoured products, this KitKat transports me back to the enveloping aroma of tea shops in Japan.
And to finish is a photo of the box for the same flavour of KitKat from 2011 containing 5 mini bars.
The box of Nestlé KitKat Itokyuemon Hoji Cha contained 12 mini bars. It was produced in Japan and purchased in Uji, Kyōto, Japan in 2015.