What is Matcha? A Beginner's Guide — Kiyocha

What is Matcha?

Matcha is green tea — but not the kind you steep and discard. The whole leaf is ground into a fine powder, and when you make a cup, you drink all of it. That's the difference. With regular green tea, you're getting the water that's passed through the leaf. With matcha, you're getting the leaf itself.

The plant is the same one behind all true tea: Camellia sinensis. What makes matcha distinct starts weeks before harvest, when farmers cover the plants to block sunlight. Shade forces the plant to produce more chlorophyll — that's where the deep green colour comes from — and slows the growth of certain compounds. The result is a leaf with more L-theanine, a naturally occurring amino acid that softens the effect of caffeine and gives matcha its calm, focused energy. No spike. No crash.

After harvest, the leaves are steamed, dried, and stripped of their veins and stems. What remains is called tencha. That's the raw material. Tencha is then slowly stone-ground into the powder we know as matcha — a process that can take over an hour to produce just 30 grams.

The flavour is unlike anything else in tea. At its best, quality matcha tastes grassy, a little sweet, slightly vegetal, with a lingering umami finish. Cheap matcha tastes bitter and flat. The difference isn't subtle, and it's almost entirely a function of where and how it was grown.

Matcha originated in China but was refined into its current form in Japan, where it became central to the tea ceremony — a practice built around attention, simplicity, and presence. That context shapes how we think about it at Kiyocha. A cup of matcha made well isn't a quick fix. It's two minutes of doing one thing.

You can whisk it with hot water the traditional way, blend it cold, or add it to milk. However you make it, the fundamentals stay the same: start with good powder, and the rest is straightforward.