Kimberley's Kyusu

Ippodo Tea is a family-run Japanese tea company that was founded in 1717, in the heart of Kyoto. More than just a retailer, Ippodo is a multi-faceted tea company that carefully selects, blends and crafts its tea. The name Ippodo, literally means “preserve one.” The name came from Prince Yamashina, who enjoyed Ippodo tea and wanted the shop to preserve one tradition: providing high quality tea. Ippodo continues to adapt as times change, but has remained devoted to high quality Japanese tea ever since.

Though I have been immersed within the world of tea and Japanese tea specifically for many moons, I had never had the chance to try any of the teas from Ippodo Tea and had lived veraciously through other Japanese tea lovers online who have had the opportunity to do so, quietly building my must try list, in preparation for when I could make my first order. Then one day, towards the end of last year, I woke up to an email notification, the email was from a member of Ippodo Tea’s team asking if I would like to be gifted some of their teas and I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. Of course I said yes and we planned what they were going to send and there was no strings attached, they did ask me to post anything, and just wanted to try their teas. I told myself I would only post about the teas if I loved them and knowing there was no pressure from Ippodo to do so made that whole process much easier.

They very kindly sent me over a selection of teas to try, all of which I cannot wait to sip on, but I had to try the matcha they sent first, which is a decision that I am sure comes as no surprise to those of you who have followed me for a while.

The matcha that was sent for me to try was their Seiun Matcha, which falls under their rich category. For Ippodo, this means that it has more depth and a longer aftertaste, with more umami and sweetness, alongside less astringency. Per serving, Ippodo recommends using 2 grams for usucha and 4 grams for koicha. For my fist session with this tea I decided to prepare it as usucha, as that is the way I usually prepare my matcha.

Since this was my very first session with an Ippodo Tea I went outside of my usual usucha preparation methods and followed the set of parameters for usucha listed on the page for the matcha which were as followed: 2g of matcha, 60ml of water at 80C, whisk vigorously for 15 seconds.

From start to finish, this matcha is fragrant and aromatic in both dry and wet form. The dry powder has notes of icing sugar, milk bottle sweets, milk chocolate, cold high quality butter spread onto thing savoury crackers and sprinkled with rock salt, milk bread and white chocolate with a subtly floral cream within it. Once a splash of water is added, the aroma still carries a lot of those notes, but now has rich and deep vegetal notes that sit prominently at the forefront of the overall aroma profile, as opposed to the subtly of the vegetal notes in the dry powder.

Within the flavour profile of this matcha, there is a fantastic levels of both minerality and umami. It has a slight sharpness to it and is savoury initially but gets creamier and sweeter as the matcha travels though your mouth. With lingering notes of savoury crackers, slightly slated high quality butter, it is quite rich, full-bodied and incredibly smooth and velvety. The vegetal notes are deep, rich and strong, and given the other notes that are present, they are a great foundation and help to keep this matcha balanced.

The aftertaste is creamy and sweet, but not overwhelmingly sweet and definitely has touches of savouriness. The minerality within it is that of rocks by the sea with moss / kelp on them because you get the minerality and vegetal notes as well as a touch of earthiness and saltiness. In terms of the texture, it is smooth and creamy /buttery, however when you first take a sip there is an initial sharpness that spreads across the tongue in a quick flash as soon as you take a sip, but it does not stick around for long and leaves an umami butteriness in his place.

As much as I love that sharpness and that transformational quality of this matcha, I found that when I let it cool l, in it’s place was a fantastic potato starchiness and out of the two, I think I preferred the starchiness. So I’ll experiment with this matcha over the next few weeks and see how it changes when prepared iced.

Paired well with: alpine milk chocolate, thin slightly coconutty crackers and buttery biscuits shallowly filled with lemon jam.

Going into this session my expectation were incredibly high, after spending so long hearing about how amazing all of the Ippodo Matcha are for so long, and usually I would be worried that a tea might not live up to my high expectations for it. However I could just tell that wasn’t going to be the case with this matcha and I’m so glad I was right. This matcha is incredible and I’m beyond thankful to have finally tried a tea from Ippodo, I don’t think I could have started off my exploration of their range of teas in a better way than this.

Have you ever tried this matcha or any other matcha from Ippodo? If you have, let me know your thoughts on them in comments. Id love to hear your recommendations on which ones I should try next. If you would like to try this Matcha you can find it here on the Ippodo website.

Until next time. Happy Steeping – Kimberley