I started drinking tea in high school, just green tea from the grocery store. Drinking tea I’ve had a deepening sense that without going to another place I am experiencing some element of another place.

The Costco tea was pivotal – my first experience with Japanese green tea.
A grassy, vegetable, seaweed experience. It sent me back to the grocery store to figure out how do I get more of that.

Fall/winter 2019 I first started looking at tea online.
I got my first order of Ippodo tea, and I drank some tea.
And then corona virus hit, and I really started drinking tea; coffee was making me anxious. 

Ippodo is a tea shop in Kyoto.
After 3 orders from Ippodo, I started wondering what is out there; where does this fall within the hierarchy of Japanese tea? I wanted comparisons as a benchmark to appreciate its quality. 

I started looking to see if there are other Japanese tea stores online, and realized that Ippodo seems to be unique. Most companies were in the USA importing and packaging tea under their label. Then I found Yunomi. 

Yunomi offers a large network of small brands that you can order direct from Japan.
The tea from Yunomi Life are all over the map in terms of what they taste like, smell like, and the quality of leaves. A radical variety that makes me realize how fine tuned, consistent, and intentional Ippodo’s lineup of products is.

First Brew

1. Fill and start the kettle (temperature varies depending on tea)
   • for sencha brew at 170 degrees plus 20 degrees to heat implements
     • tea + teapot + cups = 170 + 10 + 10 = 190 degrees
2. Preheat the teapot and cups – pour water into teapot then pour water from teapot into the cups
3. Use a scale to measure tea into teapot
   • For 2 moderately strong cups of tea brew 10 grams of tea with 14 oz water
4. Pour water from cups onto tea in teapot
5. Set timer for 1 minute (the cooler the water the longer the steep time can be)
6. Pour the tea into the teacups. Get as much water out of the tea leaves as possible, so shake our bounce the pot a bit at the end to drain off the rest of the water
7. Take the lid off of your teapot so that the leaves don’t cook, because you are going to use them again.

Steeping

• First brew :  one minute
• Second brew : ten seconds
  • Since the leaves have already started releasing compounds you are essentially just washing the compounds off the surface
• Third brew : one minute

Would you ever do more than 3 brews? 

Yeah go nuts. Until you don’t like it anymore. 
As you do successive brews notice how the flavors change.
Some flavors go away. Other flavors come out.

I started out brewing sencha in a mason jar with strainer from our kitchen drawer. It always made me feel a little bit less refined to brew that way, and I thought it would be really nice to have a beautiful teapot that I could brew in.

I spent a lot of time looking for a teapot that I liked. I thought it must be a better experience to brew in a beautiful teapot.

Now that I have the teapot, I do enjoy brewing in it, but I find myself coming back to the jar. I think gives a good extraction, and I like to see the leaves as they are brewing and unfurling.

Meoto yunomi is a pair of yunomi. One is smaller than the other, representing a husband and wife.

I got them as a replacement after my wife broke my favorite tea cup.

Hagi-ware is called the ceramic that changes color seven times. It has been cool to see how it has changed even with the short amount of use that they have had. I look forward to seeing how they develop over time.