Who's writing
I spent twenty years drinking tea wrong
Not badly — wrong. There's a difference, and it took me until my thirties to notice it.
My grandmother had a kyusu. Not a nice one; a chipped brown teapot that lived by the sink, and out of it came sencha that tasted alive — grassy and sweet at the same time. I drank it every summer at her house and thought nothing of it, the way you don't think about tap water.
Then I grew up and did what most Japanese people do: cold-brew tea bags in a pitcher in the fridge. Convenient. Fine. For about fifteen years, that was tea.
My first real matcha was a school trip to Kyoto, and it wasn't tea at all — it was matcha ice cream, matcha pudding, matcha yatsuhashi, two days of it. I've been chasing that flavor ever since, which mostly meant buying matcha lattes at Starbucks and feeling reasonably sophisticated about it.
The correction came at a proper tea shop in Ginza. I paid an uncomfortable amount for a small tin, went home, made it badly, made it again more carefully — and had the quietly annoying realization that I had been drinking a completely different beverage for twenty years and calling it the same word.
Why this site exists
Because the gap I fell into is enormous, and almost nobody outside Japan is told about it plainly. "Ceremonial grade" doesn't exist as a certification here. The 14-piece tea ceremony set nobody in Japan owns. The water temperature that ruins 90% of homemade matcha. None of this is secret — it's just ordinary knowledge that never crossed the ocean, because the people selling matcha abroad have no reason to send it.
So this site is that: what's actually normal in Japan, written from a kitchen in Tokyo, with the mistakes left in.
Who I am, precisely
I'm Sen — thirty-something, an IT job in Tokyo, and decidedly not a tea master. No certification, no lineage, no tea room. My wife is from Tango, the quiet northern coast of Kyoto — the sea-and-rice-fields side that tourists never see — which keeps me honest whenever I'm tempted to romanticize the postcard version of this country.
I buy the tins with my own money, including the bad ones. When something is out of stock, I say so. When I haven't tried a product myself, I tell you that instead of pretending. That's the whole editorial policy.
What you'll find here
- Brewing guides for matcha, sencha, hojicha and genmaicha — with the numbers
- Café-style recipes you can make with what's in your kitchen
- Honest buying guides: which brands Japanese tea people actually respect, and what to skip
Start where I wish I'd started
The 5-Minute Matcha Cheat Sheet: the ratio, the temperature, and the three mistakes that ruined my first decade. One printable page, free.
Send me the cheat sheet →How this site makes money
Some links are affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you buy — at no extra cost to you. We also sell our own guide and printable art. Recommendations are based on Japanese market knowledge, and we clearly separate what we've personally used from what we've researched. Details in our disclosure.