Baisa Tea Gathering, February & March: Traditional Matcha Processing

An announcement for our February and March workshops, the “Baisa Tea Gathering”.

“Traditional matcha processing on a hoiro”
Part 1: Sun 23 Feb, Mon 24 Feb
Part 2: Sun 2 Mar, Mon 3 Mar

Tencha is the raw material for matcha.
Tencha leaf is grown with an extraordinary amount of care.
Only first-flush leaf, fed generously and shaded for more than twenty days, becomes the very finest tencha.

The picked leaf is “roasted dry” at high temperature. The stems and leaf veins are then removed, and the leaf is ground on a stone mill to make matcha.
Processing sencha or gyokuro means kneading the leaf for five to seven hours at around body temperature, slowly “squeezing it dry”. Tencha takes far less time than that, but the way it is roasted and dried in that short window changes the flavour enormously, which makes it a remarkably deep craft.

In this workshop we recreate the method used before the modern tencha oven existed, making tencha and matcha in the shop on a hoiro, a traditional drying hearth.

In Part 1 we make tencha on the hoiro and do a light sorting with a sieve and a winnowing basket.
In Part 2 we sort the rough tencha further and grind the finished leaf into matcha on a hand-turned stone mill.

This is our first workshop on matcha. Joining both parts lets you experience everything from picked leaf to finished matcha.

We hope you will join us.

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“Traditional matcha processing on a hoiro”

Dates
Part 1: Sun 23 Feb, Mon 24 Feb
Part 2: Sun 2 Mar, Mon 3 Mar
13:00–16:00 (approx.)

Price: ¥8,000 (tax included)

※Reservation required
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To reserve, please contact us through the enquiry form on our official website or by DM on Instagram, including your preferred date and time, your name, telephone number and email address.