A morning at the Uji estate.
Notes from a visit to the family farm where our tea grows. The farmer, the bamboo screens, the stone wheels, and the thing that happens when you drink the tea where it was made.
7 min read
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By the editors of soqi
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May 2026
Before the pickup.
We left Kyoto station at six in the morning. The train climbed south and east, out of the city basin and into the hills above Uji, and by the time we reached Wazuka the tea fields were already visible from the windows — low, dense rows of Camellia sinensis running along the slopes in parallel lines, every few rows covered by black bamboo netting laid in advance of the first harvest. The netting absorbs the light. The plant, denied the sun, reaches for what is left. This is the process. The taste we would drink later was already, in some way, being made by the dark.
The farm
A family operation.
The farmer met us at the edge of the upper field. He is the third generation on this land, and he still tends the same cultivar his grandfather planted — Yabukita and Samidori, chosen for the way they respond to shade, pulling L-theanine into the leaf and holding sweetness against the cold of a Kyoto spring morning. He did not speak much at first. He walked the row slowly, stopping to examine a leaf with the same attention a watchmaker might give to a gear.
The netting had been on for nineteen days. Two more to go. There was still some colour in the field where the new growth had pushed above the existing canopy, but everything at the tips was a deep, almost lurid green — chlorophyll concentrated by the slow emergency of the shade. He pulled back a section of netting and held it for us: the smell of the shaded plant was grassy and alive, with something floral behind it, like cut stems in water.
The harvest
What they pick, and when.
The first harvest of the year — ichibancha — is the one that produces ceremonial-grade matcha. The window is narrow: from the moment the first true leaf opens until it has expanded too far, roughly two weeks. What the pickers look for is the bud and the first two young leaves beneath it, at the moment before they have fully unfolded. The picking happens in the morning. By afternoon, the leaves begin to respire and lose their volatiles. The farm employs a small crew, mostly local women who have worked the harvest for years. Their pace and angle of cut are not taught — they are inherited.
The mill
Sixty-four grams an hour.
After steaming and drying, the leaf becomes tencha — a flat, dark piece of deveined, rolled leaf that smells of the same grassy sweetness we had encountered in the field. It is rested in sealed cedar containers for up to three months. Then it is milled. The stone wheel turns at around forty to eighty revolutions per minute — slow enough that the friction does not heat the powder above thirty degrees Celsius, which would oxidize it. Each wheel produces roughly sixty to sixty-four grams of matcha per hour. To fill one of our thirty-gram tins takes about thirty minutes of uninterrupted milling.
The room where the wheels run is cold and dim. You can hear the stone and nothing else. Beneath the wheel, in a small collection tray, the powder gathers slowly — the colour of a field in April, the smell of everything we had seen that morning condensed into a small green heap. This is what they ship. This is what you open when you open the tin.
Before we left
A bowl, where it was made.
The farmer's wife made tea in the house at the edge of the field. A simple room, a low table, a single window with the shaded rows visible behind it. She used a chawan that had been in the family for forty years — rough, dark, wide-mouthed. The matcha was from the previous year's harvest, stored and rested. The water came from the well.
There is a thing that happens when you drink tea in the place where it grew. The taste is not different, exactly, but the context arrives with it — the particular green of that morning, the sound of the wheel, the farmer's silence in the field. We do not know how to sell that part. We can only suggest that the tea, wherever you drink it, carries something from the place it came from. If you pay attention, you can sometimes taste it.
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A small house of ceremonial matcha, grown by a single family in Uji and shipped from Kyoto. Stone-milled to order.
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