Sencha, gyokuro, matcha, and the pots they belong in. Practical guides to choosing, brewing, and caring for Japanese tea — with the temperatures and sizes that actually matter. Written from Japan.
The paper. Almost always the paper. If you make matcha at home and you want to know what the sweet sits on, the answer is a folded sheet of kaishi (戈紙) — washi, 14.5 × 17.5 cm for the common size, about $7 a pack from Ippodo. Not a plate. English shops file it under…
The short answer: probably not as a separate purchase. A matcha sifter is 60 to 80 mesh, which means its holes are 250 to 180 micrometres wide. A matcha particle is 5 to 10 micrometres. The mesh is roughly twenty to fifty times wider than the powder it is supposedly straining, so it cannot be…
Your kyusu does not dribble because you are pouring it wrong, and in most cases it does not dribble because it is faulty. It dribbles because of the shape of a strip of clay on the underside of the spout lip, roughly a millimetre wide, which either ends in a corner or rolls over into…
On the oldest English-language tea forum there is a thread titled “Tokoname Replacement Lids?” Somebody had broken the lid of a Japanese teapot and wanted to know where to buy another. The thread is still there. It has no answer. That is not neglect. It is the answer. For almost every Japanese kyusu worth owning,…
Japanese offices still teach tea service as a procedure, and the first instruction in it surprises people: do not put the cups on the saucers. Carry both on the tray, cups standing in a row and saucers stacked beside them. Set the tray down on a side table. Then lift each cup onto its saucer,…
If you are left-handed and you have been putting off buying a Japanese teapot because the left-handed ones seem to cost a fortune and never be in stock — half of that is wrong, and the wrong half is the price. At Ippodo, the Kyoto tea house, the Black Kyusu Teapot in Tokoname ware is…
A kyūsu holds 200–350 ml. A yunomi holds 130–160 ml when it is a cup you drink roasted tea from. Do that division and the Japanese teapot most people own turns out to be a two-cup pot — one round, for one or two people, with a second brew coming in four minutes. That is…
A yuzamashi does not cool water. Cold ceramic cools water, and a yuzamashi is simply the largest, coldest, most repeatable piece of ceramic in a Japanese tea set. That distinction sounds like pedantry until you brew a second pot, at which point the bowl is warm, the arithmetic everybody quotes stops working, and your gyokuro…
Two Japanese tea specialists will tell you opposite things about the same cup of tea. One sells pots with a stainless band wrapped around the inside wall and says on its own page that the design is optimal for deep-steamed and fine-leaf teas. The other sells pots pierced through their own clay and says the…
A standard chū-natsume holds 100 ml. That is the spec on a real one — 6.6 cm across, 6.4 cm tall — and it reads as small until you work out what 100 ml of matcha is. Matcha is one of the lightest powders in any kitchen, about 0.4 g per millilitre, so a caddy…