Week two of the Manitowoc Farmers Market will be featuring a product some may have never seen before.
Alyssa Hang Wittmus is the owner of 777 Matcha, which will make its Farmers Market debut tomorrow morning.
Matcha has slowly become more and more popular at coffee shops around the country, but many still don’t know what it is.
Alyssa explained that it’s a product many are familiar with, prepared in a different way.
“It is green tea, but instead of steeping the tea, they take all of the leaves of the plant, and then they dry them and grind them,” she noted. “So it’s a suspension instead of the steeped tea. If that makes sense, you get the whole plant.”
Tea drinkers can relate it to a more concentrated version of an iced green tea with milk.
For Alyssa, matcha is a drink she has enjoyed since high school, jokingly admitting that she wanted to be different, but it wasn’t called matcha at the time.
“Starbucks still had their green tea latte is what they called it. They didn’t call it a manual latte,” she recalled. “(I) slowly started drinking it at different coffee shops, things like that in the area, and out of the area. (I) realized that there’s a really wide variety of what matcha can look like.”
This love of the drink expanded as she began experimenting at home, and soon, Alyssa decided to bring her ideas on what the drink could be to the public.
While matcha is becoming more widely sold, Alyssa says her stand will be unique because, unlike everyone else, matcha will be her sole focus.
“I have found at a lot of places, it’s like an afterthought,” she revealed. “It’s a, ‘Oh, this is trending. So we’re going to add it to the menu.’ I’ve tried 30 different kinds of matcha, and I’ve narrowed it down to what I like to what I think the general public might like.”
Alyssa Hang
Alyssa has been promoting her product on social media, amassing a respectable following on both TikTok and Instagram.
“Genuinely, it just comes back down to being authentic and not trying to plan it out too much and just kind of going with whatever feels good,” she explained. “I think with this, just talking to people instead of like trying to curate a specific feed, just saying like, ‘Hey, this is what’s on my mind,’ has been really, really effective.”
777 Matcha joins 76 other vendors at the Manitowoc Farmer’s Market, which is held along the Manitowoc River in the parking lot across Quay Street from the Manitowoc Public Library.
