Truth be told, I’m not much of a Starbucks girl. I might go half a dozen times a year, almost always when my daughter is with me, which should tell you a lot about who’s driving that bus.

And I always order the same thing: the green tea (matcha) Frappuccino. It’s been my go-to, guilty pleasure for years.

Then I went to Japan and participated in a matcha tea ceremony — and tasted real, ceremonial matcha. And I discovered an uncomfortable truth: I don’t like matcha nearly as much as I like sugar.

In the US, matcha has become a lifestyle. We have matcha lattes, matcha cookies, matcha ice cream, matcha donuts, matcha protein powder, and — because the world doesn’t have enough pumpkin spice nonsense already — Starbucks has an Iced Pumpkin Cream Matcha on their fall menu this year. I will definitely not be ordering that one.

All of those things contain matcha in the technical sense — in the same sense that a strawberry Pop-Tart technically contains strawberries. Spiritually, these confections are only matcha-adjacent.

Chado: The Way of Tea

One of the highlights of our trip — well, a highlight for me; Ken classified it differently — was participating in chado, the Japanese Way of Tea.

Our guide, Izumi, took us to see his friend Miko, who has practiced chado for more than thirty years. Wait. Thirty years? How long does it take to learn how to make a cup of tea? I expected Miko to make tea. Instead, I watched her perform it.

The bamboo whisk. The handmade bowl. The folded cloth. The precise placement of every object. Every motion deliberate. Nothing hurried. Nothing wasted.

The complete opposite of driving through Starbucks.

Then Miko invited me to try whisking the matcha myself, and I discovered why Miko has been practicing this for thirty years. I ended up with something that looked like frothy swamp water. Miko politely rescued my matcha and finished whisking it to the proper foam for me.

It took me a minute to realize that in Japan, matcha isn’t really about the tea. It’s about attention. Which suddenly made the thirty years Miko spent learning how to make a bowl of tea seem a little less ridiculous.

Of course, if I’m being completely honest, what I was paying the most attention to during our tea ceremony was my knees. A traditional tea ceremony involves sitting seiza — kneeling with your legs folded underneath you — which Miko made look effortless.

It is not effortless. It hurts.

So while I was supposed to be contemplating the bowl, the season, the deliberate movements, and the profound beauty of being fully present in the moment, I was actually contemplating how much longer I would have to sit in this torture position.

Matcha Preparations

During our tea ceremony, Miko made two different matcha preparations for us — koicha and usucha.

Koicha, or thick tea, uses a lot more matcha and less water. It looks exactly like spinach baby food. And the taste of our koicha? Remember the fish food you gave your goldfish as a kid? Imagine what you always suspected that tasted like. Now make it bitter. No, more bitter. Now, even more bitter. OK. There you go.

Usucha, or thin tea, is lighter, more diluted and whisked until a layer of foam forms on top. I did considerably better with this version. I might even voluntarily drink it again.

With sugar.

Which, by the way, was nowhere to be found during the tea ceremony.

What Matcha Isn’t (And What It Is)

In exactly the same way that all Champagne is sparkling wine but not all sparkling wine is Champagne, all matcha is green tea, but not all green tea is matcha.

This distinction matters.

Green tea, oolong and matcha all come from the same plant, Camellia sinensis. What separates them is what happens after they are picked.

Regular Japanese green tea (sencha), follows an easy path from plant to cup. Sencha leaves are raised in the sun, then steeped in hot water and strained out of your drink.

Matcha takes a different path.

First, growers shade the tea plants for several weeks before harvest. As a result, the leaves develop more chlorophyll and retain higher levels of amino acids. Once the leaves are ready, growers harvest, steam and dry them, then remove the stems and veins. What remains is called tencha. From there, the tencha is ground into matcha, an extraordinarily fine powder.

When you drink matcha, you’re consuming the entire tea leaf. Nothing gets strained out.

And because you consume the whole leaf, matcha delivers more caffeine than an ordinary cup of green tea. Keep that in mind before accepting your third bowl of matcha before bedtime.

People who love matcha describe it as extraordinarily complex — vegetal, creamy, savory and intensely umami — fresh peas, spinach, seaweed, and spring grass.

People who don’t love matcha describe it as hot lawn.

Matcha Started in China, Japan Made it Japanese

Like many things that are now deeply associated with Japan, powdered tea started somewhere else.

Japanese monks ran into powdered tea culture in China and brought it home over several centuries. One particularly important figure in all of this was the Zen monk Eisai, who returned from China around the end of the 12th century (while Europe was busy with the Crusades) with tea seeds and first-hand knowledge of the powdered-tea tradition practiced there.

By the 14th century, China had largely moved on from powdered tea. Japan said, We’ll take it from here — and then proceeded to spend the next several centuries turning it into an art form.

This seems to be something Japan is very good at. Take an idea from somewhere else, study it for several centuries, refine it to within an inch of its life, and eventually produce something so specifically Japanese that everyone forgets it came from somewhere else.

Tea followed that pattern beautifully.

Matcha: The World’s First Energy Drink

At first, monks had a practical reason for drinking matcha: caffeine helped them stay awake during meetings (long periods of meditation). Matcha was basically the world’s first energy drink, several centuries before anyone thought to put it in a can and sell it at a convenience store.

The caffeine may have gotten matcha into the monastery, but Zen gave it a philosophy. Simplicity mattered. Discipline mattered. Paying attention mattered. Actually drinking the tea was almost beside the point.

Then the Samurai Got Involved

As tea spread beyond the monasteries, Japan’s warrior elite developed a taste for it. 

Things escalated.

Elaborate tea gatherings featured expensive imported Chinese ceramics (tenmoku), which became status symbols. The tenmoku collections of the most powerful samurai eventually became large enough to require actual curators (which, as far as 14th-century jobs went, was probably a pretty good deal).

A tenmoku collection was the medieval Japanese equivalent of displaying your expensive watch collection somewhere everyone could see it.

But during the 15th and 16th centuries, influential tea masters began pushing tea culture in another direction. The tea ceremony was about to get a makeover.

The most important of these tea masters was Sen no Rikyū.

Rikyū’s idea was that tea rooms should be small — and the ceremony should use simple, imperfect utensils. Rather than immaculate Chinese porcelain bowls, Sen no Rikyū used irregular, imperfect Japanese bowls.

The imperfection wasn’t a defect. It was his whole point. That aesthetic became closely associated with wabi-sabi: the idea that there is beauty in imperfection and the things that show the marks of time.

And then Japan built an entire room around the idea.

The Tea Room Blueprint

Traditional tea room design was modeled after a rustic hermit’s hut with low ceilings, exposed wood, and mud walls. Guests (think: samurai) entered through a low doorway called a nijiriguchi, which required them to crouch. Honestly, the only people who wouldn’t have to crouch would be hobbits — it’s that small.

Samurai also had to check their swords at the door.

Think about that for a moment.

In an intensely hierarchical society, a powerful warrior entered the room by physically lowering himself and leaving the most obvious symbol of his status behind.

Inside the tea house, rank didn’t matter. And nothing was accidental. A hanging scroll had been chosen for that particular occasion. So had the flower. And the bowl. Ditto the utensils.

Fortunately, Miko’s tea room has been updated for modern life. The door was sized for humans, not hobbits. But the interior remained minimalist and purposeful.

This is the part of chado I found most interesting. Everything is intentional — and you’re supposed to notice. The host notices first. The guest’s job is to notice back.

Speaking of noticing . . . please notice the pretty little drinks Miko has in front of her. These were the pre-game beverages. They are sakuracha, a traditional Japanese drink made by steeping pickled cherry blossoms (yes, this is an actual thing they do on purpose in Japan).

It tastes exactly like it sounds: a bowl of warm, salty vinegar water with a piece of shrubbery in it.

Shopping for Matcha in the US

If you’ve shopped for matcha in the United States, you’ve probably seen labels like ceremonial grade, premium grade, and culinary grade. They sound reassuringly official, as if somewhere in Japan there is a Matcha Authority stamping packages and maintaining standards.

There isn’t.

Japan has no single regulated grading system that neatly sorts matcha into these categories. They are largely marketing terms used outside of Japan.

This does not mean all matcha is created equal.

Matcha quality depends on all sorts of things: where the tea was grown, when the leaves were picked, the cultivar, how long the plants were shaded, how the leaves were processed and ground, and — importantly — how fresh the matcha is.

The best matcha for drinking straight with water is usually bright green, super-fine and very aromatic. It should have some bitterness, because this is still tea and not cake frosting, but it shouldn’t feel like your tongue is being punished.

More assertive matcha has its place, too. It works best in lattes, ice cream and baking, where subtlety is somewhat beside the point once milk and sugar have entered the picture.

The Modern Matcha-Industrial Complex

None of this means Japan is frozen in the 16th century, solemnly whisking spinach-tea while the rest of us corrupt it with oat milk and sugar.

Just like the US, Japan has matcha everything: lattes, Kit Kats, ice cream, cakes, soba noodles, cookies. An astonishing assortment of things have been turned bright green because someone figured out that tourists would buy them.

I have no objection to any of this. Traditions survive partly because people keep finding different ways to enjoy them. The matcha KitKats and matcha ice cream were delicious.

And there’s something wonderfully Japanese about the fact that the same ingredient can inhabit a centuries-old tea ceremony and a convenience-store candy aisle without either one necessarily canceling out the other.

It’s Not Really About the Tea

Sake tells you something about Japan’s relationship with ritual and reciprocity. Shochu tells you about regional identity and the ingenious things people will ferment when given enough time and a functioning still.

Matcha tells a different story.

Matcha tells you what happens when a culture decides that making someone a bowl of tea deserves your full attention.

The ingredients are absurdly simple: tea and water. That’s it. But then Japan adds an imperfectly perfect bowl, a bamboo whisk, a flower, a scroll, a spectacularly uncomfortable way of sitting, centuries of aesthetic philosophy, and approximately fourteen opportunities to worry that you’re holding something incorrectly.

And somehow none of this makes the tea feel more complicated. It makes it feel even more important.

Matcha isn’t really about turning tea into ceremony. It’s about turning attention into hospitality. The tea just gives everyone something to do with their hands.

Which makes it particularly funny that six hundred years of monks, samurai, tea masters, aesthetics and very specific ideas about powdered leaves eventually led us to matcha Kit Kats.

I came home with the Kit Kats.