Ashikubo, Shizuoka
Steamed 30 seconds, needle-rolled. Cut grass, a squeeze of lime, and a finish that dries the tongue just enough to make you take a second sip. The everyday tea, and the hardest to get right.
Kōbai 紅梅 — est. 2019 · 41 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1
Shincha 2026 lands 21 May
Single-estate Japanese tea
Water, leaf,
time.Nothing else.
We buy from five gardens and no more. Every leaf on this page has a grower's name attached to it, a picking date and a price we will explain if you ask. Downstairs there are twelve seats, a kettle that holds temperature to within a degree, and nobody in a hurry.
5Gardens, all visited
12Seats in the tea room
3Infusions per serving
±1°CKettle tolerance
What we can prove
2019Trading since
5 gardensDirect, no broker
48 hoursMilled to served, matcha
£0Spent on flavourings, ever
Guild of Fine FoodTwo stars, 2025
01 The signature
Work out the cup
before you pour it.
Pick a leaf, set the water and the weight, and the curve below is computed — not decorated. Extraction runs on a temperature-dependent rate constant, so hotter water pulls astringency roughly twice as fast as it pulls sweetness. That is the whole argument for a cool kettle, drawn out in front of you.
Choose a leaf
Infusion
72°C
5.0g
60sec
Within the leaf's range.
The pot and the cup
1:00
Ready · 1st steep
Extraction over time
Shaded band = the house window
A chart of four extraction curves — umami, sweetness, astringency and body — plotted against steep time for the selected leaf, water temperature and leaf weight. The figures beneath it repeat every value in text.
Umami0
Sweetness0
Astringency0
Body0
Balance0
02 What we actually sell
Five leaves.
No house blend.
A blend hides a bad lot. We would rather run out. When a garden has a poor spring we say so on the shelf label and sell the last of the previous year at a discount until it is gone.
Uji-tawara, Kyoto
Twenty days under straw shade before picking. Almost no astringency, an absurd amount of theanine, and a liquor closer to chilled broth than to tea. Brew it at 50°C or waste it.
Wazuka, Kyoto
Tencha leaf, de-veined, milled on our own granite at 30 rpm. Forty grams an hour, which is why it costs what it costs. Whisked, not steeped — you drink the leaf, not an extract of it.
Kirishima, Kagoshima
Autumn bancha roasted in a rotating drum until the sugars caramelise. Toasted rice, cocoa nib, barely any caffeine. The one we give people at nine in the evening.
Takachiho, Miyazaki
Japanese oolong is a young idea — Mr Kawano has been at it for eleven years. Withered, lightly bruised, 40% oxidised. Orchid, warm stone, and it will take five infusions without complaining.
03 Where it comes from
Tea has a season.
Pretending it doesn't
is how it gets stale.
Everything we sell is dated. Choose a month and the calendar shows what is being picked, shaded, roasted or milled, and what that means for the tin on your shelf.
Kōbai began with a fortnight in Shizuoka in 2018 and a notebook full of prices we could not afford. Yuki Adachi, who runs our sencha garden at Ashikubo, sold us eleven kilos on the understanding that we would come back in person. We have gone back every May since.
Nothing arrives by sea. One air shipment leaves Japan in late May carrying the whole first flush, and a second, smaller one in October. In between, what is in the tin is what is in the tin — and when a lot is finished, the shelf stays empty until the next spring.
Everything is vacuum-packed within a day of firing, held at −18°C in our basement, and opened into 100 g nitrogen-flushed tins as we need them. It is unglamorous and it is the single biggest reason our sencha still tastes green in February.
Yuki Adachi · Ashikubo · 1.4 ha · third generation
Harvest calendar, 2026
04 What actually happens
Fifty minutes.
No incense, no lecture.
This is not chanoyu. We are not a temple and none of us is a tea master. What we do is sit twelve people at a counter, brew three infusions of one leaf in front of them, and explain what changed between them.
The dry leaf
The tin comes to you first. You smell it cold, then warmed in a hot cup — the same leaf, two completely different smells, and the second one is what you are about to drink.
First infusion
Cool water, a long steep, a small cup. This is the sweet one, and the one people are surprised by. We pour it at the table so you can see how little liquid there is.
Second and third
Hotter, faster, bigger. The leaf has already given up its theanine, so this is where the structure arrives. Most people prefer one or the other, and that is the point of doing both.
The wet leaf, and a sweet
Spent leaf goes into a dish so you can see the whole leaves, the stems and the dust. Then one wagashi from Emi Nakagawa in Peckham, and the bill, which nobody has to ask for twice.
05 Take it home
Tins, and the
things to pour from.
Free UK delivery over £45, sent second class in a padded envelope because a tin does not need a box. Everything is dated on the base.
06 Twelve seats, four sittings
Book the counter.
Prepaid, non-refundable inside 48 hours, and we will move it once for free if you email. Walk-ins get the two window stools if they are free.
The five leaves · 13:30£0
2 people£0
Comparison flight—
Take-home tin—
Service (discretionary, already in)Included
Total, prepaid£0
— seats left
07 What people say afterwards
Three sentences,
three real people.
I had drunk green tea for twenty years and never once at the right temperature. The second cup was a different drink entirely.
Camberwell
They let me stand and watch the granite mill for ten minutes and answered every stupid question I had. Nobody sold me anything.
Edinburgh
We put the Kirishima hōjicha on our menu in January and it now outsells the espresso martini. I still cannot fully explain that.
Bristol
08 Asked at the counter, most weeks
The honest
answers.
If yours is not here, email hana@kobai.tea. A person replies, usually the same day, and it is usually Hana.
Does the water temperature really matter that much?
More than anything else you can control. Catechins — the compounds you taste as astringency and bitterness — come out of the leaf roughly twice as fast for every 10°C you add. Theanine, the savoury sweetness, only speeds up by about a third. So the same leaf at 60°C and at 90°C is not a stronger and a weaker cup, it is two different drinks. Drag the temperature slider in the brewing studio and watch the plum line pull away from the green one.
Why is the second infusion so different?
Because the first one took most of the soluble amino acids with it. By the second steep roughly a third of what was available has gone, and what is left is proportionally more catechin and more of the heavier aromatics. That is why we recommend hotter, faster water for steeps two and three: you are chasing structure, not sweetness. The studio adjusts its house setting when you switch infusion.
Is your matcha ceremonial grade?
We do not use the phrase, because it is not regulated and it means nothing. What we will tell you is the cultivar (Samidori and Okumidori), the shading period (22 days), the picking date, and that it is stone-milled here at 30 rpm in batches of 40 grams an hour. Milled matcha loses its top notes within about six weeks, so we mill to order and date the tin on the base.
How much caffeine is in this?
A 150 ml cup of our sencha at the house setting carries roughly 28 mg — about a third of a filter coffee. Gyokuro is higher, near 45 mg, because shading raises caffeine along with theanine. Hōjicha is the outlier at around 8 mg, since roasting drives most of it off. These are measured averages from our own lots, not figures copied off a chart, and they move a little year to year.
Can I bring children?
Yes, and quite a few come. The counter is high, so we put a booster on the end stools, and we brew a decaffeinated kukicha for anyone under about twelve at no charge. The fifty minutes is the honest constraint — small children get restless around minute thirty, and nobody has ever been made to feel bad about leaving early.
Why does the shelf sometimes stay empty?
Because we buy a fixed lot from a named garden and do not top it up with anything else. When Ashikubo's first flush is gone in February it is gone until late May. We could blend in something similar and nobody would notice — that is precisely why we will not. The seasonal calendar above shows when each leaf is due back.
Do you ship outside the UK?
To the EU, Norway and Switzerland, yes — £9.50 tracked, four to seven days, and the customer is liable for any import duty. We do not ship matcha outside the UK, because it arrives tired and we would rather you bought it fresh from somebody closer to you. Ask and we will happily name a good shop in your city.
紅梅 — red plum, the first thing that flowers
Come and sit down.
Four sittings a day, twelve seats, and a kettle that has been on since seven. There is nearly always room on a Tuesday.