(Food Stories) Each element, from matcha’s visual appeal to its intricate taste, is a testament to the meticulous craftsmanship and deep cultural significance embedded in every step of its elaborate production. While today we recognize matcha as something typically Japanese and a stimulating drink for everyday enjoyment, it was originally neither. When Buddhist monks brought the knowledge of tea cultivation and consumption from their visits to China back to Japan in the 8th century, tea was mainly consumed by the clergy and imperial elite for its meditative and health promoting properties. At that time, tea was prepared from compressed tea bricks, which were then pulverized and added to boiling water. It should take another 200 years until the preparation method of “whipped tea,” much closer to contemporary ways of preparing matcha, reached Japanese shores.

It is noteworthy that the tea leaves were consumed in their entirety from the very beginning—a peculiarity to which the healing effects of matcha are still attributed today: by ingesting the whole tea leaves in ground form you absorb significantly more nutrients and antioxidants than with other green teas. Antioxidants are known to scavenge free radicals and decrease oxidative stress, both of which are involved in the aging process and can lead to a number of diseases.

The nutritional content of matcha, its color and taste are closely linked to the time of harvest, farming methods and the Japanese practice of shading tea. Several weeks before harvest, tea bushes are covered with a cheesecloth canopy that has replaced the traditional straw covering. The scarcity of direct sunlight encourages the accumulation of chlorophyll, rendering leaves more brightly green and enhancing the tea’s taste and aroma. Last but not least, its high chlorophyll content also makes matcha an excellent detoxifying agent, helping to remove harmful toxins from the body.

In order to develop a strong umami flavor, a true characteristic of Japanese tea, plants need to garner minerals from the soil—either naturally or with the help of artificial fertilizers, which more often than not entail the use of pesticides. “It’s harder to get a really good organic matcha in terms of taste,” explains Tim D’Offay of Postcard Teas, a renowned teashop in London specializing in tea from small farms. While there is a big market abroad for organic matcha, a lot of top-level produce is not certified in Japan. D’Offay still makes the effort to source environmentally friendly products that are grown without agrochemicals. For him, it’s not just about uncontaminated products and better conditions for local communities, but also about drinking something that is closer to the original Japanese matcha. D’Offay, who has lived in Japan for more than 30 years and has been importing tea since the 1990s, is a pioneer and strong advocate of the idea of provenance in tea, a term normally used in the art world to describe an artwork’s history of origin and changing ownership. In order to provide clarity, traceability, and give customers the information to build connoisseurship, each of his teas bears at minimum the producer’s name and location—a common practice for specialty coffee, but anything but a matter of course for green tea. In fact, as Tim D’Offay puts it, “most producers’ matcha is sold with somebody else’s name on it.” This is due to imports, but also to the fact that the refinement of tea in Japan is usually carried out by manufacturers or professional tea refiners. While the producer steams the leaves to stop oxidation and preserve the color and then dries them, manufacturers transform the unrefined tea, called aracha, into tencha by sorting, sifting and cutting, which is then ground into matcha. As a general rule, the more precisely the origin of the product is indicated on the label, the better.

In terms of location, there are three main regions in Japan where tea for tencha is grown: Uji in Kyoto Prefecture, which is probably the most widely known regional tea brand from Japan; Nishio in Aichi Prefecture boasting the country’s second largest production volume after Kyoto, and Yame in Fukuoka as the most important emerging tencha region. Kyoto’s history as a favored tea-growing region stretches back to the late 12th century. In the 14th century, when tea games were a popular pastime among the warrior class, guests were served different bowls of tea and guessed whether what they drank was true tea from Togano’o, a mountainous region north-west of Kyoto, or non-genuine tea from other regions. A century later Uji took over as the main production area.

As manufacturers refine tencha, they traditionally blend different tea cultivars to stabilize the price and even out the quality and flavor of the final product, creating a recognizable tea indicative of their brand. “With matcha, blends are a fine art,” explains Richard Eigner, an Austrian sound artist based in Vienna, who offers a curated selection of Japanese matcha and loose leaf tea in his online shop Green Tea Blue Sky. In contrast to other product categories, designations such as single-origin are not a quality criterion for matcha per se. Similarly Eigner recommends taking labels that tout products as ceremonial grade with a grain of salt, as there are no industry standards for this. Ultimately, it is marketing that has little to do with the actual Japanese tea ceremony, a ritualized form of making tea deeply steeped in Japan’s Zen Buddhist traditions.

Mastering the chadō, which translates as “way of tea,” requires years of study and is said to be a lifelong process. The tea ceremony was elevated to an art form in the 16th century, when tea master Sen no Rikyū codified the procedures for preparing and drinking matcha, which embody the four basic principles of harmony, respect, purity and tranquillity. By this time, tea culture in Japan had already undergone several changes. In just a few centuries, matcha went from being used for religious ceremonies in temples to being a luxury commodity reserved for gatherings of the elite. It also gained popularity among the samurai class as an energy and concentration boosting pre-battle drink. Rikyū, in whose lifetime tea had developed into a means for rulers to display wealth and political power along with valuable objects and tea utensils, redefined the tea ceremony and brought focus to the aesthetic sense of wabi sabi—the appreciation for natural beauty and imperfection. Through the long history of chadō, several schools of the Japanese tea ceremony have developed, differing either in technique or in aesthetic characteristics.

Another important property of matcha is its fresh grassy aroma, resembling sweet grass. Although modern preservation and storage methods make it possible to keep powdered matcha fresh for several months, some importers prefer to take care of the grinding themselves. Postcard teas’ own traditional stone mill enables them to supply Michelin-starred restaurants in London with matcha freshly ground on the same day, for example. Kettl, a US-based Japanese tea company with an office in Fukuoka, grinds its imported tencha locally in New York. In addition to their range of blends, single-cultivar offerings and terroir-specific matcha, they offer a subscription service: every month, Matcha Mill Club members receive an exclusive matcha from Kettl’s Japanese producers, freshly ground on-site in Brooklyn before shipping.

While opinions differ on the importance of fresh grinding, matcha experts agree on a few things when it comes to its preparation: firstly, matcha should always be sieved into the preheated bowl to avoid clumps and improve mouthfeel. Secondly, the standard for two grams of matcha is about 50–70 ml of water that has been cooled to around 80°C. And thirdly, the key to a matcha with a fine creamy froth and reduced astringency lies in the rapid back-and-forth movement of the chasen, the traditional bamboo whisk, with the wrist. The flavor, taste and mouthfeel, however, change depending on the amount of tea used, the water quality and temperature and how the tea is whisked. For Richard Eigner, that’s the true beauty of preparing matcha at home: finding your own interpretation of a tea.