Ceremonial Matcha - What is that?

You’ve heard about the amazing benefits of matcha, but popping to your local cafe for a matcha latte everyday can sometimes be a strain on the purse strings. Not to mention that you never know the quality of the matcha being used. After trying matcha in all the cool and trendy cafes in Sydney, we can tell you that unless you are holidaying in Japan, your best matcha experience will be at your own kitchen table. We see a lot of cafes using culinary matcha, matcha you would use in baking, for teas and lattes and then sweetening with sugar it to cover the bitter taste.

If you’ve googled matcha before, you probably came across hundreds of matcha sellers claiming that ceremonial matcha is what you need to get your hands on!

But, wait. Do you even know what ceremonial matcha means?

Well, as the name suggests it’s the type of matcha used in the traditional Japanese tea ceremony. However, it’s actually not that easy to explain. There are no internationally agreed-upon standards for classifying matcha grades. Most companies will divide the grades by cooking and ceremonial grade, but because there are no standards or laws on how companies classify matcha grades (like calling sparkling wine champagne), most companies end up using “cooking/culinary matcha” for matcha you can use when cooking and “ceremonial matcha” for any matcha you use to make lattes or tea. 

That’s not entirely wrong.

As you might guess, culinary matcha is the matcha we use for cooking or even for making some mixed matcha drinks. It’s usually a blend of different harvests. Sometimes the first, usually the second and third but also fourth (depending on the year) and its quality is appropriate for cooking, but you wouldn’t brew a delicious bowl of matcha tea from culinary matcha. It would be super bitter – trust me, when we were scouring Japan to find the right Matcha suppliers, any matcha we tasted, we tasted as tea, lattes, cocktails, baked deserts and more.

It gets harder to explain when it comes to drinking matcha. Most companies will use the name “Ceremonial Matcha” for the matcha they advise to use when drinking, but this is quite a broad definition. The so called ceremonial matcha should come from the first and maybe a little of the second harvest and only particular leaves from the tea plant are used. However, sometimes this so-called “ceremonial matcha” comes from the same harvests as the culinary matcha and no care is taken choosing the best leaves. If you have it as a latte with sugar, honey, coconut milk, cinnamon, etc and you are new to matcha, you might not be able to tell it’s not high quality matcha. However, if you have it as a tea (matcha powder and water only), you will definitely be able to tell.

I want to state here that we have customers who like to drink culinary matcha because they enjoy the bitterness and I am not here to tell you what your taste buds like. We all have different taste buds and preferences, but what I want to do with this post is try to educate people on what they should expect from different grades of matcha and to be weary of cheap matcha.

To be very transparent with our customers, at Shoshin Matcha, we have three grades of drinking matcha, Sei, Jaku and WA and only two of them can be classified as ceremonial.

Lets start with our drinking matcha that we do not classify as ceremonial…

 
 

This is great to make matcha lattes, that’s exactly what we developed this blend for. This is what our partner cafes use in their delicious matcha lattes. It’s a blend of first and second harvest and it can also be used to brew tea, however you wouldn’t get the ultimate matcha tea experience from this grade.

As you suspect, the ceremonial grade is the highest grade of matcha you can get. It has the most desirable colour, taste and finish. This is where you have to be smart when buying tea. Most of the “real” ceremonial grade matcha doesn’t even leave Japan and within the ceremonial grade, there might be sub-divisions of grades according to the crop and the quality of the leaves. Think real champagne from France – you can buy a $22 bottle or you can buy a $60 or $100 bottle. The most expensive bottle will most likely be smoother and taste better. The champagne house would be more selective with their grapes, harvest times, how they harvest, bottling, storage and a lot more. It’s the same with Matcha. The Japanese farmers have perfected the art of growing, harvesting and producing Matcha over several hundred years, much like the French with their champagne. In our case, we chose to import two different ceremonial grades and the main reason to do that is that we are very aware of the price and also the most common uses of matcha powder in Australia.

 
 

This is the best matcha that we offer. It carries zero bitterness even when used in high amounts. It carries a vibrant rich green colour and it’s almost sweet. This is the stuff that you would find in special tea ceremonies in Japan. It’s packed full of L-Theanine and due to the flavour profile you can use more (if you want) without having to sweeten it, so you get a bigger kick of energy and focus to get you through whatever day comes your way! It comes from only the finest first-harvest tea and only certain hand-picked leaves make the cut for this grade. It’s the number one choice for those who like the best tasting Usucha, a.k.a thin tea, (think a typical cup of tea just made with matcha instead) or a more traditional style drink such as Koicha, a.k.a. thick tea. We love SEI because even if you use it in a matcha latte you can taste the difference. We are talking about zero bitterness! In saying all this, as much as we love our SEI,we wanted to give our clients an option that carries similar qualities, but at a cheaper price point. That’s the reason we have our JAKU.

 
 

This grade of matcha is also widely used to prepare the type of tea served in the Japanese tea ceremony and the most common matcha preparation in Japan. Our JAKU organic ceremonial matcha also comes from first-harvest tea. Although the leaves are machine-picked, leaf selection still plays an important part of this grade. This still tastes amazing in a cup of tea or as a latte. At the Sydney Tea Festival in 2019 we were offering both to our new tea loving friends in the crowd and some people preferred JAKU, some preferred SEI and some said they couldn’t tell the difference. With JAKU and SEI, as true matcha lovers, we would always say, if you can, go with SEI, but JAKU is there and it still gives you that great matcha buzz while tasting amazing.

We totally understand that people are going through some tough times at the moment so what was supposed to be a start of 2020 sale will continue for a while longer as we want to keep our prices as low as we can so more Australians can get their hands on some quality delicious organic matcha and help the environment at the same time.

We are still planting 10 trees in developing countries for every product that we sell. Click here if you want to read more about our tree planting mission. And, to add to that… we have a positive carbon footprint, which means we offset out carbon impact completely. Even the delivery to your door!

Our last point on ceremonial matcha – Price – The truth is Ceremonial matcha is not cheap. Only a limited amount of the good stuff will actually make it out of Japan and the quality of the leaves and the process add to the price.

Always be suspicious of very cheap ceremonial matcha.

As we mention before, there’s no international standards to classify the grades of matcha and some sellers will be offering culinary or premium matcha as ceremonial matcha and you can never find out without trying it out. If we found 100g of “ceremonial matcha” for $20, we would be a little suspicious… actually, no… we would be very suspicious!

Our advice: Make sure you buy from a supplier you trust, be suspicious of very cheap ceremonial matcha and if you are new to matcha buy from a supplier that is transparent on how they classify their grades.

If you want to learn more about good x bad quality matcha click here and if you are ready to enjoy a nice bowl of the highest quality ceremonial matcha you can get outside japan click here.

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Sabs & John

JohnCeremonial matcha, SEI, WA, JAKU1 Comment