Material Matcha Uji (MMU) produces insanely good Matcha Green Tea. Collaborating with traditional tea-masters and using ancient, nearly forgotten blending techniques with the highest quality tea leaves from Uji, MMU creates the most exclusive blends of matcha ever offered to the world.
From corporate jobs to the fertile lands of Uji
Material Matcha Uji is the brainchild of two Frenchmen & longtime expats in Japan, foodies at heart, who after years in finance & IT gave up their big corporate jobs to go on a quest for purity: to find and create the greatest matcha green tea ever.The Founders, Morgan & Etienne |
Etienne Denoual, co-founder at MMU, explains: “It all started from a deep wish to reconnect with nature and authenticity. When I went back to Kyoto, a city I had lived in for years before, it was a revelation. We just had to do it.”
The Team at Material Matcha Uji |
Becoming a tea-maker
Making high grade Matcha is no walk in the park. Indeed, they faced serious issues: while so-called matcha is booming worldwide (it is often low quality green tea dust), its production has seen a steep decline in Japan. Farmers are facing increasing expenses, weak demand for superior quality matcha, and lower sales value. Even more worrying, the aging tea-making community faces successor problems, endangering its very existence.Grinding Green Tea |
The two founders, who willingly admit that two years ago they knew next to nothing about tea-making, and were both rather coffee people, took a fresh look to the issues and devised an innovative development model: if superior matcha doesn’t work in the domestic market anymore, they would take it abroad for the first time, where foodies are thrilled by Japanese delicacies.
Rare Craft Matcha
Their matcha blends, the result of more than a year of hard work in the fields and in their workshop, are uncompromising, bold, sophisticated, and probably unlike anything you have ever tasted before. Straying from the very classical image of Japanese tea ceremony, their craft matcha belongs to the realm of guilty pleasures, not unlike artisanal chocolate or micro-distillery whiskey.Green Tea fields of Uji in Kyoto |
Because Matcha is a precious and pure material, they package their blends in different raw materials honoring the minimalism of Japanese craft & culture. "We consider our packages and vessels as something one lives with, a celebration and everyday ceremony of the purity of Matcha." explains Morgan Josset, co-founder.
Material Matcha Uji Vessels |
Support their Kickstarter's Crowdfunding campaign
Backed by a devoted community and now ready for production, they are asking backers to help them buy a whole year of harvest of several plots of land that are especially promising. Providing tea farmers financial stability and peace of mind, they push them to always favor quality over quantity, and hope that younger generations will one day take up the torch!You can help support their Kickstarter Crowdfunding campaign by visiting the following link https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/materialmatcha/rare-craft-matcha-green-tea-from-japan
This actually looks pretty bad ass!
ReplyDeleteThank you NS! It does look pretty good :)
DeleteThank you for sharing this! What an interesting story. I started drinking matcha recently and I'm so glad that Uji was the first matcha I discovered in a local Asian shop in Melbourne. I then tried other brands' matcha but it didn't taste that great. Now I have an idea why! ☺
ReplyDeleteThanks for the story. Drinking their matcha tea will now be more meaningful.
It would be great to catch up with them in person. Who knows, may be one day it will happen. ☺
Hi Natalie. Happy New Year! Not a problem. I am a huge fan of matcha and we are lucky here in Japan to have so many great varieties and brands available to us.
Delete