Does the Colour of Your Matcha Affect the Taste?
The greenest matcha I have ever bought was also the worst matcha I have ever bought.
I have drunk a lot of bad matcha, and some of it cost me nine dollars. What I have worked out is that the colour of your matcha does affect the taste, and you can usually tell how a cup will go before you have tasted it. What I did not know for a long time is that the colour has a limit. Past a certain point it stops telling you anything useful at all, and that is where a lot of people get talked into buying the wrong tin.
Where the green in matcha actually comes from
Matcha is green because of chlorophyll. Growers cover the plants for roughly three to four weeks before harvest, which cuts the amount of light reaching the leaf. The plant responds by making more chlorophyll so it can catch the light that is left, and the leaves get darker and greener as a result.
That same shading changes the flavour at the same time. In lower light the plant holds onto more of its amino acids, mainly L-theanine, and those are what give good matcha its sweetness and its savoury, brothy note. It also produces fewer catechins, because catechins build up in response to sunlight, and catechins are the bitter, drying compounds you taste at the back of a harsh cup.
So in a well shaded first harvest matcha, the deep green and the good flavour arrive together. They are both side effects of the same growing decision, which is the entire reason people started judging matcha by how green it looks.
When dull, khaki matcha is a genuine red flag
At the low end, colour is a fair warning. A dull olive or yellow green powder usually means the plants were shaded less, or the leaves were picked later in the season, or older leaves were used, or stem and vein were ground in with the leaf. All of those leave you with fewer amino acids and more catechins, and you can taste every bit of it. The cup comes out flat and grassy with a harsh finish, and it needs three pumps of syrup before it is drinkable.
Brown is a different problem entirely. Matcha oxidises as soon as it meets air, and light and heat both speed that up. By the time the colour has dulled towards brown, the flavour has already gone stale and slightly papery. If your tin has been sitting open next to the toaster since March, that is your answer.
Colour is a good way to spot bad matcha. It is a terrible way to pick the best one.
Why bright green matcha is not automatically better
Colour stops being a useful signal well before you reach the top of the range. Two matchas can look almost identical and taste nothing alike, and the brighter of the two is not automatically the better one. There are four reasons for that, and none of them make it onto the front of the tin.
Tea plants come in cultivars, in the same way apples come in varieties. Each cultivar has its own leaf chemistry, and colour and flavour are separate traits that do not move together. Some cultivars are naturally vivid but taste fairly one dimensional, while others look more muted and carry far more depth and sweetness. A lot of vibrancy is simply genetics.
Most ceremonial grade matcha is not a single cultivar. It is a blend of several, put together so the flavour stays consistent from one harvest to the next rather than so the powder looks as green as possible. The colour you see is the average of everything in the mix, which means a blender can build something bright that tastes thin, or something a shade softer that tastes properly rich. That is a decision, not a defect.
Matcha is stone milled down to somewhere around five to ten microns. Finer particles scatter light differently, and your eye reads that as a brighter green. Two matchas made from the same leaf can look noticeably different purely because of how finely they were milled.
Lighting, packaging, editing and, at the worst end of the market, added colourings can all push a powder greener than it really is. A neon green matcha in a photo tells you nothing about what ends up in your cup.
Ours is shade grown ceremonial grade matcha from Uji in Kyoto. It looks the way it looks because of how it is grown, not because we turned the saturation up for the camera.
The bit that is actually your fault
Colour only describes the leaf. It says nothing at all about what you do with it once the tin is open. You can ruin genuinely good matcha with boiling water, and no amount of chlorophyll is going to save you from that.
Sift it first so it whisks smoothly, keep your water around eighty degrees rather than straight off the boil, and whisk it properly instead of stirring it around. Half a teaspoon is right for the Unsweetened, and a full teaspoon for the sweetened blends.
How to store matcha so it stays green
Keep the lid on tight, and store the tin somewhere cool and dark that is not next to the stove or sitting in the sun. Air, light and heat are the three things that dull the colour and flatten the flavour, so cutting all three is most of the job.
Do not decant it into a cute glass jar for the open shelf. I did that once and it became the most expensive piece of decoration I have ever owned.
Until my next questionable idea.
Morning Made Unsweetened Matcha Latte
Shade grown ceremonial grade matcha from Uji, Kyoto. Nothing added, nothing to hide behind.
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