Taste over name value — from Japan’s oldest tea region. Nagasaki, near the southern tip of Japan, is where Japanese tea began. In 1191, the Zen monk Eisai brought tea seeds from China and is said to have planted Japan’s first tea garden here. The prefecture later became the starting point for Japan’s earliest tea exports to the West. Higashi-Sonogi is a small town on the bay — a place where tea fields spread across the hills and plateaus, many of them overlooking the sea. It’s a landscape you don’t often find in Japanese tea country. Sonogi is a traditional tea region, but not widely known globally — often hidden behind big names like Kyoto, Shizuoka, and Kagoshima. Production is smaller, but the quality is exceptional. This matcha comes from FORTHEES, an aspiring venture by four skilled young farmers who won first place at Japan’s National Tea Competition three years running. They built the region’s first tencha factory and set out to create matcha that stands on its own. This is their top-grade matcha — a blend of Tsuyu-hikari and Saemidori. Flowery, verdant, and full of quiet complexity. The umami is there, but it doesn’t dominate — it sits gently alongside the other notes rather than overpowering them. The mouthfeel is on the lighter side, with a clean finish that makes usucha very easy to drink. As an oat milk latte, it’s genuinely impressive — the depth of flavour carries through beautifully. Usucha: ★★★★☆ Great Latte: ★★★★★ Excellent Tea is grown all across Japan, and behind the big names are many smaller regions producing remarkable tea. We wanted to shine a light on one of those places — and more importantly, we wanted to choose our matcha by taste, not by reputation. We shared this one with close friends and regular customers, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive — so we decided to make it a permanent part of our lineup.
