Maybe you've seen it in a latte at your local café, or spotted the vivid green powder tucked into a recipe somewhere. Matcha has a way of catching your attention. But beyond the color, that quiet, almost mossy green, what actually is it?
If you've been curious but not quite sure where to start, this is for you.
It Starts With a Single Plant
All tea, green, black, white, oolong, comes from the same plant: Camellia sinensis. What makes each type distinct is how the leaves are grown, harvested, and processed.
Matcha is a type of green tea, but the similarities with your average tea bag end fairly quickly. The journey from plant to cup is deliberate, unhurried, and deeply intentional. Which is part of why the result tastes so different.
How Matcha Is Made
Three to four weeks before harvest, matcha tea plants are covered, traditionally with bamboo mats or cloth canopies, today sometimes with shade screens. This blocks most of the sunlight and triggers something interesting in the plant.
Deprived of direct light, the leaves work harder to photosynthesize with whatever light they can find. This causes them to produce more chlorophyll, which deepens the green color, and more L-theanine, an amino acid that contributes to matcha's characteristic calm, focused energy. The flavor shifts too. Less astringent, more savory and sweet, with that distinctive umami quality that good matcha is known for.
After shading, only the youngest, most tender leaves are hand-picked. These are steamed quickly to stop oxidation, then dried. At this stage, the leaves become what's called tencha, the raw material for matcha.
The stems and veins are removed, and what remains is slowly stone-ground into a fine powder. This is not a fast process. Traditional stone mills grind slowly, sometimes producing as little as 30 to 40 grams per hour, to keep the temperature low and preserve the delicate compounds in the leaf. The result is a powder so fine it feels like silk between your fingers, and a flavor unlike anything you'll find in an ordinary tea bag.
Curious to go deeper? In our next post, we explore what makes matcha fundamentally different from regular green tea, and why that difference matters.