Sourced directly from Uji, Japan
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You can spend months sourcing the finest stone-ground matcha from Uji, whisk it with a hand-cut bamboo chasen, and serve it in beautiful Kasama-yaki — and still ruin the bowl in a single step most people never think about.
The water.
It sounds almost too simple. But a bowl of matcha is, by weight, somewhere around 99% water. The tea leaf is the soul of the drink, but the water is the body it lives in. Get the water wrong and even the best matcha will taste dull, flat, or bitter. Get it right and a good matcha will bloom — sweet, savoury, and impossibly smooth.
Here's what actually matters, and how to get it right at home.
My obsession started with coffee (and it got out of hand)
I should confess something before we go any further: I am not a normal person when it comes to water.
It didn't start with matcha. It started a couple of years earlier, with coffee. I was deep — and I mean deep — down the specialty coffee rabbit hole when a well-known coffee roastery owner sat me down and told me the thing that broke my brain. The beans, he said, are only half the story. The water is what makes or breaks the cup. And he had a specific recommendation: for coffee, he swore by Nestlé bottled water.
Now, a reasonable person hears this and buys a few bottles for their morning brew.
I switched my entire household water supply to Nestlé.
The whole house. Drinking, cooking, the lot. My family thought I'd lost it. I maintain, to this day, that I had simply found it. If the coffee guy said Nestlé, then Nestlé it would be — for every tap my hand might one day touch.
So by the time I fell for Japanese tea, I wasn't easing into the water question. I was already the guy reading the mineral content off the back of a bottle in the supermarket like it was a wine list. And here's the thing: matcha rewards that particular brand of madness even more than coffee does.
Water is (almost) all of your matcha
When you drink matcha, you're drinking the whole leaf suspended in water rather than an infusion poured off the leaves. That makes water quality even more important than it is with steeped teas like sencha or hojicha. There's nowhere for a bad water profile to hide.
Everything that's dissolved in your water — minerals, chlorine, other treatment chemicals — ends up interacting directly with the compounds that give matcha its character: the L-theanine and amino acids behind that signature umami and sweetness, and the catechins behind its gentle bitterness. The wrong water throws that balance off before the whisk ever touches the bowl.
Why soft water wins
The single most important factor is water hardness — the amount of dissolved minerals, mainly calcium and magnesium, in your water.
For matcha, you want soft water with a low mineral content. High levels of calcium and magnesium mute the flavour. They flatten the delicate sweetness and umami you paid for, and can push an otherwise balanced matcha toward a chalky, lifeless taste. Soft water, by contrast, lets those subtle amino-acid notes come forward clearly.
This isn't a coincidence of taste — it's geography. The great tea regions of Japan, Uji included, sit on naturally soft water. The matcha was, in a sense, designed around soft water. When you brew with soft water at home, you're recreating the conditions the tea was made for.
The chlorine problem
If you're brewing straight from the tap, there's a second culprit: chlorine. Most municipal water is treated with it, and while it's perfectly safe to drink, it's terrible for matcha. Chlorine carries a faint chemical aroma and taste that clings to the tea and overwhelms its natural fragrance.
The good news is that chlorine is easy to remove. A simple activated-carbon filter (the kind in most home water filters) takes care of most of it. Letting water sit out for a while helps too, but filtering is faster and more reliable.
A lesson from Hoshi no Mura
On one of my sourcing trips through Kyushu, a tea farmer in the village of Hoshi no Mura, near Yame — its name translates beautifully to "Star Village," and it's one of Japan's most respected regions for gyokuro and high-grade green tea — gave me a piece of advice I've never forgotten.
We were talking about bottled water, and he was very clear: Evian is not a good choice for matcha. Too many minerals. Volvic is much better.
I was curious enough to check the numbers later, and he was exactly right:
- Evian carries around 80 mg/L of calcium and 26 mg/L of magnesium, with total dissolved solids around 345 mg/L. It's a hard, mineral-rich water — lovely to drink on its own, but far too heavy for matcha.
- Volvic is far softer: roughly 12 mg/L of calcium and 8 mg/L of magnesium, with total minerals around 130 mg/L.
That difference is exactly why Volvic lets a good matcha sing while Evian quietly smothers it. A farmer who has spent his life around tea could taste in a single bowl what it took me a lab report to confirm. (I'd like to say my Nestlé years had trained my palate to that level. They had not.)
What to actually use
You don't need anything exotic. In order of preference:
- Filtered soft water — a standard home carbon filter over soft tap water is excellent, affordable, and removes chlorine. If you live in a soft-water area, this is likely all you need.
- A low-mineral bottled water — Volvic is the easy, widely available benchmark. Look for a bottle with low total dissolved solids and low calcium and magnesium on the label.
- Avoid hard, mineral-rich waters (like Evian) and distilled or fully de-mineralised water, which strips out so much that the tea can taste oddly hollow. A little mineral content is good — just not much.
The label is your friend. Aim for soft, low-TDS water, and you're most of the way there.
Getting the temperature right
Water quality and water temperature go hand in hand. Boiling water scorches matcha, drawing out harsh bitterness and destroying the sweetness you're working so hard to protect.
Aim for around 70–80°C (158–176°F) — hot, but well below boiling. If you don't have a temperature-controlled kettle, boil your water and let it rest for a couple of minutes, or pour it once between two vessels to bring the temperature down before whisking.
Soft water at the right temperature is the foundation every good bowl is built on.
Respecting the leaf, from Uji to your bowl
At AICHA, we travel to Uji, Kyoto to source our matcha directly from the tea families who grow it — because we believe the quality of what's in the tin should be beyond question. But our responsibility to the leaf doesn't end at the tin. It ends in your bowl.
The care you put into your water is the final step in that chain. Soft, filtered, chlorine-free water, warmed to the right temperature, is the difference between simply drinking matcha and truly tasting it.
Source well. Brew with care. And give your matcha the water it deserves.
Explore AICHA's Uji-sourced matcha collection at myaicha.com.
