What is matcha?
The whole leaf, in suspension.

Three to four weeks before the first harvest, the tea bushes are covered. Denied full sunlight, the plant slows its work: it produces more chlorophyll to catch what light it can, and it stops converting amino acids into the tannins that make sunlit tea brisk. The result is a leaf that is deeper green, softer in texture, and unusually high in L-theanine — the amino acid responsible for matcha's savoury, brothy sweetness that the Japanese call umami.

Leaf grown for matcha has its own name: tencha. After plucking it is steamed within hours to lock in colour, then dried without rolling. Stems and veins are blown and sorted away until only the fleshy blade of the leaf remains.

Tencha becomes matcha in a granite mill turning at roughly thirty revolutions a minute. That patience matters: friction heat scorches aroma, so a single mill produces only about forty grams an hour. The powder that falls out measures five to ten microns across — finer than flour, fine enough to hang in water rather than sink.

With sencha or gyokuro you steep leaves and discard them, drinking whatever dissolved. With matcha you drink the leaf. Everything water-insoluble — the fibre, the chlorophyll, most of the catechins and the beta-carotene — ends up in the bowl. It is the reason a 2g serving tastes so much fuller, and the reason the quality of the leaf is impossible to hide.

Japan's tea year is counted in flushes. The ichibancha, or first flush picked in late April and May, carries the sweetness the plant stored all winter. Later flushes grow faster in stronger sun and taste correspondingly sharper — perfectly good for lattes and baking, but not for a bowl of usucha you intend to drink plain. Everything we sell as ceremonial is first harvest.

Tencha — the unrolled, de-stemmed leaf milled into matcha. Usucha — thin tea, the everyday bowl, about 2g to 70ml. Koicha — thick tea, roughly 4g to 40ml, paste-like and reserved for the best powder. Chasen — the bamboo whisk. Chashaku — the bamboo scoop; two heaped scoops is about 2g.