Behind Ceremonial Grade: Exposing 130 Years of Tea History
We won't be getting rid of "ceremonial" tea any time soon.
Whether you know it or not, “ceremonial grade matcha” is a divisive term.
Recently,
(founder of Kettl)1 and David (co-founder of Tezumi)2 both wrote articles on why they don’t use “ceremonial grade” in their businesses. Zach says he believes the term is “about as much good as” terms like “all natural” or “artisanal” on store-bought goods such as flour. David, a practitioner of the Ueda Sōko school of chanoyu (aka Japanese tea ceremony; another problematic term3), goes to great lengths to explain why the term ceremonial grade does nothing to show the actual matcha used in chanoyu. I strongly recommend reading both articles to gain a better understanding of how legit vendors view matcha.I read both pieces and nodded along, confident that I was standing on the side of truth. Then I read two books–Green With Milk and Sugar by Robert Hellyer and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout–and completely changed my mind.
Ceremonial grade matcha is real and it has over 130 years of history in the United States.
Despite what Google apparently thinks, Gwenyth Paltrow did not popularize matcha in the United States. Hellyer’s book showed me matcha was first introduced to the United States at the World’s Columbian Expo in 1893–over 130 years ago (though the Kyoto Exposition of 1872 also displayed matcha to foreign visitors; this event was held within Japan).
There, the Japan Central Tea Association constructed a Japanese tea house to show the American public how tea was prepared and consumed in Japan.
The teahouse contained three rooms with different ticket prices: 10 cents for a room with a cup of sencha, 25 cents for a serving of gyokuro (also never-before-seen at this time), and 50 cents for entry into the “ceremonial tea saloon”. (Hellyer, 2021, p. 119) Visitors who paid fifty cents, an amount that could have purchased a month’s supply of tea or more at the time, were invited to sit and enjoy a cup of “ceremonial tea” along with a tea sweet. (Jenks, 1893, p. 185) The ceremonial tea was matcha–described in one fictional account as a “liquid so startling green that the visitor is almost afraid of it.” (Truman, 1898, p. 436)
Upon learning this, I was stunned. Not only was I entirely unaware of this history, I was shocked to discover the term ceremonial tea in use at the time. I wanted to know whether ceremonial tea was a term Americans were familiar with at the time.
Knowledge of ceremonial tea was already in circulation amongst British writers since at least 1883–the earliest source I could find on Google Scholar. One A. B. Hutchinson wrote an article for The Leisure hour: an illustrated magazine for home reading, in which he mentions visiting the homes of the shizoku–samurai families. Mr. Hutchinson was served “ceremonial tea” with “grave courtesy” upon visiting the families in their ancestral homes. (Hutchinson, 1883, pp. 568)
Including Hutchinson, there are 30 sources on Google Scholar mentioning the phrase ceremonial tea before 1900, alone. Google Scholar further shows usage of “Japanese tea ceremony” and chanoyu in written works happening already by the late 1870s and early 1880s.
This history matters because, in order for something to be ceremonial “grade”, there must first be awareness that there is something ceremonial in the first place. My research shows Western knowledge of ceremonial tea and tea ceremony goes back at least 150 years!
I’m less clear on when ceremonial grade as a description for matcha became commonplace. Using Google Trends, we can see there are spikes of interest in searches for “ceremonial grade matcha” as early as October 2004. Since Google’s data ends on January 1, 2004, any prior Google search history is unavailable.
I’d love to find a library of historical advertisements to see what else I might be able to unearth about the history of ceremonial grade matcha, specifically. However, this is the limit of my knowledge as of right now.
Regardless, we can see ceremonial grade matcha is nearly as old as Generation Z. In his piece, Zach also mentions ceremonial grade matcha was “already being used” when he began his career in Japanese tea in 2007.
What this means is that at least one entire generation of American tea consumers were born and grew to maturity with the perception that ceremonial grade matcha is real. As I’ll show in my next piece, this perception matters even more than the truth.
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Bibliography
Hellyer, R. (2021). Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups. United States: Columbia University Press.
Jenks, T. (1893). The Century World's fair book for boys and girls: Being the adventures of Harry and Philip with their tutor, Mr. Douglass, at the World's Columbian Exposition. The Century Co.
Truman, B. C. (1898). History of the World's Fair: Being a Complete Description of the World's Columbian Exposition from Its Inception. United States: Mammoth Publishing Company.
Hutchinson, A. B. (1883). WAYS AND MEANS IN JAPAN. The Leisure hour: an illustrated magazine for home reading.
