It’s the small rituals that give us a sense of safety in times like these. They look different for everyone, and it can take a while to figure out which ones feel right. Rituals are at the heart of Noritual Lab. Contrary to what the name might suggest, this matcha label is all about weaving ritual back into everyday life — just in a contemporary way. Founded in June 2023 by Kai Funada Classen, the brand not only offers matcha products via its online shop but also hosts tea ceremonies twice a month at Anti Space in Mitte, creating a space where you can pause, reset, and simply breathe. Anti is the perfect setting: everything revolves around slowing down, recharging, and giving your body and mind a little more attention. With saunas, ice baths, red light Pilates sessions, and a range of classes, it’s a place to do something good for yourself at almost any time of day. The ceremonies, limited to six participants, are led by Haruka. Like Kai, she grew up in Japan and was introduced to tea culture at an early age by her parents, who met through tea ceremonies themselves. At twelve, she began practicing ceremonies on her own, learning their structure and the care with which they’re performed. Haruka walks you through the preparation, explains the different elements, and, of course, shows you how to hold your tea bowl properly and prepare your matcha. The ceremony is not a solemn demonstration; it’s designed to be interactive. You can interrupt Haruka at any time, ask questions, or move at your own pace.

The ceremony is conducted using products from the No Ritual “Curated Matcha” series. Each edition reflects a carefully considered selection, close collaboration with producers, and deep respect for origin. During my ceremony, we were accompanied by “Meguri no Shiro”, a matcha developed in collaboration with a tea house in Japan. Made from Saemidori leaves grown in Shizuoka (Japan’s largest tea-growing region), it has an intense, fresh umami flavor and a vibrant green hue. With its ceremonies, Noritual Lab aims to make tea culture more accessible in Berlin. But ultimately, it’s about something simpler: showing how easy it can be to pause and integrate the preparation of matcha as a small ritual into your everyday life. After the ceremony at Anti, take the rest of the tin home with you, free to explore how to shape your very own matcha ritual from what you’ve learned.

Text: Robyn Steffen / Photos: Jule Baur, No Ritual Lab

Noritual Lab

Anti x Noritual Lab: Mindfulness Tea Ceremony (twice a month). Book your spot here.

@noritual.lab

Reading poetry isn’t always easy. Maybe it’s a collective trauma from German class, maybe it’s because contemporary poetry rarely tells you where to begin. Yet so many people write such good stuff. Here are four and a half Berlin poetry collections for anyone who enjoys genre-bending and wants an entry point into contemporary forms of writing. Sophia Eisenhut’s Spam in Alium treats writing as an ongoing conversation that observes, comments on, and questions itself. Between letters with no clear object of affection, drafts that get stuck, and a taste for theoretical friction, a body of text emerges that folds essay, poetry, and inner monologue into each other. Moving between references from literature, pop culture, and her own life, Eisenhut negotiates closeness, shame, and self-interrogation with linguistic precision. As a reader, I understand everything and nothing at the same time. From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson by Elise Houcek and Zack Darsee also plays with overlap, but starts from a poetic crime story. Language becomes an overstimulated interface, shot through with media logic, references, and interference. The book plays with surveillance, narration, and loss of control, and translates the constant background noise of the present into a dense, often overwhelming textual landscape. I feel like I’m somewhere between an investigative episode of ‘The Three Investigators’, the accumulation of all of my friends’ note app notes, and a neurodivergent stream of consciousness. If this is contemporary poetry, I never want it to end. (And if you’d like to be a poet yourself and don’t know where to start, Zack Darsee runs excellent workshops.)

If all of this sounds too academic for you, Olga Mai offers an easier yet heavier way in with her self-published collection Break My Heart So I Can Pay My Rent. The title says it all. The starting point for her very personal little book was heartbreak. The texts circle dating, work, financial insecurity, and emotional exhaustion, staying close to everyday speech while turning it into melancholic imagery. Anyone who wasn’t sad before will be afterwards. The book was launched at Café Tiergarten and is available on request. Katharine Spatz’s Season Zines are small and exquisite. Each season, the Berlin poet releases a pocket-sized selection of her poems. The current issue matches the mood: seven pocket-sized poems to get through winter. If you wait until spring, you can buy the whole quartet from her via DM. Honourable mention goes to Postponed by Sanna Helena Berger, who was meant to curate an exhibition but instead invited poets and writers to contribute texts. The pieces on doubt, fatigue, inertia and collective overload form a polyphonic collection that makes faltering continuation, hesitation, and pausing legible as a shared experience. The reader is available online for free. If you’re looking for a place to start, begin anywhere. Everything else will fall into place as you read.

Text & Photos: Inga Krumme

Spam in Alium, From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson, Zack Darsee, Break My Heart So I Can Pay My Rent, Season Zines, Postponed

You can order Break My Heart So I Can Pay My Rent via email. 

Season Zines via DM @spatzlova.