When Matcha Is Your Personality

Amid a matcha boom, with its matcha girlies and sugary matcha lattes, can the premium green tea replace wine as a status symbol?

Annie Arriaga writes and makes videos for Food52 and elsewhere, and is a masters student at New York University’s Food Studies program. Annie will regularly be covering coffee, tea, and other beverages for Everyday Drinking.

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The “matcha girl” is the “clean girl.” The premium, green Japanese tea has taken over social media feeds and coffee shop menus, and somehow, has its own “aesthetic.” What does it mean to turn beverage preferences into personality traits?

I appreciate matcha in the same way I appreciate wine. The history behind the tea-growing, the meditative process of whisking it, and the particular terroirs of different farms all fascinate me. I love the chocolate, nutty flavors of matcha from Yame and the saline, umami notes of matcha from Uji. These obscure and nerdy details can be enjoyed by anyone with an appreciation for food and drink— and why it especially interests me to see matcha become a common coffee replacement in the West, especially for younger generations. But matcha cannot, and should not, be coffee-fied.

From farm to powder.

Matcha is more expensive than coffee. Tencha (the whole leaf form of matcha) is grown primarily in Japan, the harvesting cycles for high-quality matcha are fickle and slow, and all ceremonial grade matcha is ground by stone mills, producing around 30 to 40 grams of matcha powder per hour. In comparison, global coffee production is a well-oiled machine of productivity that churns out billions of pounds of the fruit every year, even despite natural disasters affecting main producers in Vietnam and Brazil. You can’t compare the two: matcha should be significantly more expensive since it’s a luxury product.

At the same time, matcha lattes are on the menu of most coffee shops in New York City. The demand for matcha from markets across the world, namely the U.S. and the U.K., is skyrocketing at unprecedented rates that cannot be met by Japanese farmers. Big chains like Starbucks and Blank Street serve matcha lattes (made with a sugar added “matcha latte” powder mix that gets thrown in a blender) with syrups, fruit purees, and cold foams.

Blank Street Coffee's blueberry matcha and Starbucks' lavender cold foam oatmilk matcha.

Ceremonial grade matcha is typically made from the youngest, first harvest leaves of Tencha that is known for subtle, delicate flavor, a vibrant green color, and higher prices. Predictably, it's also the grade of matcha used in Japanese tea ceremonies. Culinary grade matcha is made with leaves from later harvests of the same plant and is known for less complex, bitter flavor, darker color, and lower prices in bulk. Culinary grade matcha is meant to be used for cooking and baking because of its pronounced flavor and cheaper price. Many coffee shops, from big chains to independent businesses, will use culinary grade matcha for their lattes in an effort to cut costs. That swampy green color and overly bitter flavor of culinary grade matcha is, unfortunately, what many people associate with matcha lattes.

Green tea has been marketed to women in the U.S. for a long time, mainly because of its supposed ‘health benefits,’ including helping with weight loss and blood sugar management. The matcha ‘boom’ has happened parallel to the rise of modern diet culture, a predictable rise in low-calorie messaging, partly brought about by GLP-1 (Ozempic) becoming readily available to the general public. To complicate things further, the ‘rise’ of premium matcha in the West comes at a time when Americans are struggling financially.

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So why are Americans spending so much on matcha? Why are matcha powders sold out online? Being a “matcha girlie” is not a club that everyone can join— the consumption and preference for matcha in the American market is largely a way for consumers to communicate their financial and cultural status. Even while people might be ordering a Strawberry Shortcake matcha latte and taste little to none of the actual green tea, they didn’t order a coffee. They might be spending a hundred dollars on matcha powders, all just to prepare a matcha latte in the same way they would a creamer-loaded coffee.

On top of that, its association with thinness and the health and wellness industry surely helps propel the drink’s cultural relevance in the U.S. even further than other coffee replacements. As a matcha and coffee drinker, I do have to admit that the caffeine release IS much slower than espresso and makes me feel a lot less anxious than an afternoon double shot. I’ve heard from many matcha-drinking friends that this subtler caffeine release is the main reason they opt for green tea, as espresso or coffee makes them feel anxious.

An iced matcha cortado and an iced matcha latte from Kettl, a New York based matcha importer and coffee shop.

For better or worse, matcha caught on in the U.S. and big companies are trying their hardest to commodify it, in the same way that coffee transformed a few centuries ago. It’s caused a matcha shortage, as we’ve seen in recent headlines, and the shortage doesn’t seem to be dying down anytime soon. Japanese farmers and the Japanese government are shifting policy and farming methods to keep up with the demand. There are some producers in China and elsewhere around Asia hoping to capitalize on the Western trend, but it's incredibly difficult to sell matcha not grown in Japan because of the flavor. The U.S. will probably see a further push to make culinary grade matcha the norm and ceremonial grade matcha into even more of a luxury product.

This “catching on” is not necessarily a bad thing. I, for one, love to enjoy matcha prepared in its purest form, at home, at traditional tea spots around New York, while also occasionally ordering a sweet matcha concoction out at a cafe.

As long as matcha obsessed countries like the U.S. can pay the premium for high-quality, ceremonial grade Japanese matcha, and be patient around the growing cycles, then consumers can and should enjoy the tea while acknowledging how special and limited the product is. Now, when this limited nature reveals itself through shortages and price raises, people will inevitably use it as an opportunity to display their financial and cultural capital.