"Organic" is one of the most traveled words in food. It appears on packaging, in menus, in marketing copy so reliably that somewhere along the way it stopped meaning much at all. You see it, you nod, you move on. What it actually looks like — the land itself, the conditions that earn the word, what it means to trust it — most of us have never had reason to think about.
We did, on the final day of the Kim'C Market Culinary Odyssey, in Boseong.
The Far End of the Map
Boseong sits in the southwestern corner of South Korea, in South Jeolla Province, where the hills hold moisture and the temperature swings hard between day and night. It is the country's most celebrated tea-growing region — not by reputation alone, but by geography. The fog comes in thick, the soil drains well, and the slow accumulation of cool nights and warm afternoons produces a leaf with more complexity than the same plant grown in steadier conditions.
Bohyang Dawon has been farming this land since 1937, when Jaehyung Choi first planted tea trees on the hillside. Four generations have tended the same fields since. Today, Choi Young-ki, the fourth-generation head of the family, runs the estate across roughly 16 acres of certified organic farmland — a commitment that, in Korean agriculture, remains genuinely unusual. His son Joonyong, the fifth generation, works alongside him.
Ryan Kim, the founder of Kim'C Market, has been sourcing from Bohyang Dawon for years. The relationship is the reason we were here — not as visitors on a farm tour, but as guests who were handed baskets and told to start picking. Every stop on the Odyssey had been made possible by that kind of trust, built over time. At every stop, we had eaten, learned, and made something with our hands. Boseong was where we would make tea.
What a Living Field Looks Like
We started in the field.
Joonyong led us out into the rows before the morning heat settled in. The task was simple: fill a basket with the season's young shoots — leaves so new they had barely unfurled, tender enough to bruise if you held them too firmly.
It sounds simple. It is not. The new shoots are small — smaller than you expect — and the basket fills slowly. We worked our way through row after row. Some of us ate a leaf straight from the plant as we picked — raw, right off the bush. A single tea leaf, it turns out, carries five distinct tastes: bitter, salty, sweet, sour, and the deep savory quality Koreans call gamchimat. There are said to be over four hundred beneficial compounds in a single leaf. Standing in the field, chewing one, that didn't feel like an exaggeration.
But the field itself was the lesson we hadn't anticipated.
Bohyang Dawon's rows do not look like the tea fields in photographs — the manicured, uniformly green hedges that line tourist brochures of Boseong. There were weeds growing between the rows. Real ones, low and untidy. Spiderwebs across the bushes, intact and unhurried. Bees moved through the leaves. Insects rested on the shoots we were trying to pick. At one point, a small spider crossed the back of a hand and no one flinched, because by then the point had already made itself.
This is what an organic field looks like. Not the clean, controlled image on a label — but a place where things are left to live. The weeds, the webs, the insects: not signs of neglect, but evidence. You do not spray a field and find spiderwebs on the plants a week later. You do not eliminate insects and watch them return to rest on new growth. What we were walking through was not a performance of organic farming. It was the proof of it.
The Work Before the Cup
After picking, we moved inside to the cauldron room.
Choi Seung-seon, Choi Young-ki's wife and the family's director, set us each in turn at the iron wok — a gas-fired demonstration version used for teaching, heated to 287 degrees Celsius. Before we began, she told us something about the real production cauldrons: those are fired with wood, which burns hotter and less predictably than gas. Anyone working at a wood-fired wok wears cotton, always — because that kind of heat will melt synthetic fabric directly onto skin. Cotton holds. It was said plainly, as a fact of the work.
The process is called deoggeum — pan-firing. Its purpose is simple: stop the leaf from changing. Green tea is unoxidized, and without heat applied immediately after harvest, what you picked in the morning would, given time, become something else entirely.
We each took a turn at the wok — pressing the leaves against the surface, turning and pressing again, then lifting them to a mat to cool. Then working them by hand, rolling and compressing the softened leaves in a process called yunyeom, drawing out moisture and shaping what's left. Then back to the wok. Then the mat again. Each pass concentrating the leaf a little further.
The leaves went from field to wok without washing. It was a clear day, the quantity small enough to handle with care — and on an organic field like this one, Choi Seung-seon said, there was simply no need. When we finally looked at what all those baskets, all that picking, all those passes through the heat had produced, it was a modest pile. More than enough to understand what goes into a cup. Not quite enough to take for granted.
The Room at the End
After the firing, after the cooling, after washing the warmth from our hands, we followed Choi Seung-seon and Joonyong into the cha-dam room — the room set aside for tea conversation.
The walls held fermented teas. Rows of them, dark and compressed, arranged in a loose chronology from one end of the room to the other. The older ones had drawn in on themselves — darker, denser, further along in whatever slow transformation fermented tea undergoes when left to its own time. The room smelled the way time smells: earthy, settled, faintly sweet.
Choi Seung-seon poured, and as she did she spoke. The taste of the tea, she said, starts with what kind of land it grew in. You saw the rows out there — all that grass, all that life between the plants. That untidiness is what good tea tastes like. A field managed into neatness produces a different leaf entirely.
Someone in the group, warming their hands around the bowl, said it quietly: it's like meditation. And it was — drinking tea the way you might sit in stillness, not consuming something but attending to it. Present with this cup, this room, this moment. In the middle of a busy trip through a country full of things to see and learn, the cha-dam room offered something rarer: a reason to be nowhere else.
We drank. The conversation moved the way it does when the work of the day has already said most of what needed saying — easy, warm, without urgency. Outside, the field was still doing what fields do: growing, quietly, without being asked to hurry.
Kim'C Market Culinary Odyssey
This was the last stop.
From the predawn fish stalls of Noryangjin to a table in a Boseong tea room, the Kim'C Market Culinary Odyssey had taken us through eight days of Korean food at its source. We had drunk makgeolli with a professor who had spent his career thinking about it. We had cooked alongside a Buddhist nun who kept a step stool in front of her stove. We had made kimchi with a master and put up jars of soy sauce that are still aging in Damyang as you read this. And we had walked through an organic tea field in the early morning and understood, finally, what it means to actually believe that word.
A cup of tea, at the end of all of it. The room was warm. The walls held their years quietly. It felt like the right way to finish.
From the Fields of Boseong to Your Cup
Bohyang Dawon's organic teas are available at kimcmarket.com. The family has been farming the same hillside in Boseong since 1937 — every tea they produce comes from the same certified organic fields we walked through that morning, grown without pesticides, in the kind of land where nature is left to do its work.
The current range includes green tea, a misty tea selection spanning green, yellow, and black varieties, organic mugwort tea, and stone-ground matcha powder. All are grown and processed by the Choi family on their Boseong estate.
FAQ
What is fermented tea, and how is it different from green tea?
Green tea is unoxidized — fired immediately after harvest to stop fermentation. Fermented tea, called tteuim-cha or heuk-cha in Korean, is intentionally allowed to oxidize and age over time, sometimes for years. The result is darker, earthier, and more mellow, with a character that continues to develop the longer it ages. It is broadly related to the Chinese pu-erh category, though Korean versions carry their own distinct regional character. At Bohyang Dawon, fermented teas line the walls of the cha-dam room in loose chronological order — the older ones darker, denser, drawn further into themselves with each passing year.
What is gamchimat, and why does it matter for tea?
Gamchimat is the Korean term for the fifth taste — the deep, savory quality also known as umami. A good tea leaf carries all five tastes: bitter, salty, sweet, sour, and gamchimat. The presence of that fifth flavor is often what separates a complex, well-grown leaf from a flat one. It's also why experienced tea drinkers sometimes describe a good cup as satisfying in a way that's difficult to explain — the gamchimat is doing quiet work in the background.
What is the difference between pan-fired and steamed green tea?
Most Japanese green teas — sencha, gyokuro, matcha — are made by steaming the leaf immediately after harvest to stop oxidation. Korean green tea traditionally uses a different method: deoggeum, or pan-firing, where the leaves are pressed against a hot iron wok. The difference shows up clearly in the cup. Steamed teas tend to be grassy, bright, and vegetal — think of the clean sharpness of a good sencha. Pan-fired teas are rounder and warmer, with a subtle toasty depth that comes from the contact with heat. Neither is better; they are simply different traditions, shaped by different hands.
What is the Kim'C Market Culinary Odyssey?
The Culinary Odyssey is a small-group journey through Korea organized by Kim'C Market, built around direct access to the country's most respected food makers and producers. The itinerary is shaped by relationships developed over years — with fermentation masters, temple food practitioners, kimchi masters, and tea farmers — that are not available through standard travel programs. The next program departs later this year. For more details, reach out at hello@kimcmarket.com.