Is our matcha ceremonial? And what does it even mean?

Is our matcha ceremonial? And what does it even mean?

You may have noticed that at MICHI we do not title our matcha as being "ceremonial." 

Nearly every brand selling matcha outside of Japan uses the word somewhere on the label. A lot of people search for it too, and we get why: it's a fast way to signal "this is the good stuff" without having to explain anything. So we've been asking ourselves why we still won't use it.

It does about as much for the customer as printing "artisanal" on a bag of supermarket flour. It doesn't tell anything real about what's in the tin, it just short-circuits the question before you get to ask it. So maybe the real question is: what does "ceremonial" actually mean? The honest answer is - not much.

In Japan there is no official, agreed-upon grading system for matcha. The one classification that does exist applies to tencha, the unground leaf that matcha is made from, not to the powder itself. Tencha has to be produced in a dedicated tencha factory, and it has to be shade-grown, but the way it's shaded, or whether it's hand-picked or machine-harvested, doesn't change whether it qualifies as tencha. As long as the leaf goes through steaming, drying, and the aracha finishing steps, it's tencha. 

Nobody really knows where "ceremonial" came from as a category label, it was already everywhere by the time we started paying close attention to matcha. Our best guess is that it borrows its authority from chanoyu, the tea ceremony: the formal preparation of matcha tea room by practitioners.  During chanoyu (tea ceremony), matcha is whisked thin (usucha) or kneaded thick (koicha),  no lattes involved. So the word was originally describing a setting and a method of preparation, not a quality tier. What's often missed is that plenty of tea ceremonies in Japan are conducted with humble, everyday-grade matcha, not the rarest lots a garden produces. Sometimes the finest matcha does make an appearance but it's the occasion, not the leaf, that made it "ceremonial" in the first place.

 

We understand why "ceremonial" caught on, it's a lot easier to print one word on a label than to explain which specific factors makes it premium. But we think matcha drinkers deserve better than a label that saves us the trouble. So instead, here's how we actually think about matcha at MICHI.

 


How we think about it instead

Rather than a single quality word, we sort our matcha by what it's best suited for, which is closer to how it's actually used in Japan:

Latte grade. Our Mizu matcha is built for this,  a blend chosen to hold its flavor and color against milk, rather than getting lost in it. This is the entry point to our lineup, and it's still made from proper shaded tencha.

Usucha - thin, whisked tea. This is what most people picture when they hear "ceremonial," and it's where the bulk of our range lives: Haru, Yasu, Hiro, and Kaze are all made to be whisked with water and drunk as-is. Each comes from a different grower and cultivar,  Kaze, for example, is a blend of Samidori and Okumidori hand-picked in Ujitawara, from a family-run factory that's been at it since the 1860s and each tastes noticeably different because of it.

Koicha - thick, kneaded tea. This uses roughly double the powder and half the water of usucha. Koicha demands tea with real depth: high L-theanine, plenty of natural sweetness, enough body to go thick without turning bitter or flat. Any koicha-grade matcha can be whisked thin as usucha too.

We source every one of these teas directly from small farms and family producers across Japan - Uji, Yame, Toyota and Shizuoka, visiting the growers ourselves so we know exactly whose hands the leaf passed through before it got to yours.

We know a tasting-note card and a region on a label is more information than most people are used to seeing on a bag of matcha, and that it takes more effort to read than "ceremonial."

MICHI means "road" or "path" in Japanese, and we think that's fitting understanding matcha properly isn't a single word, it's a walk through where it's from, who grew it, and how it was made.

Filip & Mark