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I did not set out to start a matcha company. I set out to solve a problem in my own head, and the solution kept escalating until it turned into a business.
This is the honest version of that story — the science I found along the way, the one book that gave it a name, and the part where I quietly admit that a normal cup of tea probably won't do very much for you.
It started with a teabag, at a funeral
My grandmother passed away and I flew to India for the funeral. My brother came in from somewhere else, and we spent those strange, slow days together the way families do.
One morning I noticed him making green tea from a teabag. Not ceremonially. Not as a wellness ritual. Just a man with a mug and a teabag, first thing.
I asked him about it. He said it helped him in the morning — that it was the first thing he had, and it set him up better than anything else.
I filed that away. When I got back to Dubai, I bought a box of green teabags.
That is the entire origin. Everything after it is escalation.
What I was actually chasing
To explain why the teabag stuck, I have to back up.
I have ADHD. For most of my working life I managed it the way a lot of people do, which is to say I managed it with caffeine and hoped for the best.
Then my son was born and I stopped drinking alcohol. That decision opened up a surprising amount of time and attention, and — very much in keeping with how my brain works — I poured all of it into a new obsession. Specialty coffee. I bought the equipment. I learned origins, roast profiles, aromas, brew methods. I got good at it.
But I was still looking for something. Coffee gave me a spike and then took it back. I would climb, then flatten out, and the flattening always felt like a small betrayal.
So I did what I always do, which is research. And the research kept pointing at one compound: L-theanine.
L-theanine is an amino acid found almost exclusively in the tea plant. The literature described exactly what I was looking for — a calm, alert state. Focus without the edge. Not sedation, not stimulation. Something in between that I had never quite managed to reach on coffee.
Then I found out where the highest concentrations of it live, and my teabag habit suddenly looked very inadequate.
What L-theanine actually does in the brain
Here is the science, kept honest.
When researchers put people under an EEG and give them L-theanine, they consistently observe an increase in alpha-band brain wave activity. Alpha waves are associated with a state of relaxed alertness — the mental gear you are in when you are calm but awake, settled but not drifting off. It is the state you fall into when you are absorbed in something rather than fighting to concentrate on it.
A few details worth knowing:
- The effect has been observed from doses of around 50mg, which is a meaningful amount, not a token one.
- It appears to work through two routes: increasing alpha wave generation in the occipital and parietal regions of the brain, and supporting GABA synthesis, a neurotransmitter involved in calming neural activity.
- Onset is roughly 30 to 60 minutes, which matches my own experience almost exactly.
Crucially, L-theanine does not make you drowsy. That is the whole point of it. It takes the sharp edges off caffeine without taking away the alertness — which is why the caffeine-plus-L-theanine combination that occurs naturally in tea leaves behaves so differently from caffeine on its own.
The book that gave it a name
Around the time I was transitioning from coffee to matcha, I read The Silva Mind Control Method by José Silva, published in 1978.
Silva is usually misfiled as some sort of mystic. He was not. He was born in Laredo, Texas, in 1914, and he was fundamentally an engineer. He repaired radios. He taught electronics for the US Army Signal Corps during the Second World War. And when he became curious about the mind, he did the most engineer-like thing imaginable: he bought an EEG machine and started measuring the electrical activity of the brain for himself.
What he found, and built his whole method around, was the alpha state. That same relaxed-alert frequency. His entire body of work is an attempt to answer one question — how do you deliberately get there?
That question landed hard for me, because I knew exactly what I was missing.
I am a very logical person. I see things as they are. That is useful most of the time, but at that point in my life I was aware of a gap: I was executing my day-to-day work perfectly well and I had almost no imagination for anything beyond it. I could not picture something bigger than what was directly in front of me. I felt I was lacking foresight, and I suspected that the state Silva described was the missing ingredient.
So I went looking for it. Honestly, I was almost outsourcing the problem — trying anything that might get me there.
Matcha was one of those attempts. Not the answer, not a revelation. One of several deliberate efforts.
It just happened to be the one that worked.
Why matcha, and not just green tea
Here is the part where I argue against my own industry for a moment.
A standard cup of black tea contains somewhere around 20mg of L-theanine. Most green teabags are in a similar range. That is below the dose at which the research observes clear effects. If you drink a teabag and feel nothing in particular, you are not imagining it — you are simply underdosed.
I do not say that to sell you something. I say it because it is the single most important thing I learned, and nobody told me at the start.
Matcha is different for one structural reason: you consume the entire leaf. With brewed tea, you steep leaves in water, extract some fraction of what is inside them, and throw the leaves away. With matcha, the leaves are shade-grown, de-stemmed, de-veined and stone-milled into powder, and you drink all of it. Nothing is discarded.
The shading matters enormously. In the weeks before harvest, the tea plants are covered. Deprived of full sunlight, the plant slows its conversion of L-theanine into catechins, and the amino acid concentrates in the leaf. That is also where matcha's sweetness, its deep green colour and its umami come from — they are all the same phenomenon. Shade-grown teas — matcha and gyokuro above all — are simply where L-theanine lives.
Once I understood that, gyokuro and matcha became the only two teas I really cared about.
The escalation
The escalation went roughly like this:
Teabag. Then a nicer teabag. Then matcha from a local specialty store in the UAE — which, honestly, tasted bad enough that I nearly abandoned the whole project. Then matcha ordered off Amazon, several brands, trial and error.
One of those brands — a company that no longer exists — was the turning point. I made a bowl and I felt different. Not dramatically. Not like a stimulant. I still cannot describe it properly in words, and I have stopped trying to. It was a distinct quality of energy that I had not encountered before, and it was the reason I did not give up.
After that it was direct imports from established Japanese producers into Dubai. And eventually, working directly with growers in Uji, it became AICHA.
Each step was just me refusing to accept that the previous step was as good as it got.
What actually changed, day to day
I did not quit coffee dramatically. I replaced one of my three daily coffees with matcha, and then the ratio kept shifting on its own until Japanese green tea had taken over.
The differences I noticed, in order of how much they mattered to me:
Stable energy. This is the big one. Coffee gives me a peak and then a return to baseline that feels like a decline. Matcha gives me a level line. It does not surge and it does not drop out from under me. That consistency across a whole working day is what I had actually been looking for since I stopped drinking.
No jitters. None. This is where the L-theanine and caffeine relationship is most obvious in practice.
Better sleep. On coffee I would struggle to fall asleep at a set time. Now my routine holds: I drink my matcha at around 9:30 or 10 in the morning, and I am asleep by ten at night without a fight. The morning timing is not incidental — it is the whole reason it works.
Leaf quality is not a marketing story. Handpicked-leaf matcha has a noticeably greater effect for me than machine-harvested. I did not expect that going in, and it is a significant part of why AICHA sources the way it does.
The ritual itself. I did not anticipate caring about this. Whisking by hand, watching the colour turn, the few minutes of doing one thing only. Some of the benefit is chemical and some of it is simply that I stop for four minutes and pay attention to something. I am not going to pretend I can separate the two.
You cannot force the alpha state
This is the conclusion I have landed on, and it is less exciting than what I was hoping for when I started.
You cannot will yourself into that focused, calm, clear frequency. Pushing harder is precisely the thing that keeps you out of it. What you can do is stack the conditions in its favour — sleep, movement, quiet, and yes, what you drink and when you drink it.
Matcha is one of those conditions for me. It is not magic and it is not medicine. It is a well-made cup of tea containing an unusually high concentration of an amino acid that the research associates with exactly the mental state I spent years trying to reach on purpose.
Some mornings it is a bowl of tea. Other mornings my brain shifts into a different gear entirely and I get an hour of thinking I could not have forced.
I will take the odds.
A note on honesty: nothing here is medical advice, and matcha is not a treatment for ADHD or anything else. This is my personal experience and my reading of the research, offered as one person's account rather than a recommendation. If you are managing a health condition, talk to a doctor — not a tea seller.
