It’s an early spring Thursday at 3pm, and the queue at Matcha Kobo in Melbourne’s CBD snakes out the door. Aproned employees tumble ice into plastic cups, whisk matcha in small bowls, and extract elaborate matcha-laced cakes from the display cabinet. Every third customer is filming the scene, engaging in the social proof that is at least as important as the products ingested.

Those products? Matcha, matcha, matcha, the Japanese green-tea powder that has overtaken coffee as the beverage of choice at many of Australia’s busiest, trending cafes. It’s whisked with not-quite-boiling water then served hot or – more frequently – over ice, layered into tall plastic cups with milk, coconut water, crushed berries, banana syrup or hazelnut foam, even coffee. It’s mixed into desserts, too: creams, cakes, crumbles, custards, crepes; all glossy, grassy green.

Further inside the cafe, young people type assignments into laptops at a long table dotted with power plugs. The State Library is a block away, but why would you study there in regal hush when you can be in the hubbub, sitting for two hours on a Berry Berry Matcha Latte for $9.50? Beyond the laptoppers, an elevated room is designed like a Japanese temple with paper-panelled walls, low tables and thin floor cushions. Customers leave their sneakers at the steps and sit with legs criss-crossed or zigzagged to the side. Most people have cold drinks with a green layer of matcha for swirling with a straw through other ingredients. You can get coffee here, too: it’s on page six of the hand-made cloth menu, after five pages of tea drinks. The Australian cafe is not what it used to be.

“Matcha is a big trend and getting more and more hyped,” says Matcha Kobo’s owner Stella Dong, who is from Shanghai and owns the fast-casual restaurant company Alleyway Group, which caters mostly to Gen Z, including many international students from Asia. “We take matcha very seriously.”

Seriously means sourcing tea from Uji, a famous growing region south of Kyoto, whisking every drink to order and grinding tea leaves into matcha onsite (just about everyone else buys pre-ground powder). Four granite mills slowly rotate near the entry. “It has to be slow because we can’t let the stones heat up – keeping cool preserves the green colour,” says Dong, who paid $100,000 for the mills. Every hour, each machine produces just 40 grams of powder. With each drink using about five grams of matcha, those stones must keep turning. At first, they spun 24 hours a day to build up stock. “Someone had to sleep here,” says Dong.

Matcha powder drops into a drawer beneath the mills: it’s an eye-popping green and the smell is heady, sweet, seaweedy. At the nearby counter, staff member Nodoka sieves 4.3 grams of matcha into a ceramic jug, ladles in 60mls of 70C water, then whisks it briskly for 30 seconds using a bamboo implement shaped like a shaving brush. This part of the process feels almost holy, but the reverence is undone somewhat when Nodoka dumps the thick, foamy mixture into a plastic cup of ice and milk. The green tea sits on top, even brighter against the white.

As a food writer, my social media feeds are culinary parades. Over the past year, the content has become more and more matcha green, with a high proportion of self-described “matcha girlies” sharing drinks on Instagram, TikTok and Little Red Book, a Chinese platform. For many of these mostly 20-something, mostly female, mostly Asian matcha fans, the drink is a social movement as well as a beverage.

Ellene Win, 28, and her sister Donna, 26, started Matcha Club in Sydney last July. “COVID killed my networking skills,” says Ellene, a data analyst. “Everyone became a homebody. It was hard to make connections.” She thought matcha could be a catalyst for conversation. The sisters organise monthly events such as coastal walks, candle-painting, puppy yoga, and potluck meals where people bring matcha scones and omelettes. Their Instagram account has grown to 3500 followers, and up to 100 people attend the meet-ups. The sisters have also made friends through the club. Donna, an engineer, found her housemate through it. “It’s a new ritual,” she says. “People who move to Sydney tell us it’s hard to make friends. We’re happy we’ve been able to help them find community through something they like already.”

‘Matcha is tied to slow-living culture, balance, sitting down with a friend. It’s different to an espresso shot.’

Tara Daw, Melb Matcha Girlies

Tara Daw, 24, started her Melb Matcha Girlies community in August 2023 via TikTok. There’s now an Instagram account and a chat group of about 700 people. “I came to Australia as an international student from Myanmar,” says Daw. “I used to drink a lot of coffee but I would get jittery. Matcha didn’t give me that spike.” Daw loved exploring matcha cafes with friends, but her social life tailed off after starting a 9-to-5 job. “I posted on TikTok one day: ‘Anyone want to meet up for matcha?’ I had 50 messages.”

The club took off. “I’ve made a lot of my best friends through this group. People have become co-workers, roommates, travel and study mates.” Daw thinks matcha’s pull signals a shift in priorities. “Matcha is tied to slow-living culture, balance, sitting down with a friend. It’s different to an espresso shot. People have realised hustle-and-grind culture is not worth it. [The] 2020 [lockdowns] showed us it can stop any time. Now they prioritise taking care of themselves.”

My first matcha drinking experience was in Japan, in the late spring of 2016. With the last cherry blossoms fluttering to the ground, I visit Ohara, a rural mountain town, an hour north of Kyoto and enter Hõsen-in temple with other iPhone-toting pilgrims to see the gardens and dose up on zen. The temple rules are gentle. “There is no time limit for viewing,” says its website. “You can sit on the tatami mat and contemplate your soul.” I sit cross-legged on the woven flooring to gaze through the windowless timber struts that frame a 700-year-old pine, its knotty branches supported by scaffolding, a great-grandfather tree, epic and still. The temple is famous for its gardens but also for a ceiling stained with the blood of 17th-century samurai who chose ritual suicide over dishonour.

As I contemplate my soul, a tea master brings matcha in a tactile grey-green cup. Next to the drink is a wagashi, a sweet made from pounded rice. With chanting resonating through the pavilion, I pick up my cup with two hands and let the warmth seep in before inhaling the aromas and sipping. This is my first trip to Japan and I am constantly overwhelmed. Even while brimful with what I’m experiencing – the heated box to keep nori crisp at a hotel breakfast, elaborate gift wrapping, the whoosh of a matcha whisk – I’m also sure 90 per cent of whatever is going on doesn’t strike my awareness. I feel constantly klutzy. But seated here – sipping, appreciating a sweet, admiring a tree, letting peace in – I sense that I am at least doing this exact moment properly.

Matcha has been served in temple tea ceremonies like this for centuries in Japan. As the story goes, a Buddhist monk brought tea seeds from China to Japan in 1191, and the hilly Uji region near Kyoto became known as fertile growing territory. In the 15th century, the Ashikaga shogun family that ruled the area were tea connoisseurs and encouraged more farming. Production protocols developed. All tea – black, green, matcha – comes from the same Camellia sinensis plant but growing, harvesting and processing methods create very different products.

The best matcha is made from young, bright green leaves, handpicked during a short period during spring. Before picking, the plants are shaded for 20 days to make the flavour sweeter and richer in umami. Traditionally, the first 10 days of shading was effected by laying reed mats over scaffolding to block sunshine. For the final 10 days, straw was spread over the matting, creating a dim cave. These days, synthetic nets are used. When deemed ready, the leaves are picked, steamed and dried, ready for grinding.

When a niche product becomes an international beverage and culinary ingredient, it radically changes the dynamics at source and causes ripples around the world. Between 2008 and 2023, Japan’s green-tea exports increased from 1701 tonnes to 7579 tonnes, with matcha being a main driver of that increase. At the same time, tea production was falling.

“Due to factors such as the ageing of producers and a shortage of successors, production volume fell [from 96,000 tonnes in 2008 to 75,000 tonnes in 2023],” according to Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. The ministry also notes, “Approximately 40 per cent of tea plantations are ageing, with trees over 30 years old, and there are concerns that the ageing of tea trees will result in a decline in yield and quality.”

It takes up to eight years for new plants to be ready to harvest. Workers are getting older too: 74 per cent of agricultural workers on tea farms are over 60. The Japanese government is providing incentives around mechanisation, improved processing facilities and encouraging a switch from growing sencha (leaf tea) to tencha (the tea that can be turned into matcha).

Ai Hasegawa runs Norm Tea House in Tokyo and studies tea ceremony. Her teacher, who prefers to remain anonymous, uses high-grade ceremonial matcha (koicha) for their classes. “We can no longer buy from the producers we used to purchase from,” the teacher says. “Instead, we’re forced to buy lower-grade matcha at higher prices than before. To avoid raising lesson fees, we’ve had to limit the number of koicha practice sessions where matcha is actually used.”

Hasegawa sources some of her tea from organic tea farmers, including a fourth-generation farmer who also doesn’t want to be named. “This year, it feels like demand for organic matcha has increased fivefold,” the farmer says. “Prices have at least doubled.” This farmer is using the increased income to purchase new machinery as a way to manage taxes. “It’s not realistic to rapidly increase production,” they say, “But we’ve started diverting raw material that used to go into sencha and gyokuro [shade-grown leaf tea] into matcha production instead.”

Loading

The farmer is cautious about the sudden surge in demand for matcha. “If the trend continues, it could be good, but big changes often create distortions, too. For example, some wholesalers have gone bankrupt this year – even while technically in profit – because of the sudden surge in procurement costs. Also, many producers are probably taking on debt to invest in expansion right now. If the trend shifts or demand drops, those moves could turn into serious failures.”

China grows more matcha than Japan, though it doesn’t have the same cachet. Could we grow it in Australia? Southern Forest Green Tea in Western Australia is trying. It sells Australian-grown matcha online and to local cafes, but Dawn Groenewald, who works with her farmer parents Ron and Maria Kemp, is quick to distinguish it from the original. “We don’t shade our tea, which means we don’t get that ultra-green colour,” she says. “It’s matcha, but Australianised.” The family tried to shade their three-hectare plantation. “But we’re seven kilometres from the ocean and every bit of wind hits us. We’d go out there in the morning and the cloth was all blown away.”

I try their product. It’s brownish-green and without the heady lift of the best ceremonial matcha, but the flavour is pretty good, maybe a little sweeter than most. It wouldn’t pop on TikTok but it’s much cheaper, at about 25 cents a gram, compared to more than $1 a gram for the good stuff. Sales are steady, says Groenewald. “We have [locally based] Japanese customers who keep ordering.”

Those who import matcha from Japan to Australia are feeling the pinch. Melisa Phanna runs Satori Tea House, an online supplier. “It used to take two weeks to a month to get a shipment, now it’s four to six months,” she says. “You have to lock in your shipment early: my farmer told me that I have to book the 2026 harvest now, which you never had to do before. Minimum
orders used to be 5 kilograms, now they’re more like 100 kilograms, and the wholesale price has gone up from around $200 to $320.” Phanna fell into the business. She was a matcha fan who moved to Australia from Cambodia in 2020 and thought Sydney’s matcha scene was undeveloped. Being an online marketer, she created social media content to highlight good suppliers and ended up importing some herself.

“I followed my matcha journey,” she says. “Lower-quality matcha tastes like grass, is bitter and dries your tongue and throat. Higher-quality matcha tastes almost creamy, like a natural milkshake.” As tastes become more refined, there’s more pressure to supply quality matcha, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, she says. “When people better understand matcha, they’re willing to pay a higher price for it. They connect with the culture behind it.”

I wake up thinking about coffee but the matcha girls’ talk of gentle caffeine buzz deserves investigation. This is the morning. With a fond glance at my coffee machine, I get out a tin of Phanna’s matcha. I don’t have ceremonial teacups nor a bamboo whisk but I find a doovalacky in the back of a drawer, a green plastic pickle pusher that I thought might be handy one day. I add a spoon of matcha powder to a glass, pour in enough hot water to turn it to a slurry, whisk it with my pickle pusher while saying a silent apology to all tea masters, and top it up with more water. It’s nicely foamy, a lawnkeeper’s green and smells happy and fresh. Does it do the job? After half a dozen sips, I feel the brain-brightening tension at the back of my skull. My eyes feel more open. My fingers dance across my keyboard. It’s good, but I’m back on coffee for my mid-morning jumpstart.

Food and nutrition scientist Emma Beckett isn’t surprised matcha fans often report a gentler caffeine buzz than they get with coffee. “Teas have an amino acid called L-theanine, which has a calming effect,” she says. “Coffee doesn’t have it, and because matcha is powdered, the calming compound is more easily absorbed into the body than with leaf tea. People may perceive that the caffeine isn’t hitting them as hard or as fast.”

The actual amount of caffeine varies widely across different teas and coffees. “In general, I’d say there’s slightly less caffeine in matcha,” says Beckett, adding that no caffeinated drink actually gives you energy. “Caffeine binds to what you would essentially call sleepiness receptors and makes you feel less sleepy, but all you’re doing is holding off a sleepiness that will catch up with you later.”

Loading

Prior to this story, I hadn’t spoken to Beckett since 2019 when researching a story about healthy eating. We touched on all the hot-button stuff at the time: turmeric lattes, acai, keto. Matcha hadn’t yet hit the mainstream. “It’s definitely having its moment now and I think it’s going to hold its place,” she says. “There’s the cultural aspect, the pop-culture Asian aesthetic; matcha is riding various waves.”

What about the health factor? Matcha mavens often say it’s high in antioxidants, boosts liver function and heart health, promotes weight loss, the usual. “All teas are high in bioactives, the chemicals or compounds in food that have health benefits, but are not essential nutrients,” says Beckett. “Antioxidants are a bioactive compound that help prevent damage occurring to cells and DNA by blocking harmful chemical chain reactions caused by things such as alcohol, pollution and sunlight.”

Because matcha dissolves in water, more of those bioactives can be absorbed. “A standard matcha made with water is high in antioxidants, which could have health benefits similar to other plant foods, helping to reduce the risk of chronic diseases like cancers and cardiovascular disease.” A matcha latte though, not so much, Beckett says: “Milky drinks, matcha pancakes and the like carry a ‘health halo’. People say, ‘It’s got matcha in it, so it’s good for you,’ but a matcha-flavoured milkshake isn’t necessarily very healthful.”

Is there any danger matcha may change from being a daily darling to passé, when influencers find their next “It” ingredient? An early warning sign came in late August when US beauty TikTokker, Lynn Shazeen, posted “RIP to my matcha obsession era” and announced matcha made her anaemic. The post shows her receiving an IV infusion. It has 6.3 million views.

“Matcha will not make you low in iron,” says Beckett. “However, tea does reduce the effectiveness of iron supplements, so if you are deficient in iron, you should separate tea from supplements or any high-iron foods you are eating to address that deficiency.”

For now, even specialty coffee guys are leaning into the green dream. “Every man, woman and dog wants matcha at the moment,” says Sam Keck, co-owner of Commonfolk, a Victorian roaster. “If people want matcha, we’re going to serve it, and we’re going to serve it to the same quality that we strive for with coffee.” So far he’s finding that coffee drinkers will sometimes add matcha to their order, or swap it in now and then.

Closer to the city, at Sana cafe in Cheltenham, owner Steve Chrun sells more matcha than coffee. “You’d be silly not to have matcha,” he says. “To open a successful venue, you have to cater to trends.” He’s noticed the creep into an older demographic, too.

Another close watcher of the matcha march is Abigail Forsyth, founder and managing director of KeepCup. The company’s best-selling reusable cups are those designed for cold beverages, such as matcha drinks, with sales up 30 per cent this year. “If you look around an Australian uni, everyone is sucking on a straw,” Forsyth says. The look is important, with most cups see-through. “It’s all about the interaction of ice and milk and colour.”

In a final strong sign of matcha’s march, Lune, a cult croissant brand, put up an Instagram post in September, showing a hand gripping an iced matcha drink with the caption: “Sorry it took us this long. Matcha now in all Lune venues.” You can only imagine the constant queries that forced the decision.

Loading

Yet, not far from Lune’s flagship in Melbourne’s Fitzroy, there’s a curious holdout. Cibi is a 17-year-old Japanese cafe and design store that serves traditional hot whisked matcha in ceramic cups. “No matcha lattes,” says owner Meg Tanaka, a Gen X-er born in Japan who also has two cafes in Tokyo. “My generation grew up with the tea ceremony, a special occasion with tradition, culture and meaning, something you have in a temple. If my mum saw me whisking matcha at home, she would be surprised.” Tanaka is bemused by the surge. “Who would have thought it was going to be this big? It’s interesting how things originate in one country and move and become something else.”

But Cibi does run matcha-making workshops, and sells all the special bits and pieces for crafting the perfect cup at home. “If people only know matcha mixed with milk, it’s nice to learn what it’s originally about,” says Tanaka. “They love the whisking, it’s so meditative, gentle and calm. I do understand the desire to take it into the home and create your own micro-teahouse. It inspires me, whether I do it or not.”

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.