Ieiri Popo Celebrates Five Years With a Bottle of 55,000-Yen Gyokuro

774INC — Ieiri Popo, a 774inc streamer, marked five years since her debut on Sunday by drinking a bottle of gyokuro, a high-grade Japanese green tea, priced at 55,000 yen. She said it was bought with Super Chats from her viewers, and thanked them repeatedly through the 139-minute stream.

She had teased the stream as a 50,000-yen “something” and put a silhouette on the thumbnail. Chat guessed Calpis, wine, cola, whiskey and grape juice before she brought out a wooden box wrapped in cloth and then the bottle. Reading from the maker’s product page, she said the tea was hand-rolled by a technique that Kyoto Prefecture designates an intangible cultural property, and that it was extracted without heat over about three days. She had kept it in the refrigerator at home with a note warning that anyone who drank it without permission would owe 50,000 yen.

“It turned out that good gyokuro has both bitterness and umami.” — Ieiri Popo, on the tea

The cap came off with a soft pop rather than the loud bang she had braced for. Following the instructions, she poured the tea into a wine glass borrowed at home and found it far paler than she had expected. Its scent, she said, was simply that of good tea. The taste was another matter. She said it was nothing like the green tea she usually drinks: bitter at first, then a sweetness she took to be umami, with a flavor that stayed in her mouth long afterward. She compared it to the first time she tried matcha as a child.

She went to fetch tsukimi dango, or moon-viewing rice dumplings, and found that the sweets made the tea taste sweeter. A side-by-side tasting with an ordinary supermarket tea from her kitchen followed. Gyokuro, she concluded, was not a drink for everyone and was better sipped slowly. Later she worked out that the glass held roughly a fifth to a sixth of the 750-milliliter bottle, around 10,000 yen’s worth, and used the “glass” as a unit to price her anniversary merchandise: the full set came to one glass, the acrylic panel set to 0.6 and the doodle keychain and can badge set to 0.1. The goods are on sale through Nov. 7. After reading out the history of the tea’s producer, she said she would take its motto, to do one’s best at what one has to do now, into her sixth year.

The rest of the evening was a look back. Going through memories sent in by viewers, she spoke of the Newtown days, which she said brought in many of her current viewers, and of the screenshot from the day she passed 100,000 subscribers. She said a new cover song will premiere at 6 p.m. on Monday, ahead of a watch-along of the finale of Bleach, a series she has long said she loves. A 3D anniversary live, with Akatsuki Kura as guest, is set for 8 p.m. on Nov. 3. She closed the stream by saying she would join an anime-song singing relay afterward.