Sourced directly from Uji, Japan
Cart
0
When I make matcha with something truly exceptional — a single-origin from Uji, the kind we're careful about sourcing — I don't reach for the kettle first. I reach for cold water.
Three or four grams of matcha, about twenty millilitres of room-temperature water, and I whisk it into a thick, glossy paste. Then I take a small taste straight from the bowl. And more often than I'd like to admit, that first taste is so complete — so smooth, so deeply satisfying on the tongue — that I never make it to the hot water at all. I just drink it cold.
There's a name for that thick paste. It's called koicha (濃茶), and it's the concentrated preparation served in traditional Japanese tea ceremony. Koicha only works with high-grade matcha. Try it with cheaper stuff and the concentration exposes everything — the bitterness, the chalk, the flatness. In a way, koicha is a quality test. If a matcha tastes good this thick and this cold, you know exactly what you're holding.
So before we even get to temperature, that's my honest starting point: the better the matcha, the less it needs.
How I ended up caring about degrees at all
I didn't come to matcha through tea. I came through coffee.
For years I was deep into coffee preparation — the grind, the ratios, the pour. And anyone who's gone down that road ends up with a temperature-control kettle on the counter, because with coffee, a few degrees genuinely changes the cup. So by the time matcha became my daily ritual, dialling in water temperature wasn't a fussy extra step. It was just how I already made hot drinks. The instinct was already there.
That coffee background is, honestly, a lot of what shapes how I approach matcha today.
The common wisdom: 80°C
Ask around and you'll hear the same number for matcha: eighty degrees Celsius. Not boiling. Boiling water scorches matcha and drags out a harsh, bitter edge that no amount of whisking will fix.
I land just under that. I brew mine between 78 and 80°C. It's a small window, but it's the one where I consistently get sweetness and umami without tipping into bitterness.
My actual method: cold first, then warm
Here's where I go a little further than most.
With high-quality matcha, I start with that cold whisk I described — the koicha step. The reason is deliberate. My primary reason for drinking matcha is what's in it: the L-theanine and the gentler, sweeter compounds that give matcha its calm, focused quality. Cooler water lets those softer notes lead before hotter water pulls out the brisker, more bitter side of the leaf. Start gentle, then build.
Once I've got that smooth cold paste, I top it up with water at around 78°C. No lumps, no clumps — not in the bowl, and not going down your throat. That smoothness comes down to particle quality. When the matcha is ground fine enough, it suspends properly and integrates completely into the liquid. Our Golden Grade is milled especially fine for exactly this reason.
And because it integrates that well, water isn't the only option. Some mornings I top up with coconut water. Sometimes soda. Both dissolve beautifully, precisely because the matcha is fine enough to carry it. The point was never rigidity — it's that good matcha behaves well in whatever you give it.
The morning in Kyoto that stayed with me
I'll leave you with a story that captures the whole tension of this piece.
I was walking through one of Kyoto's more touristy neighbourhoods and stopped for a premium matcha. It came to me hot — hotter than I expected. I was surprised enough that I said something, almost as if they'd made a mistake, and asked them to remake it.
They didn't. The server held her ground. She told me she'd trained at a traditional Japanese tea school, and that the water was meant to be at ninety degrees. I was a little dismissive in the moment. But later I read the same thing in a book — that in certain traditions, ninety degrees is a real and deliberate number.
And that's the thing I keep sitting with. As much as I respect the tradition — and I respect it enormously — I'm precise by nature. In Japan, matcha is often made the way you'd describe walking: you don't overthink it. There's an iron kettle, an approximation, a feel for how long to let it sit before it settles down to around eighty. It's intuitive, and it's beautiful, and it works because it's lived-in.
I don't make it that way. I measure. I want to know the number, because for me the temperature is tied directly to the taste I'm chasing and the experience I'm drinking matcha for in the first place. That precision is my coffee background talking, and it's a big part of who I am — as someone who drinks this every day, and as someone building a matcha brand.
Neither approach is wrong. Tradition trusts the hand. I trust the thermometer. And the wonderful thing about genuinely good matcha is that it rewards you either way — cold and thick from the bowl, or warm at seventy-eight degrees, or somewhere in between that you find is entirely your own.
Where I land, if you want the short version:
- Never boiling. It scorches the tea and turns it bitter.
- 78–80°C for a standard warm bowl.
- Start with a cold whisk when the matcha is worth it — a thick, koicha-style paste, tasted before you add anything hot.
- Fine particles matter. Good matcha suspends cleanly, with no clumps, in water, coconut water, or soda alike.
