MATCHA SONOGI | ceremonial grade

"Making tea to connect people, and soften their hearts." This is the motto of the producers behind MATCHA SONOGI, a blended matcha from a cooperative of four tea farmers overlooking Ōmura Bay in Higashisonogi, Nagasaki prefecture, Japan. The matcha is one cultivar—yabukita, the gold standard in matcha production—but from four different lots of yabukita tea trees, all planted, tended, shaded, and harvested with the distinct styling of each farmer. Each shades their plants with nylon screens for 21 days before hachiju hachiya ("88 nights"; or, 88 days after the 1st day of spring), when the first flushes are machine-harvested and processed to tencha. This lot both defies and embraces an old norm in matcha production—that matcha is made of tencha from multiple farms, then finished by a skilled producer (chashi—"tea blender") at regional tencha producing and milling factories. MATCHA SONOGI is indeed blended from multiple lots of tencha; but the farmers share a plot of land and produce thei