Ichibancha (一番茶) is the first tea of the year. The flush opens in late April and is finished in about two weeks, and it is the only harvest that becomes ceremonial matcha — what is picked later comes from the same bush and makes a different drink.
Three weeks before picking, the rows go under screens that cut roughly ninety per cent of the light. Starved of it, the plant loads the leaf with chlorophyll and holds on to L-theanine instead of converting it into the catechins that taste bitter. Pickers then take the unopened bud and the two leaves beneath it and nothing further down: the third and fourth leaves are tougher, higher in catechins, and would read as bitterness in the bowl.
Hazuki grows on small family-run farms in the hills above Uji, south of Kyoto, where the same families have tended the same plants for generations. Tea has been cultivated here for some eight hundred years, and the still, misted air of the valley is part of the reason it still is.
Cut leaf begins to lose its volatile compounds within hours, so it is steamed the same day — fifteen to twenty seconds, enough to stop the enzymes that would otherwise turn it brown. It is dried flat and never rolled, and its stems and veins are separated out, leaving tencha. Only then is it milled, between granite wheels turning slowly enough that friction never warms the powder past the point where its aroma burns off. One mill yields about forty grams an hour, so a thirty-gram tin is roughly forty-five minutes of stone.
Sift one to two grams into a warmed bowl — one or two scoops of the chashaku. Add about sixty millilitres of water at roughly 80°C. Boiling water scalds the powder and pulls out bitterness, which is the commonest mistake and the easiest to avoid.
Whisk briskly in a W, from the wrist, keeping the chasen off the floor of the bowl until a fine even foam covers the surface, and drink it while the foam holds. For a latte, whisk it smooth with a little water first, then add warm milk. Once the tin is open keep it sealed, cold and dark, and finish it within a month: milled matcha has an enormous surface area and gives up its colour and sweetness to air.
