Mad About Matcha
A trend that may be hard to swallow
by Oliver Benjamin

Like the Internet and the return of hard rock music, the meteoric rise of espresso coffee will always be associated with the zeitgeist of turn-of-last-century America: that is, the sense that a great new product might not only make scads of money but usher in greater freedom of expression for all.

The 1990s were heady years, and for the most part their libertarian legacy is still with us, though we've long since learned that there are frustrating limits to growth. The dot-com boom tanked when everyone realized the Internet wasn't actually generating much tangible cash; hard-rock "grunge" music quickly became as repetitive and juvenile as it had been 20 years earlier; and as coffee corporations multiplied, they struggled desperately to come up with some edge over their competitors, even though beneath the hype they all essentially purveyed the same product. Unlike pizza or hamburgers, sadly, there are only so many things you can add to a cuppa before you muck it up. It has proven quite the challenge to diversify a product that is at its most perfect when unadulterated. We should hope none of us lives to see the nacho cheesaccino.

After years of struggling to think up new flavors to squirt into our blended coffee drinks, marketers appear to be embarking on a different tack entirely. As talk show host Jon Stewart puts it every night, "And now, your moment of Zen." They are turning, ever so slowly, to tea. And not just any tea, of course. The problem with tea is that you don't need a big, pricey machine or any particular expertise to make it, and so it's difficult to justify charging $4 per cup. Moreover, it's a challenge for simple, unassuming tea to compete with the sugary, creamy, flavored, hyper-caffeinated goodness of a big, fat, blended latte. And the chai latte is so last decade, though a billion people on the Indian subcontinent might decline to concede this.

Enter one of the strangest ideas ever brewed up for your drinking pleasure: the "matcha latte." To understand how truly bizarre this latest offering is, we must review a little about Japanese culture, cuisine and a smattering of population genetics.

First off, matcha is a ground-up powder made from the most expensive tea in Japan, called gyokuro. Gyokuro is sometimes referred to as "shade-grown" tea because part of its growth cycle must take place in the shade; this is one of the reasons it's so expensive. Another is the fact that pricey, high-nitrogen fertilizer is used, which is the principal reason matcha enjoys such an eye-poppingly brilliant green color. Finally, Japan is one of the smallest and most expensive countries in the world, so production costs are as high as farmland acreage is low.

But its high price isn't what makes matcha so special. In fact, it's so special that you generally can't buy it in a restaurant or store. This is because matcha is used almost exclusively in elaborate, ritualized tea ceremonies that last upwards of three hours—solemn, spiritual affairs deeply tied to the Japanese national character as well as its religious traditions. Matcha is essentially a sacramental tea, rarely consumed outside of ceremony. There's a good reason for this: like Catholic communion wine or its kosher cousin, it normally tastes pretty grim.

Most Westerners describe their first taste of matcha as something between a fist full of lawn clippings and a wet tatami mat, only more bitter. This is no slight on matcha, of course—from the Asian point of view, we Westerners don't have the most discerning palates; look how long it took us to get used to the idea of sushi. And like sushi, matcha presents its own special challenges when consumed in an authentic Japanese fashion. Luckily for the earnest epicurean, that isn't necessary. When it comes to sushi, most people just stick to cooked varieties like shrimp or already-familiar raw ones like salmon. Either that, or we just jam in a bunch of avocado and crab sticks and call it a California roll. Turning Japanese? I really think not.

Similarly, the aforementioned matcha latte undergoes a thorough drabbing-down: The tea taste is covered up with so much sugar and milk that outlets could probably use actual lawn clippings and few would be the wiser. Sounds like a typical "appeal to the lowest common denominator" Yankee marketing shenanigan, except that it's not: The matcha latte was invented by Kouta Matsuda, the Japanese founder of Koots Green Tea, and became popular in Japan a few years before landing on U.S. shores in 2006. Whereas traditional matcha is made by simply whisking the powder into hot water, Matsuda figured out a way to run it through an espresso machine—a kooky idea that added nothing to the drink except the facility to justify a higher price. But you did get milk.

Now, here's the really strange part: According to most estimates, some 95 percent of Japanese adults are lactose-intolerant, and genetically so. So a matcha latte is something of a combinatory contradiction in terms, akin to a Big McAmish burger or Kalahari crabcakes. Yet, despite this, it appears that the Next Big Thing complex works as effectively in Japan as it does in the States, and it supersedes any gut-level protest that might ensue as a result.

However, early indications are that it might not be going over so well here after all. Anecdotal evidence from Internet forums suggests that most people find the matcha latte, at least Starbucks' version of it, an acquired taste not very much worth acquiring. Even with a great deal of sugar and milk as well as a shot of sweet mango syrup, the concoction seems unpalatable to most people. Furthermore, when spokespeople and reviewers proclaim, "Either you love it or you hate it," or, "It's good when you cover up the taste with other flavors," one suspects a product's days are numbered, especially when it's earmarked for mass consumption.

But Koots and Starbucks are not alone on the matcha bandwagon. And wherever that neo-matcha vehicle is, the critics are tailgating closely behind. When The Washington Post reviewed a series of products flavored with matcha recently, the general message was approximately, "If you must follow this trend, here are the offerings that won't force you to rethink your knee-jerk allegiance to fashion."

Yet despite the odds against it, we should hope that more folks do in fact develop a taste for matcha, whether in latte form or in its original style. That's because matcha may in fact be one of the healthiest concoctions known to man. More than any other available elixirs today, antioxidants rule the roost; scientific studies suggest that these protective compounds help guard against microscopic damage to our cellular machinery and even DNA, staving off aging, decay and even cancer. By now, nearly everyone knows that green tea is an excellent source of antioxidants, eclipsed only marginally by coffee, pomegranate seeds and blueberries. Yet brewing tea only extracts a small percentage of the leaf's bounty. Because matcha is essentially the whole leaf ground up, however, it offers up the whole shebang: A cup of its infusion will net the imbiber 137 times the amount of healthful antioxidants than an equivalent cup of the brewed version. 137 times. Plus, 10 times the amount of ordinary nutrients. If instant karma doesn't get you, as John Lennon promised it would, now you can go down to the shop and pick up some yourself.

In recent years, we've had to sit through a barrage of wild, sweeping health claims about our beverages: Green tea is better than black tea. ... Black tea and green tea have the same benefits. ... Coffee is bad for you. ... Coffee is good for you. ... Chocolate produces love hormones. ... But only in women. ... Coke rots your teeth. ... No it doesn't, at least not any more than orange juice. ... Saccharine sweetener gives you cancer. ... But only if you drink a lake of Diet Pepsi. ... Mate is healthier than tea. ... Mate is not any healthier than tea, and it tastes like old gym socks ...

Of course, after all the headlines are retired none of the claims really stick around very long, but matcha may be different — 137 times the amount of antioxidants as other beverages is certainly something worth our consideration, if not an outright celebratory toast. Furthermore, let's be honest: Even if it turns out that the whole antioxidant promise is a bunch of hooey, a drink as green as Kermit the Frog and as bitter as Bayer aspirin simply must be good for you in some way, especially when it hails from a nation with the longest-lived people on the planet. Right? In any event, one needn't be too reasonable when making wild, sweeping health claims.

With this in mind, we should hope that some company finds a way to make matcha more palatable without sacrificing its essential spirit and chemical beneficence. Currently, the easiest way to make matcha really tasty is to put it in ice cream—green tea ice cream found in Japanese restaurants is made with matcha and was until recently the only way the majority of Japanese people ever ingested it (in comfortably small doses). And it is often sublime. Of course, though green tea ice cream shakes may not be the healthiest way to start one's day, perhaps a low-fat frozen yogurt variety might be engineered. Pinkberry and its imitators have done famously well with their own faux-yogurt, green-tea-flavored, health-conscious desserts, so it's just a matter of time before someone fashions a greener, drinkable, highly caffeinated variety. How about a hot matchaccino (halved with espresso)? Or, for discerning adults, a matcha martini would probably be the healthiest cocktail in history. We're going from tea cozy to tea crazy! Matcha-cha-cha!

Better yet, we might all hope that the American consumer embraces matcha as it was meant to be: something utterly foreign that we might learn to love. It might take a while, but then, $4 espressos weren't an overnight success in Tokyo, either. On the other hand, the Internet and grunge rock caught on like crazy over there, so maybe there's hope for matcha in America after all. For the sake of goodness (and greater freedom of expression—i.e., growth), let's encourage everybody to just grimace and bear it. Wake up and smell the freshly cut grass clippings.

 

Comments on this article may be sent to comments@freshcup.com.