30/05/2026
Single harvest matcha? A demystification
Not long ago, an entity with a very authoritative name, conveying something like a body representing matcha producers from Japan sent us a huge list of matcha, 6 pages of it. Some organic, some location specific, most are flush specific: first flush, second flush, autumn flush etc. Items with the first flush label dominate the catalogue.
Since it has been our practice to buy directly from producers, we normally do not respond to solicitations from agents and wholesalers. However, this huge catalogue is too alarming to us.
This is very much different from our experience in seeing how respectful Japanese matcha producers work — they always blend tencha from different harvests from different areas of different cultivars in order to maintain a relatively stable range of quality so that they can be optimising the operational efficiency of their grinding set up, which is a huge part in the cost, and be able to consistently providing the market with a stable range of quality that represents their reputation. In Japan, reputation is more than an asset.
Supply is still behind demand, dramatically
With the ongoing shortage of supply, all producers are working hard to catch up with supplying their existing clients, there simply cannot be such a large body of products, many even from our best connected origin of Uji, and many with the FDA organic label. Producers in Japan mostly use JAS for organic certification instead of … read the complete story in the Tea Log section of our site
In the picture:
A technician attending to the freshly re-roasted tencha blend as it fills the bag for moving to the grinder. In Uji, at a matcha producer founded since the Meiji era.
