Hello, has anyone compared a kabazaiku vs a kaikado container? I'm wondering which one might be better to store sencha.
I suspect the tolerances might be better on the kaikado, making the sealing tighter but the cherry bark tea caddies have apparently the advantage of absorbing excess moisture from the leaves.
Kabazaiku vs Kaikado?
I can't speak directly to the quality of Kaikado wares and it's impact on the tea, but I've been impressed by my Sakura bark containers keeping delicate Japanese greens and low roast/no roast oolongs. They lose very little over the couple of weeks that it takes me to go through a container's worth.
How long do you plant to store tea in them? My experience is that sencha goes bad rapidly outside of a Mylar bag. I might store it in a container for no more than a month. The only wood one I bought ended up having a strong odor from the finish that I was never able to clear. This would obviously transfer to the tea so I never used it.
I store my sencha in a container for 2 weeks max, the rest goes in individual doses in my freezer. But to my question I guess that there is no concensus on what’s better to store sencha between a kaikado and a kabazaiku? Would be a nice experiment if someone has both. I already have a quite expensive kabazaiku which is completely odourless inside, I might get a kaikado just to compare them then.
I should mention another solution that often comes up here....some people put the mylar bags *inside* pretty outer containers, whether washi or sakura or ceramic caddies. So you buy the one you want to look at, and leave the tea in the bag inside. I started out doing that but then realize for my daily teas I generally can go through them fast enough. And the Sakura caddie are just fine for the less delicate teas, like roasted oolong or balhyocha or puerh of the week or month. My ceramic caddy does not seal so well, but also gets daily use as storage for broken up bars of chocolate: the nibble-sized pieces help control the chocolate addiction, and the caddy sits on the tea table because fine chocolate and fine tea go so well together.
