
Our Teas
Keiko Uchida admits to being ‘slightly obsessed with tea’ and drinking ‘tea bags of tea very rarely. I love Matcha and I drink large amounts of green tea every day. I start drinking matcha in the morning and have sencha in the office when I am working, and hojicha after 6:00. I also like to drink a good grade of black tea during the weekend.’ As she grew up in a very traditional Japanese family, they were ‘very strict about the quality of tea and how it was brewed, which had a significant impact on me.’
One of her aims early on was to have a store selling excellent Japanese teas, similar to a fine wine shop. Now Keiko Uchida’s Notting Hill store is a mecca for those hunting the very best Japanese teas.
Currently Keiko Uchida offers more than 30 different varieties of ceremonial grade matcha teas in the London store and on line. And Keiko is keen to keep adding new varieties and introducing new flavours. She visits Japan three times a year to meet with tea makers and tea farmers, as well as new partners, talking and tasting a huge range of teas.
Most tea shops might sell between 1 and 5 varieties of Matcha tea. However, there are so many different aromas and flavours of Matcha in Japan, and Keiko has passionate ambitions to introduce the wonderful range of these many delights that Matcha offers, rather like the many fine wines seen in a fine wine shop. As with wine, each region has a different flavour, as the soil, the weather and even the tea master and can create completely different teas. It is a very Japanese thing to be so obsessed, concentrating on such a thing and trying to improve skills and qualities every single day. Perhaps that is why Japanese restaurants have had such success with Michelin stars. And why there is such a Matcha tea boom globally.
One thing Keiko has found is that ‘visiting all our tea farmers and tea makers and wonderful hard working people, they are producing some of the very best teas in the world. Some of the teas are the favourite of the Japanese Royal Family, and another has won the best taste award from the Japanese Minister of Agriculture.’ These are craft teas, the best of the best.