Tokyo Weekender - October 2017

Dream
Powder
Words by Alec Jordan
Born out of a “crazy ambition,” new company Material
Matcha Uji is looking to breathe life into the country’s matcha
industry, and take the high quality tea beyond Japan’s shores
Creating high quality matcha
(powdered green tea) is no easy
task. It demands an encyclopedic
knowledge of the land where the
tea is grown, an understanding of
the wide variety of tea plants and their individual
characteristics, and a deep sense of the
tradition of tea making itself, all coupled with
the fine nose and palate of a true connoisseur.
They’re not the qualities that you’d expect
to find in a former trader in the derivatives
market and an expert in machine translation
and speech recognition algorithms, but
Morgan Josset and Etienne Denoual are full of
surprises. The two Frenchmen have recently
launched the company Material Matcha Uji
宇 治 (MMU for short),
and have dedicated
themselves to bringing
a new level of
matcha to customers
overseas.
Between
the two of them,
Josset and Denoual
have some 25 years
of experience in
Japan. But as Josset
explained, they’d
spent almost all of
it in the corporate
world, and after
a shared period
of soul searching,
they knew that they
wanted to do something
concrete, something tangible.
They just weren’t quite sure what that
something was until they visited a friend in
Uji, a famed tea growing region just outside
of Kyoto, who took them to the oldest tea
house in the world, had them drink a superb
matcha, and explained to them that the
tradition behind the beverage that they had
just enjoyed was in danger.
High quality matcha usually doesn’t
make it out of Japan, their friend explained,
and the plants that are used to make it are
rapidly being replaced by high-intensity,
low-quality agricultural products. Furthermore,
the average age of a Japanese tea
farmer is about 65, and many of them are
finding it increasingly difficult to find someone
who is willing to follow in their footsteps.
And it’s not easy work. The tea plants
need to be shaded during part of the growing
period in order to ensure that they are of
the fullest flavor, and the exact timing of this
process is the sort of thing that can only be
learned from years of experience. For the finest
flavored tea, only the first flush, or harvest
of leaves are used. Many farmers are forced
to base their entire year’s earnings – and their
financial stability – on the harvest that they
bring to market, usually in May.
All of a sudden, Josset and Denoual’s
purpose became clear: they would help in
their own small way to breathe life into the
matcha industry and bring high quality tea
to customers outside of Japan. Throwing
themselves into their quest, they would spend
time with tea farmers learning about what it
takes to bring a harvest together, refine their
understanding of tea while spending time
with master matcha blenders, and come to a
deeper understanding of both the tea ceremony
and Japanese business practices.
As the first result of their labors, they
have created three varieties of matcha, each
with a unique flavor profile: MMU01, MMU02,
and MMU03, all of which are on sale on the
company’s website. But their project doesn’t
just end with the creation of a product.
They’ve launched a Kickstarter project to secure
a year’s worth of tea leaf harvest, which
will not only allow MMU to create a large
amount of matcha, but assure the tea farmers’
peace of mind, allowing them to focus on
what they do best: growing high quality tea.
Josset explains, the project is a product of
crazy ambition, but launching the new business
has pushed the two of them to reach new
heights that they wouldn’t have imagined
before: “With a lot of passion, will and work,
you get to surpass yourself and do things that
you thought were impossible. You have to
listen to your dreams and believe in yourself.”
To find out more about Material Matcha Uji
宇 治 , go to materialmatcha.com.
32 | OCTOBER 2017 | TOKYO WEEKENDER