Shinjuku's Ceremonial Reserve gift box is a tasting experience crafted meticulously to bring you four intensities of the finest Japanese shade-grown matcha.
The first 500 boxes of Shinjuku Ceremonial Reserve will include a limited-edition omamori, a traditional Japanese amulet bringing good fortune.
Our Matcha
The matcha we selected for our Ceremonial Reserve box comes from small, family-owned farms in Kagoshima, where tea leaves grow in the shadow of the Sakurajima and Kaimondake volcanoes.
Kagoshima's mineral-rich volcanic soil imparts a bright, bold, naturally umami flavor, and the warm climate allows for the healthy growth and harvest of premium cultivars (strains) impossible in cooler climates like Kyoto or Shizuoka.
Our matcha is known as ichibancha, or "first tea." Ichibancha is the very first harvest of the new spring tea leaf shoots, prized in Japan as the highest-quality harvest of the year for its young, tender leaves. These tea plants spend the entire winter storing nutrients to produce a delicious, vibrant flavor - an especially powerful effect in the fertile volcanic earth of Kagoshima.
The best matcha - ours included - is traditionally grown in the shade, restricting up to 90% of sunlight, which forces the plant to concentrate its nutrients in its leaves, keeping the leaves tender, bright green, and umami rather than bitter. Even then, once it's harvested, tea masters carefully select and blend leaves together to produce the absolute best matcha possible - and we've carefully selected this matcha from a range of the finest on the market to bring you a superlative tasting experience.
The Shinjuku Story
Two years ago, walking in Tokyo, I ducked into a little matcha shop in the shadow of a pagoda to try some matcha ice cream. I had tried a lot of matcha products before - matcha lattes, matcha cookies, matcha chocolates, matcha beer (don't recommend) - and I thought I was rating all those products on a scale of 1 to 10.
Only on that warm day in Asakusa when I tasted the rich, creamy, umami flavor of this pure ceremonial matcha ice cream did I realize: everything I had tried before was on a scale of 1 to 2, and this was a 10.
It took me a year and a half of dreaming about it, but I finally decided to bring that deeply nostalgic human experience to a perfect ceremonial matcha chocolate, crafted for the people who will truly appreciate it. This chocolate expresses everything it means to taste the highest-grade matcha: finesse, tranquility, ceremony, and the feeling of walking through the historic alleys of Tokyo unburdened by the stresses of life.
