Stacks of Matcha - Chado Tea House January 2025
2025 - Onwards and Upwards
Vancouver – cold, rainy, miserable; Chado Tea House – Sunny, Happy, and ready for the year ahead.
To mark the start of 2025, we have a new tagline.
"Tea is great, and we like it, especially the Japanese kind!"
We know it's not a great one and not very catchy, but we only have a small marketing budget.
While the world seems to be getting more complicated and more difficult, the simple art of preparing and drinking tea helps us remember that the good stuff is still good and the bad stuff will pass. So that is our ‘slogan’ for 2025 and beyond.
A much better one, which fits nicely with tea, is, ‘It looks good, it tastes good, and by golly, it does you good.’
We cannot use that one as it has already been taken, or it was.
A long time ago, when I was a child growing up in England, TV commercials proclaimed that cigarettes made you sexy and alcohol was good for you. Mackeson is a beer that used to use that tagline.
Mackeson is a stout, classed as a milk stout. The milk part comes from the addition of lactose to the brewing process. According to those in the know, lactose is not affected by the brewing process and adding it gives the beer a sweet and creamy taste. It's strange now that people seem more interested in taking lactose out than adding it, but that’s another story.
Mackeson has been brewed in the UK since 1907. It is still available there, but we have not seen it for sale in Canada or the US, we may have missed it; I used to drink it, and it is good, if you ever get the chance give it a try.
Matcha Shortage?
There is a lot of talk about a bit of a matcha shortage at the moment. A few well-known tea shops in Kyoto stopped their online sales in order to service clients at their physical locations, and there are many stories in the Japanese press about huge demand outstripping supply.
We have a good supply and plenty of stock. We are monitoring the situation because the lead times to get new supplies are longer than previously.
Matcha is very popular now, and increasing supply quickly is not an easy fix because the tea has to be grown, harvested and processed before more can be made available.
There is a consensus that the milling process is currently the main bottleneck.
The traditional milling process for matcha, where it is converted from leaves to powder, was always done with small stone grinding wheels.
As things modernize and the pressure to produce more matcha increases, one might expect the wheels to be huge to enable them to grind large amounts of leaves. However, a by-product of grinding is heat, and larger wheels generate more heat, which impairs flavor. So even today, matcha factories have hundreds of small grinding wheels working 24 hours a day to process small amounts of leaf material into powder.
The second picture shows a more modern way to produce matcha; these machines are being tested, used and perfected to create the matcha more efficiently. Notice the water supply that circulates the central processing component to keep the temperature cool.
We have two Matcha to showcase this month.
The first is our premium Matcha - Matcha The Best (30g).
This is our top ceremonial grade luxury Matcha.
The tea used to produce this highest-grade Matcha green tea powder meets many rigorous quality tests, and only the finest of the crop is used in this Matcha.
We are sure this Japanese Matcha Tea will meet all your expectations. This luxury green tea powder has a silky smooth texture, delicate aroma, depth of flavor and sweetness. This ceremonial grade tea can be used to serve both the Koicha thick tea and the more common thin matcha called Usucha. To make the thick tea, one uses double the amount of the tea, which requires high-quality tea to avoid the tea becoming bitter.
The second selection is our Bulk Matcha Midori 100g.
This is a high-quality everyday-grade Matcha in a larger size. It is still "ceremonial grade," and we sold it in a 30g canister in past years. We have changed to an aluminum zip-sealed bag because this matcha is versatile and people like to use it often. It is suitable for a straight bowl of Matcha or used creatively for a latte, smoothies or baking!
This Matcha MIDORI has a rich, smooth taste and is excellent for an everyday Matcha treat.
Happy Lunar New Year
It is the lunar new year and a cause of big celebration in many countries.
I have to confess that I always feel a bit of a phony talking about seasons and lunar new years and harvest moons because I can't help thinking that if it had been down to me to notice that the moon goes around the earth, that days are shorter in winter and longer in summer, or figure out that the earth goes around the sun, that knowledge would not exist. It amazes me that people figured all this out thousands or hundreds of years ago, but I am glad someone did because I can be guaranteed I would never have cottoned on!
Many countries in Asia, especially China, celebrate the Lunar New Year. Japan does not celebrate it in a significant fashion. It adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1873 and celebrates the new year on 1 January.
However, some remnants of the Lunar Calendar, or more correctly, the Lunisolar Calendar, which considers the lunar cycle but then makes some adjustments for the seasons related to the Sun, exist in Japan. A few festivals have two different dates depending on where you are in Japan. A big celebration is the Obon Festival, the date of which is different depending on where you are in Japan and what calendar is used to determine the festival, some lunar, some Gregorian.
In Japan, some tea cultivation and harvesting times have aspects that are traditionally related to the lunar year. One such time in Japan is the arrival of the first harvest – Shincha. This typically happens in late April or early May, and it is an exciting time in the Japanese tea world because it is the time that the first teas are picked. The traditional day that the tea is picked is based on the lunar date of the first day of Spring - Risshun (立春) and is 88 days after that. The 88th night after the first day of Spring - is called Hachijū-hachiya (八十八夜).
We hope you enjoy the celebrations. If nothing else, it proves we are getting closer to longer days and the first Tea harvest of 2025.
