At yunomi-jp.pro we are just few dozen orders before we hit 50,000!!
Order number 50,000 will receive 50,000 yen worth of store credit and other orders between 49990 - 50010 will receive 5000 yen discount code each for use on their next order.
It has been 13 long, tiring, exciting, rewarding years since I launched yunomi-jp.pro as a global launchpad for small scale Japanese tea farms and factories.
I don’t know anyone talking about cultivars when I first created ObubuTea.com for the Obubu farmers in 2010. They taught me so much in the beginning and I realized that so little information was communicated to tea connoisseurs worldwide. Generalized, often mistaken information — at that time things like: shaded tea is used for matcha, so we used to see “matcha is made from gyokuro” all the time. And then there’s the horrid story of “genmaicha” coming from a “samurai lord who chopped off the head of his servant named Genmai”…
Going forward, as matcha becomes global culture, as Japanese tea finds fans on every continent, I want to look inward, to making Japanese tea more popular among Japanese themselves—there are more companies popping up making high grade wine-bottle style pre-brewed tea, served at French restaurants. But the making of tea — I feel there needs to be something new about making tea from leaf at home, to get Japanese to rediscover the joy of not just tea but of making tea.
Towards that end we are gathering more Japanese herbs and other ingredients that can be used to flavor tea. Not just selling pre-blended tea, but to encourage consumers to own their own “apothecary” at home and craft their own blends at home…more work and less convenience, but also greater joy from the creation.
And we are encouraging farmers to grow their own herbs, so that we can have single origin blended teas.
Finally we are working on a reiteration of our Tokyo cafe. The next version will launch in late May hopefully and eventually it will become Yunomi.Matcha’s Mini Matcha Millery (tentative name and tagline)—exploring not just matcha but also other powdered ingredients to put us at the forefront of the alternative latte boom led by matcha.
