You’re probably drinking Chinese Matcha (but is that a problem?)

So I heard something that sounded crazy to me. That in 2026, more matcha will be made in China than Japan. Like what? China has been making and selling so much matcha that basically, unless you're going to a specialty Japanese matcha shop, you should probably just assume that the matcha you're drinking is Chinese matcha. Simply put, you've probably had Chinese matcha and didn't even know. I lived in China for 10 years, and I've run this tea channel for 5, and I hadn't even heard that much about Chinese matcha. But over the last year, I've been on a journey to find out what is going on. From the tea mountains of Guizhou, China, where tea farms are being adapted to grow shaded green tea for matcha, to grinding matcha in Uji, Japan, with a 16th generation matcha master. From wading through ethno-nationalist sentiment to uncovering sneaky import and export practices, This video is the result of my deep dive and what led me to be, as far as I can tell, one of the first people in the world selling Chinese single source matcha that tells you it's Chinese and is transparent all the way back to the mountain. So grab your whisk and let's make some matcha. So what is matcha anyways? Matcha is green tea that is grown with a special shading process. Tarps are hung above the plants during harvest time to increase the sweetness and umami of the tea leaves. It also adds more antioxidants. The leaves are then picked, steamed in the Japanese style, which is different from normal Chinese green teas, which are roasted or wok treated, and then ground into a powder. Why do all this work? Purity. The Japanese tea sage Sen no Rikyu distilled the Japanese matcha ceremony into four words. Wa. Kei. Sei. Jaku. The matcha we drink now is a ritual symbol of the pure essence of tea. concentrated while retaining its freshness. It's strong, grassy, sweet, umami, and it provides fantastic energy. Prepared by mixing water and then whisking to bring up a foam, the matcha powder is very, very different from teabag tea powder. It is made to retain the distilled essence and nutrients of the tea and is rich in flavor and antioxidants. So I want to start by explaining no, I haven't been a matcha guy. I do Chinese Gong Fu Tea, which is all loose leaf. And so despite many, many, many people asking about matcha over the years, for all this time, I haven't ever sold matcha. Because the core of what I do is connect people to the farmers and the land that I know, and I didn't know any matcha farmers. But when I went to Guizhou last year to do our Guizhou province tea sampler, I took an extra flight to a matcha company and saw their farms. And what I saw there really shocked me in both good and confusing ways. And while I'm not claiming to be a super matcha expert, I think if you watch the video, you'll agree I've put in the legwork to share what I've learned with you. For many years, matcha was a niche hobby amongst Japanese tea drinkers and the occasional gaijin who got really into Japanese culture. Wait, ah! But unless you're a sage living in a cave on a mountain, you know that matcha is everywhere now. Aside from ceremonial drinking, it's in lattes, ice creams, cakes. Haven't seen any matcha perfume, but you know, wouldn't be surprised. As we know, we live in a world where the market decides what's in our food. And matcha's versatility as a flavoring powder has taken a niche Japanese tea item used in a ceremony that's actually closer to theater than it is to culinary arts, and blown it up into a massive global consumption commodity. At first, Japanese matcha producers just added production. But Japan is actually not a huge producer of tea. Only a small amount of global tea production comes from Japan. And even a smaller amount is matcha grade. So while Japan is part of tea culture on a global scale, it's a small island country. Labor is expensive. There's not actually that much land to use to meet this huge demand. Into the gap in the market came China, already a massive tea producing country with a taste for Japanese style snacks. Matcha went directly into Chinese boba shops and pastries and out into the rest of the world. So who owns matcha? Who invented it? Who popularized it? Do these questions even make sense? Do they matter? Especially as a loose leaf tea guy learning more about matcha, I really wanted to know as much as I could before I started deciding to start my own matcha line or not. So I'm going to break down what I learned in China, what I learned in Japan, and share my thoughts on where the wisdom lies. So in 2025, I went to Guizhou to check out what Chinese matcha looks like. The matcha company we worked with was very quick to tell us, Matcha comes from China. Is that true though? Kinda. There is a traditional Chinese tea practice called Dian Cha. This is where leaves are ground into powder and the whisked drink is then drunk and enjoyed. While it existed as early as the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century, Dian Cha became very popular amongst the elite of society during the Song Dynasty, where the four arts all scholarly people should know were Dian Cha, Fen Xiang, Cha Hua, and Gua Hua, whisking tea, burning incense, arranging flowers, and hanging paintings. There are many similarities between diàn chá and matcha, but here's the thing, no matter how many times I ask, nobody seemed to know very much about diàn chá. Nobody knew how to do it themselves, nobody knew where to go to drink it. It really felt like our Chinese host's insistence on matcha being Chinese was more like a trivia answer than a deep past knowledge. And it was mostly being revived to add a bit more legitimacy to matcha as a Chinese art form from a nationalistic lens. In fact, it made it hard to even ask basic questions to our Chinese matcha partners. For instance, we shot a Q&A video on the Tea House Instagram, and you can see when I ask about this stuff, the guy just goes on a tangent. What is the difference between Chinese matcha and Japanese matcha? First of all, the origin of matcha is China. During the Song Dynasty, because of the Chinese and Western dynasties, they entered this teahouse and went to Japan. Then Japan gained the tea culture. Now, I actually did manage to get in touch with the Diancha expert. Comment and let me know if you'd like to see me interview them. But when comparing Diancha to the operation that I was seeing, it was very clear that even though China totally has a legit claim, To the art that preceded modern matcha, the tradition was broken in the long centuries of Chinese history, much of that time very chaotic. Meanwhile, in Japan, the tradition continued and became what we know today as matcha. The following summer, I went to Uji in Japan, which is well known for its matcha. Shops lined the street of this small town, and I got to visit a 16th generation matcha shop run by Tanaka Sensei. His son, the 17th generation, was also at the shop. He showed me how matcha was originally hand-ground and took me through the process of whisking matcha. Our Japanese tea friends confirmed that the first tea in Japan came from China, brought over by the monk Eisai in 1191. The tea plants that he brought are similar, but Diancha, the style with the powder, that was what was popular at the time, and people neither in China nor Japan would have been drinking loose leaf tea at this time period. The tea ceremony that we know as Japanese tea ceremony is actually what was popular in the Tang and Song dynasties in China and has been preserved in Japan. Since the 1500s, the Japanese tea sage Sen no Rikyu codified the ceremony, instilled its essence as wa, kei, sei, jaku, And then, matcha and the way of making it has been passed down ever since. Interestingly, I actually found Japanese people to be very open and accepting of China's role in their tea culture. Although after so many hundreds of years, they clearly felt that this was the beginning of Japan's tea culture, not so much a copying of somewhere else. So who owns matcha then? At the end of all this learning I felt confused and conflicted. Culture isn't clean and culture doesn't belong to any one person, country, or place. But what I did feel very strongly was that as an outsider in both China and Japan, I knew it wasn't a good idea to sell matcha if I didn't have an understanding about why I was doing what I was And the breakthrough for me on the why came from Tanaka-sensei. I made a short about this that's just perfect, so I'm just going to show you the short. I asked the 16th generation matcha master what he thought about the matcha boom and matcha being in everything. Tanaka-sensei has seen matcha go from a small craft to a global commodity. How do you decide what to do in a world where everything changes so quickly? His answer, Michio Mamoru, defend the path. During our interview, he told me that the The world will change. Stores will sell matcha. Let them. He's going to focus on his shop, his matcha, and doing things the way that his family has done since they were selling tea to the shoguns. I personally found a lot to learn in that answer. It's easy to get blown this way or that by the market, or even whether my videos get likes or not. But the goal to defend the path, the people, and the ways that brought you to here, that makes sense to me. And it doesn't mean fighting the tide, like he sells all sorts of matcha stuff in his shop. It's about the way you do it and why you do it. It was great to be able to talk with him. I'm going to share a longer video of our conversation when I can get it edited. So, doll. This made things really clear for me. What is the Jesse's Tea House doll? What is the most important thing for me, the thing I can't give up? What ways do I need to flow with the times and allow for space so people can each find their own path of tea rather than insist they follow ceremonial traditions? At that point, everything became clear. Here, our Dao is one sourcing in person two quality and taste and three health and safety a huge part of our doll is sourcing in person the best part of being a tea guy is i get to go to the tea mountains to find tea for all of you and i was very very happy to go to guizhou guizhou is one of my favorite places in china especially for tea because it is so rural and so out there that pollution Which is one of the biggest challenges for sourcing tea in China is greatly reduced. I got to meet the managers of the farm that grows the tea that wound up in our everyday matcha. Seeing the amazing work that they put into making fantastic tea specifically for matcha use. That put me very much at ease because I know tea and seeing this tea I know that whatever they make from that tea must be pretty damn good. So everyone wants to know, what is the difference in taste between Japanese matcha and Chinese matcha? And the answer is, it depends on the tawar. Our Guizhou matcha is high altitude green tea. In the tea world, that's considered higher quality tea than the stuff grown at lower altitudes like in Japan. The soil is less rocky and the green tea is a little bit sweeter. However, the Japanese green tea is often grown near the sea, where the common practice is to incorporate Great fish bones into the fertilizer. So while the quality of the grind, the freshness, and many other factors are considered, the Chinese matcha tends to be a little bit fresher and greener and less umami than the Japanese. However, I don't think that means one is simply better than the other. Just like I don't feel the need to say whether Chinese tea or Japanese tea is better, I don't feel the need to say whether Chinese matcha or Japanese matcha is better. When it comes to comparing any two single source teas, you're comparing two different Both are premium quality. If you drink them back to back, you'll notice the taste being slightly different. If you're not doing a literal taste test, I think most people will not be able to tell a big difference. This explains why Chinese matcha has found its way everywhere and nobody's talking about it. One other note on quality, both the everyday and the premium matchas can be drunk straight or mixed with milk or other liquids. I actually really tried They tried a drink they made with coconut water and matcha together that was great. they're both good mix and the premium in my opinion still tastes even better when it's mixed. we ran a blind taste test with the whole jesse's tea house china team and we all picked the premium tea as our favorite even when mixed in a latte. but i also found that the everyday matcha was plenty good and super tasty in mixed drinks and so in my opinion that's all you need if you're mixing your drinks because once you mix the matcha with other heavy flavors like milk and sugar syrup the differences in the flavor are not going to be as clear. So if you're making straight ceremonial style matcha, the flavor difference will be a little bit clearer between the everyday and the premium. But as somebody who's more casual to engage matcha drinker and not a hardcore matcha drinker, I found that the Chinese and Japanese matchas were similar enough. If you found similar quality, it's not like one is better or worse. Health and safety was the part where I felt most confident that the Chinese matcha would match up against anything on the market anywhere. I was honestly super impressed by our matcha partner's health and safety capacities. The tea is grown to organic standards. It was processed by top-of-the-line equipment they imported from Japan. In Guizhou, they had two facilities, one for making food-grade matcha for baking and another that is close to medicinal-grade matcha made for straight drinking. Everything is sealed by people who look like they're working for NASA. Afterwards, it's all put in cold storage to keep fresh until we ship. They've put real work into the facilities. This is as good as it gets. the matcha is safe. It's not a secret when you say China and food, there's going to be a fight on the internet. One side is always like, oh, gutter oil, everything in China is fake, and if you eat anything, you die. And the other side is like, hate on China as a result of anti-communist propaganda, and you wouldn't be asking about food safety at all if it was from Japan. I actually see See both sides here. People aren't crazy for asking if the food they're putting in their mouth is safe. And yes, I have to do more work, probably unfairly, to prove that Chinese food products are safe because of past Chinese safety issues. So I don't really listen to either side. I just listen to science. I pay good money to get top end chemical testing. My favorite letters are ND, which means not detected. So as your tea guy, my doll and my first responsibility is to make sure that our stuff is safe. Our stuff is so good, we can sell it not just in the U.S. and Canada, but also in the EU, where the food standards are, in my opinion, a little bit overkill. But by sourcing to the EU standards, even though they are kind of extreme, it does give me a good way to find the best vendors out there. Because if you want to pass those tests, you really need to know what's in your land, what's in your water, and what's in your plants. In fact, there are recent studies showing how pesticide counts in Japanese matcha, even from great places like Uji. Can be very high and as someone who lived in China for 10 years, I know that some of those bad food stories are real, even though the Western media has no profit motive to report when things improve and only motive to talk when things go bad. Believe me, they do the same thing to us. Every time there's an E. coli outbreak and some lettuce in the States, it's headline news all over China. They do the same thing to us. Nationalism is a hell of a drug. Ha ha ha ha ha. My point is, food comes from the ground. You need to know that land, that farm, and that product. It's not safe because it comes from one country or the other. It's safe because you can produce scientific paperwork that shows that it fits safety standards, ideally the highest standards you can find. Finally, there was some trickery, some stuff that I heard that was going on that sounded pretty crazy. Boredom. The following is somewhere between hearsay and scuttlebutt, which is to say Chinese people and Japanese people both told me it was going on, but I don't want any smoke, so I'm not calling out anyone, and that's not why I'm in this tea game. Okay thanks. So I heard rumors, some of them more than that, but the point of this video isn't to flame any existing brands. There were essentially shady practices of laundering Chinese matcha as Japanese matcha. First, there were some Japanese companies that were buying Chinese matcha, mixing their matcha with Chinese matcha, relabeling, and then exporting as Japanese. And this would count under export standards fully as a made in Japan product. Second, Second, there were Chinese investors that would purchase old Japanese matcha companies. Some were real, some were defunct, and basically they were just buying the name, but they would revive the company with none of the original practices that were used by the original Japanese companies that they had purchased. These companies were essentially shell companies designed to make you think you're buying from an old Japanese company when all of the product is grown and packed in China. And finally, and this is the craziest one to me, some people just write made in Japan on the packaging and smuggle it into the market. It's made in China, packaged in China. China and they just straight up say made in Japan on it. When we talked to the matcha tin company that makes our tins and asked for the design files to make sure that our branding fit and everything would fit on the tin, the example design file they showed us said made in Japan even though it was being printed in China, packed in China, and shipped out of China. So just saying. All of this is on top of the big thing that's obscuring matcha quality. Which is that unless you're an expert, you can't look at matcha and just decide if it's good or not. Most people don't have any idea. So like loose leaf tea, there are always people selling matcha with bad flavor profiles and passing it off as better than it is to customers that just don't know better or simply don't do their due diligence in testing suppliers. Maybe people that just like wanna get on with life, huh? While all this stuff was confusing, it wasn't a real problem for me because all these practices were outside the doll anyway. I'm not doing all that. But still, it made me uncomfortable. So Chinese matcha's everywhere. Who's the bad guy here? In the end, how do I feel that everybody's drinking Chinese matcha and nobody knows about it? Is that good? Is that bad? Like, what's going on? And after listening to both Chinese and Japanese teachers, it's really hard to say who's right. As an outsider to both cultures, I honestly don't want to get swept up in some sort of East Asian ethno-nationalist shitshow. That's not why I do tea, and I would argue any true tea person doesn't want to be involved in that either. We would rather be drinking tea, not... taking smoke. Maybe China deserves to claim Matcha because of its history, despite the fact that everyone that I asked seemed to have very little idea about what Diancha was. Maybe the Japanese deserved to claim Matcha because they were the ones to introduce it to the West and preserve the Matcha ceremony, even if they didn't invent it in the first place. But I will say for both sides, even though they don't agree with each other, I wouldn't say that either side is lying. I think that both sides genuinely believe that their cultural interpretations of the real history that they told me and that both sides are also saying exactly what happens to be good for business. But if there's two groups that I think are being shady here, it's one, brands that source from China and imply through packaging, marketing, or simply omission that their product comes from Japan. And two, vendors. So supermarkets, boba shops, cafes who do the same. And I want to be clear, I'm largely not talking about high-end matcha people. I felt a lot of kinship with the types of vendors that like me will go to Japan and work with the farmers and track their product back to a single source. I'd actually love to do videos with any of those matcha brands. If you're from one of those brands and you see this, reach out and let me know, I'm just curious. I'm talking about brands and the shops that carry them who are happy to use Japanese aesthetics, knowing that consumers won't ask too many questions and just assume something is better because it comes from Japan than from China. And that allows them to charge higher prices While shifting to cheaper suppliers. And here's the truth. This internal confusion actually hurts people like Tanaka-sensei who truly care about Japanese matcha, because it means that his authentic product now has to fight in a market with low-quality Chinese fakes. And it also hurts Chinese matcha farmers who really put in the work, because they fear no one will buy it if they tell you the truth. Which means somehow we've reached a point where everybody has been drinking Chinese matcha, but I'm one of the first people that's willing to tell you the stuff that I sell on my shop is... Chinese. And the problem isn't Japan or China or history or culture. The problem is it's harder than ever before to know what we're eating and drinking. Where does the food we put in our mouth even come from? I don't know. Food producers have the technology to show customers what they're getting. And while some don't show it just because they're bad at social media or they don't care, others proactively obfuscate their products so they can source lower quality or switch vendors at any time without customers knowing While they keep their prices high. I am a graduate of Brandeis University, which is named after Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who famously said, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Transparency reveals who puts in the work for you as tea friends and who doesn't. That is my thought. That is the path. So in making my new Chinese matcha line, I hope you'll agree with me that the world is big enough for great matcha from both China and Japan. And if you're determined to be a hater on Chinese matcha without ever, ever trying it, to quote another famous thinker, This ---- ain't nothing to me, man. So thanks to my excellent teachers, both Chinese and Japanese, and their willingness to share their knowledge and their culture, I've now come up with this, the Jesse's Tea House Matcha Line. Single source Guizhou matcha, one everyday matcha and one premium matcha. While they can both be drunk straight or mixed, I find that the everyday type mixes well enough for anyone who's not a super matcha head. both are better than what you can find in cafes and in high-end grocery stores and i know that because our matcha people supply a lot of the high-end grocery stores and restaurants in america and i tasted the stuff that they supply them and we got stuff that's better than that and both of these are going to be in our subscription box so subscribers are going to get a 30 gram tin of both the everyday and the premium matcha and along with other stuff in in my effort to make sure that the subscription is the best thing on the site always It's a whole other video to talk about matcha equipment, but just as Chinese matcha is being marketed as Japanese without specifically lying, almost all matcha equipment online is made in China and marketed as Japanese. Dehua, the city where we get all our porcelain gaiwans and tea cups, manufactures about 90% of the matcha equipment in the entire world, and it all looks Japanese. But seeing as our path is one of transparency and our matcha is Chinese, We've designed two Chinese-style matcha bowls to go along with our matcha line. One is blue-white porcelain with art featuring the beautiful mountains of Guizhou and the character Cha for tea on the bottom, which, by the way, I wrote that character myself. And a second option, a premium Jianzhang glazed matcha bowl, similar to our existing Jianzhang cups. It's actually unreal. In a market where everybody copies stuff and races to the bottom, nobody's ever made Chinese-style matcha bowls. It's crazy. And believe me, I looked this up. As of this video, there are no other blue-white porcelain or Jianzhan matcha bowls on the market. Couldn't find anywhere. Looked everywhere, we couldn't find it. So if you start seeing them, you know it's other people in Dehua that are copying us. So with this sentence, I directly said to Dehua, the manufacturer of our products, Of course I support you making your own Chinese matcha bowls. And one more note on art, this is an AI art, this is actually an ancient piece of art showing the beauty of Guizhou that we found in traditional Chinese painting. This stuff was all over Tang Dynasty TikTok, although they called it Douyin. In fact, all of our new teaware line coming this holiday season is either historical art, which we can access without copyright fees, or art that we've commissioned artists to paint or draw. These items are actually available now for pre-order with and without the matcha. If you're a subscriber and you know you're going to be getting matcha and you'd like a bowl to come with it, you can pre-order your matcha bowl and we'll be able to combine it with your tea box and matcha set to save you on shipping. Each set comes with everything you need to do matcha. It comes with a quality purple bamboo chasen for whisking, as well as a chasen holder, a scoop holder as well. So whether you're drinking matcha straight in the ceremonial style or mixing it to then add into a drink, you can enjoy the handmade process of whisking matcha. As always, thank you so much for your support. All of you who watch these videos and especially the people who go to the shop and choose me as your tea guy, you let me do all this crazy stuff like spending a year and a half making a matcha line in the way that I think is right and not just throwing some powder into a tin and chasing some fat. And I'm going to be honest, I'm a bit scared. I've never sold matcha before and I put a lot of money and time into this project buying high quality matcha and designing equipment from scratch. So I hope you like it. I think you will. And if you're anything at all into I think it's worth tea drinkers to think about whether the specific tasting notes of Japanese matcha is really worth the extra money you're paying. Or maybe you even like the Chinese tasting notes better. It's different to our. Finally, a special thanks to our subscribers who are going to be getting one of each of the matches in their subscription box. Your support is the only reason I was able to spend so much time on this project, knowing that we had a base of supporters that will That will give it a shot on day one. So thank you so much. And so. Drink more tea. Hey, everybody. Thanks for making it to the end of the video. This video really was the work of a year and a half worth of effort. If you've been following me or you even just watched this one video to the end, please click the like button, comment on the video, subscribe to the channel. If you're on YouTube, click the bell. Do whatever you can to let the algorithm know that you actually want to see more of me in the future. And I really hope you guys enjoy it. Thanks so much.