Foundations
Matcha is green tea leaf ground into powder and drunk whole, rather than steeped and thrown away. That one sentence explains almost everything else about it: why it is expensive, why it is stronger, why it goes stale so fast, and why it is the only tea you whisk instead of brewing.
The short answer. Matcha is powdered green tea made from tencha, leaf that has been shaded from the sun for weeks before picking, steamed, dried, destemmed and stone-milled. You whisk the powder into water and drink the entire leaf, which is what separates it from every other tea.
Matcha is written 抹茶. The first character means to rub, grind or powder; the second means tea. Ground tea. The Chinese pronunciation of the same characters is mocha, which is an unhelpful coincidence given what mocha means on a coffee menu, and the two have nothing to do with each other.
Every other tea is an infusion: hot water pulls soluble compounds out of the leaf and the leaf is discarded. Matcha is a suspension. The leaf is milled to particles in the range of five to ten microns and those particles stay suspended in the water you drink. Nothing is thrown away.
This is the root of most of matcha's properties. You get more caffeine, because you consume all of it rather than what dissolved. You get more of everything else in the leaf too, for better and worse. And because you are drinking ground plant matter rather than an extract, the drink is opaque, it settles if you leave it, and it has body in a way tea never does.
For roughly three to four weeks before harvest, the bushes destined for tencha are covered. Deprived of full sun the plant produces more chlorophyll to capture what light remains, and it accumulates more amino acids, including L-theanine, while producing relatively fewer of the bitter catechins that sunlight drives. That is why matcha is both unusually green and unusually savoury, and why those two qualities travel together. Colour is therefore a real signal about how the leaf was grown, which we cover in what the colour of matcha tells you.
Milling slowly matters because friction generates heat, and heat degrades the aromatics and the colour. Speeding the mill up produces more powder that is worth less.
There are two traditional preparations. Usucha, thin tea, is roughly 2g whisked into 60 to 70ml of water: this is what almost everyone means by a bowl of matcha. Koicha, thick tea, roughly doubles the powder and halves the water into something closer to paint than a drink. Koicha is unforgiving and demands a genuinely good powder, which is why it is served at the formal end of tea practice. Start with usucha. Our method guide covers it step by step.
If you have never made it, start with how to make matcha. If you are about to buy your first tin, the first-tin guide covers the price floor below which a ceremonial claim is not credible. If you want to know where it comes from, the regions of Japan is the map, and Uji is where the story starts.
FAQ
Tencha, which is green tea leaf that was shaded for three to four weeks before picking, then steamed, dried, destemmed and stone-milled to a powder. Nothing is added. When you drink matcha you consume the whole leaf rather than an infusion of it.
Savoury and vegetal with a distinct umami depth, a natural sweetness in good examples, and a mild astringency. Not like steeped green tea, which is thinner and more purely grassy. Bad or badly made matcha tastes bitter and drying, and usually the fault is water that was too hot or too much powder rather than the tin.
Same plant, different product. Green tea is steeped and the leaf discarded; matcha is powdered leaf drunk in suspension. That is why matcha carries substantially more caffeine and more of everything else in the leaf. See matcha vs green tea.
Mostly the milling. A traditional granite mill produces roughly 30 to 40 grams an hour, and it has to run slowly because friction heat degrades colour and aroma. Add weeks of shading, hand-picking of the best grades, and destemming, and the cost is labour and time rather than scarcity of the plant.
Ground tea. It is written 抹茶: the first character means to rub or powder, the second means tea. Read with Chinese pronunciation the same characters give mocha, which is an unfortunate coincidence, since coffee mocha is unrelated.
The shaded, steamed, dried and destemmed leaf that gets milled into matcha. Tencha is matcha before grinding, and it is traded as a commodity in its own right. Rising tencha prices are the reason usually given for matcha's price rises, which makes it a farming and demand story rather than a retail one.
Health claims about matcha are graded by evidence strength on our benefits page, and anything we have got wrong and fixed is logged on our corrections page. We do not sell matcha and we do not sell rank order, which is explained in our editorial policy.