What Is Matcha, and What Does It Taste Like?

Matcha is Japanese green tea grown in the shade, steamed, dried without rolling and ground to a powder so fine that you whisk it into water and drink the whole leaf. It tastes savoury and sweet first, with a fine bitterness underneath and a texture closer to a thin broth than to steeped tea. Good matcha is smooth with a sweet aftertaste; poor matcha is sharp, grassy and dries the mouth.

One bowl: 2 g of powder, 70 ml of water at 70–80 °C, whisked for 15–20 seconds. Everything below assumes that bowl.

This article explains what matcha is and what it tastes like, nothing more. To choose, brew and store it, read our matcha powder guide. To see how it sits next to sencha, kabusecha, genmaicha and hojicha, read Japanese green teas explained.

The short answer

If you have never tasted matcha, expect something between a strong green tea and a vegetable broth: savoury, slightly sweet, slightly bitter, with foam on top.
If you tried it once and found it bitter, the water was too hot or the powder was a cooking grade; first-harvest matcha whisked at 70–80 °C is not harsh.
If you only know matcha lattes, you have tasted matcha plus milk and sugar; the tea itself is drier, cleaner and more savoury.

1. What is matcha, exactly?

Matcha is defined by how it is grown and processed, not by the word on the bag. The international technical report ISO/TR 21380:2022 describes it as tea made only from shade-grown leaves and shoots of Camellia sinensis, steamed to stop oxidation, dried without rolling and then finely ground. Three steps separate it from ordinary green tea.

Shade. For roughly three weeks before harvest the bushes are covered. ISO/TR 21380 describes two stages: first cutting out 70–80 percent of the light, then 95–98 percent for the final 20–30 days. With little light the plant keeps more chlorophyll and more of the amino acid L-theanine, and converts less of it into bitter catechins. That is why matcha is deep green and tastes savoury.

Tencha. The shaded leaf is steamed and dried flat, not rolled into needles like sencha, and stems and veins are removed. What remains is tencha, a brittle flake almost never drunk as it is.

Grinding. Tencha is ground on granite mills to a mean particle size of 10–30 micrometres, finer than flour. A mill turns slowly to keep the powder cool and gives only a few tens of grams per hour, which is the main reason matcha costs more per gram than the same leaf as loose tea.

Powdered tea came to Japan from China in the late 12th century, and Uji in southern Kyoto has grown it for most of the time since. Our matcha comes from one family farm in Kizugawa, in the same southern Kyoto tea district, from first-harvest spring shoots.

2. What does matcha taste like?

Four things happen in the mouth, in this order.

Umami first. The savoury, brothy taste comes mostly from L-theanine and other amino acids that the shading preserved. People compare it to dashi, seaweed, cooked spinach or fresh peas. It is the taste that tells you the tea was shaded properly.

Then sweetness. Not sugar sweetness; a soft, round sweetness behind the umami that grows as the bowl cools a little. First-harvest leaf has more of it than later pickings.

Then bitterness. All matcha has some. In good matcha it is fine and short, like the skin of an almond. In poor matcha it is the first and loudest thing you taste, with an astringent drag that dries the tongue.

Then the finish. Good matcha leaves a clean, slightly sweet aftertaste that lasts a minute or more. A sour or stale aftertaste means the powder has oxidised; opened matcha changes within weeks.

Texture matters as much as taste. Because you drink the ground leaf, a bowl of matcha has body: a fine foam on top and a slightly creamy feel without any milk. The aroma is fresh and green, with a note of sweet hay or cocoa in very good lots.

At Morii Teahouse I watch first-time drinkers on the second sip, not the first. The first sip is surprise, because nobody expects tea to taste of broth. The second is where they decide, and most say "sweet".

3. Why matcha tastes different from green tea

With sencha or any leaf tea you drink an infusion and discard the leaf. With matcha the leaf is the drink. That one fact explains most of the differences in the cup.

Concentration. A 2 g bowl of matcha delivers everything in 2 g of leaf. At the MEXT Standard Tables of Food Composition 2020 value of 32 mg caffeine per gram, that is about 64 mg per bowl, against roughly 40 mg in a 200 ml cup of sencha at standard strength. Flavour is concentrated the same way. Full numbers are in how much caffeine is in matcha.

Water temperature. Hot water pulls out more catechins, which taste bitter. Matcha at 90 °C or above turns harsh because nothing is filtered out. This is the most common reason a first bowl disappoints.

Grade and harvest. "Ceremonial" and "culinary" are not regulated terms. In practice, powder from first-harvest shaded leaf is sweet enough to drink with water alone; powder from later harvests is sharper and belongs in lattes and baking, where milk and sugar cover the edge. The taste gap is as real as the price gap, as we measured in supermarket matcha compared.

Matcha and sencha side by side

Caffeine values are MEXT 2020: 32 mg per gram of matcha, 20 mg per 100 ml of sencha infusion. Prices are our regular prices, October 2026; cost per cup uses 2 g of matcha or 2.5 g of sencha.

	Matcha	Sencha
Grown	Shaded about 3 weeks	Full sun
Form	Powder, whisked into 70 ml water	Leaf, steeped in 200 ml water
What you drink	The whole leaf	An infusion; leaf discarded
Taste	Umami, sweet, fine bitterness, full body	Fresh, light, slightly astringent
Caffeine per serving	About 64 mg (2 g)	About 40 mg (200 ml)
Price, cost per cup	30 g €29.90, €1.99	50 g €10.90, €0.55

The table says what the first sip says: matcha is sencha with the volume turned up. More taste, more caffeine, more body, roughly four times the cost per cup. One is a bowl you sit with, the other a pot you refill.