Over the past few years matcha has become a near-perfect wellness product — green, photogenic, exotic enough to feel special and simple enough to fit in a glass of ice. In that success there is one small problem: the tea itself sometimes goes almost unnoticed.
For a great many people, the first encounter with matcha today is not a Japanese tea ceremony or a small bowl of tea, but a cold green drink from a café. There is nothing wrong with that. Food and drink have always travelled, adapted and found new forms, and modern café culture is probably the reason matcha crossed from the narrow world of Japanese tea into everyday life from Belgrade to Los Angeles.
Even so, matcha is not simply a flavour to add to something else. It is a tea with a very specific cultivation and production process. It is made from tencha: leaves of Camellia sinensis that are shaded before harvest, then steamed, dried and finally stone-ground into an exceptionally fine powder. Unlike most green teas, where the leaf is steeped in water and removed, with matcha we drink the ground leaf itself. Almost the entire product enters the cup, which makes the quality of the raw material especially important.
Shading is not decorative tradition. It changes the chemical composition of the leaf — including chlorophyll content, L-theanine, caffeine and other compounds that affect colour, aroma and flavour. Good matcha is therefore not simply intensely green. It should be very finely ground, fresh-smelling, with a pronounced umami, a mild natural sweetness and a bitterness that exists but does not take over the entire cup. Literature reviews on matcha name precisely this — cultivation, shading, cultivar, leaf maturity, grinding and brewing temperature — as the factors that alter its composition and quality.
This is where the term ceremonial grade appears, today almost as familiar as matcha itself. One thing is worth clarifying immediately: it is not a universal, legally defined Japanese quality category. There is no single government stamp that automatically guarantees a product is ceremonial, and the Japan Matcha Association does not treat the term as a unique international classification.
That does not mean the difference between a premium drinking matcha and cheaper powder is invented. Far from it. In international markets, ceremonial grade is generally used as shorthand for matcha of sufficient quality to drink on its own with water — brighter in colour, finer in texture, less harshly bitter, and with more umami than products primarily intended for cooking or pastry.
At VERA we do not use that term as a label expected to do the work on its own. We use ceremonial-grade matcha from Uji, in Kyoto prefecture, but origin and packaging name are not enough for us. If a matcha does not have good colour, aroma, fineness and a flavour that can stand alone with water, it is not good enough for our bar.
That matters because of what makes matcha chemically interesting. It contains catechins, including EGCG, as well as L-theanine and caffeine. Because we drink the ground leaf rather than an infusion that is then strained, matcha can be a concentrated source of these compounds. At the same time, serious literature reviews caution that composition varies significantly from product to product, and that we still need more high-quality clinical studies specifically on matcha in humans before turning those compounds into sweeping health claims.
That is, in fact, good news for the tea. Matcha does not need to detoxify, reset metabolism or promise eternal youth to be interesting. It is enough for it to be a quality product with a clear origin, a specific composition and a flavour that has a reason to exist.
And it is precisely flavour that best explains why we insist on ceremonial quality. If matcha can only be drunk after adding large amounts of sugar, flavourings or other ingredients meant to cover its taste, we may not actually like that matcha. A good product should survive a meeting with water. Only then does everything else become a choice rather than a mask.
That is why we have the Matcha Shot: concentrated matcha prepared with water, with nothing to hide it. Alongside it we have the Matcha Raf with coconut milk and Iced Matcha, also with coconut milk. Three different ways to drink the same tea — but the base standard is the same: matcha must first be good enough to exist on its own.
Perhaps the simplest quality test follows from this. Try matcha with water alone. Not because it is the only correct way, but because that is when you see most clearly what you have bought. If the colour is murky, the smell tired and the taste aggressively bitter and astringent, additional ingredients can hide that — but they cannot fix the underlying product.
In this, matcha is very much like specialty coffee. We once thought coffee was simply coffee, until we started paying attention to origin, variety, roast and preparation. The same thing is now happening with matcha. Green powders can look similar in a photograph, but in the cup they can be as distant from each other as instant coffee is from a carefully brewed single origin.
Matcha is not just a green drink. It is a tea. The better the tea, the less it needs to explain why it is good.
We claim ours is the best matcha in Serbia. If it is not — we will refund you. VERA, Nikole Spasića 4, Stari Grad, Belgrade.
Matcha at VERA →