About One with Tea

I've been drinking tea daily for over twelve years. My parents drank green tea every morning for breakfast, and I grew up watching what it did for them. There was a quality about it I couldn't name as a kid, but kept noticing. A kind of grounded steadiness that other drinks didn't seem to bring.

After years of tasting teas and learning the craft, I came to understand what was actually happening. Tea has a quiet alchemy that almost nothing else in nature does. It contains caffeine, but also L-theanine, an amino acid found almost exclusively in tea that crosses the blood-brain barrier and produces alpha brain waves. The same brain state monks spend decades trying to access. The same focused calm samurai needed before battle. Tea wakes you up and slows you down in the same sip. The Chinese have a word for that kind of balance: yin and yang. The opposites that only exist because of each other.

That balance is why this brand is called One with Tea. Whenever I drink it, I come back to myself. Back into balance. Back into presence. I built this brand because I wanted other people to feel that too, and to realize that tea can be an anchor in your life. The more you live from that balanced space, the better the decisions you make from it.

Japan stands for excellence in tea, and I wanted to make sure the people we sourced from offered organic matcha.

So I flew 7,000 miles to Japan to film a documentary and meet the farmers, tea masters, and exporters who actually grow and process this leaf.

Over 5 weeks in Japan, I traveled across Shizuoka, Kyoto, Kagoshima, Fukuoka, and the Mt. Fuji region. Some of the producers and moments that shaped the brand:

• Shizuoka, with Mohei Honda. Rode through tea fields his family has tended for generations on the back of a harvester. Steam rising in the sencha factory. Every batch handled with care.
• The mountains, with Jiro-san. A farmer who still sees tea as art. "Tea is an empty canvas," he told me. "Every farmer starts with the same leaf. But what you do with it, that's where the art lives." When I tasted his tea, I understood what he meant.
• Yame, at Kurihara Seicha. Tasted one of the most refined gyokuros in the world. Award-winning year after year. Shaded for weeks. A tea so layered it changed what I thought tea could be.
• Wazuka and the Mt. Fuji region. Met both veteran farmers and a new generation returning to tea, shifting fields to tencha (the leaf that becomes matcha) because for the first time in decades, the numbers actually worked.

What I came home with wasn't just tea. It was a real understanding of what goes into a single bowl, and a commitment to source with that level of care.