Ippodo Tea

Ippodo has sold tea from central Kyoto since 1717, one of the longer continuously operating tea houses in a city with no shortage of historic merchants. The current catalog runs past forty distinct items, built around the core Japanese green tea categories - matcha, including seasonal Uji-Shimizu new-harvest releases, gyokuro, and sencha across multiple grades - alongside roasted hojicha and genmaicha, barley tea, organic options, and a teabag line for a faster daily cup. Every offering is described as selected, blended and crafted in-house rather than resold from a single supplier's stock, consistent with a merchant whose business has always been built on blending as much as sourcing. The Kyoto Main Store keeps a tasting counter running as a matter of course, letting customers sample teas before committing to a purchase or a gift order - a service that functions less as a modern retail perk and more as the shop's long-standing way of doing business, carried into the present rather than added on. For a company three centuries old, the range stays disciplined rather than sprawling: a defined set of Japanese tea categories, refined through blending, sold with the option to taste first - the same basic proposition the shop has presumably offered across three hundred years in the same city.