This month

This page changes with the box. It carries the season your box was packed in, and the sweet that travelled with it.

Shūbun — the autumn equinox

Equal again — and the dark takes the lead.

Day and night are the same length, and from tomorrow the night is longer. The red spider lilies come up along the paths, exactly on time, every year. Shūbun runs from 23 September to 7 October: the sixteenth of the twenty-four seasons of the old Japanese calendar.

This month’s sweet

The sweet is chosen for the season and changes every month. The one in your box is named on the card that came with it, and its full ingredients and allergens are on the label on the packet.

Eat the sweet before the tea — especially a sweet one. With the sweetness still in your mouth, the matcha tastes rounder, and its bitterness turns almost sweet.

Making the bowl

Sift two scoops — about 2 g — into a warm, dry bowl. Add 60–70 ml of water just off the boil. Whisk fast in a W, from the wrist, for about fifteen seconds, then slow enough to break the coarse bubbles.

The whole method, in three lines · The fuller guide

If something is wrong with the box

Write to hello@shoptomari.com and I will put it right. One person reads that address.

Tomari (とまり) is an old word for a mooring — the place a boat ties up for the night. A bowl of tea is meant to be the same: a few minutes to put the day down. You do not need to know the rules to begin.

Who chose this

I choose everything here by hand, in Japan. I practice tea rather than simply selling the tools for it — I am not a tea master and I do not claim to be. I am a practitioner, which mostly means I have ruined enough bad whisks to know what a good one feels like in the first second of holding it.

Nothing is drop-shipped and nothing passes through a third warehouse. I pack each order in Tokyo and post it from Japan, ceramics double-boxed by hand. If something arrives broken, send me a photograph and post the piece back — I cover the return postage — and I replace it. Who writes and chooses all this, and the longer version of why this shop exists.