Start here
Your box has arrived. Everything you need is on this one page.
Nothing here is long. The method is three lines. The rest are links to follow only if you want them.
Make your first bowl
Sift 2 g — two scoops — into a warm, dry bowl.
Add 60–70 ml of water, just off the boil. Boil the kettle and let it stand a minute or two. The whisking matters more than the number: fast from the wrist, then slow enough to break the coarse bubbles. In a tea room the kettle sits just below boiling all afternoon, and the tea is not bitter.
Whisk fast in a W motion, not round, for about fifteen seconds, until a fine foam rises. Then fill the bowl the rest of the way, or pour it over ice.
The full method, with quantities for thick tea, iced and lattes →
If the foam will not come
It is almost always the whisk rather than you. A whisk with too few tines, or bamboo that was cut green and never properly cured, cannot beat enough air into the tea, and no amount of effort fixes it. People taste that bowl and blame themselves.
The five causes, in order of likelihood →
Monthly Matcha Club
One tin and a seasonal sweet, each month, chosen to the old Japanese calendar of twenty-four seasons — so that what arrives in the deep cold of daikan is not what arrives at hakuro, when the dew first stands on the grass.
It is not open yet. Leave your email and you will hear before anyone else.
Until the sign-up form is live: send an email to hello@shoptomari.com with waitlist in the subject, and you are on the list. Nothing else is needed.
If the tea was good
A line of review would help me more than you would guess. I am one person, and a review is how the next person decides whether to trust a small shop shipping from the other side of the world.
Your review link is in the email that came with your dispatch note. If it has vanished, write to hello@shoptomari.com and I will send it again.
If you want the whole subject
What matcha actually is, which four tools matter and which do not, how to tell real Japanese matcha from what is sold as it, and how to store it so it does not fade in a fortnight.
Matcha at Home: a complete beginner's guide →
Thank you for letting this into your morning.
