Shades of Matcha:
Why Matcha Color Matters
The color of matcha powder will allow you to make some assumptions about its flavor and freshness before the water even boils. Knowing your matcha shades helps you ensure that you are getting high quality matcha, especially since this stuff isn’t cheap.
Shading + First Leaves
Matcha powder gets its vibrant green color from cultivation and harvest methods. For the purpose of making matcha, camellia sinensis plants are grown in open fields and then are shaded for the last month of cultivation. Shading causes the plant to create more chlorophyll, giving good matcha a vibrant green color. Ceremonial grade matcha also requires stone grinding of the freshest and youngest shade grown leaves. These leaves will be a hyper green color compared to older ones or those exposed to the sun.
Older leaves will have higher antioxidant content. From a health perspective this is awesome, but not so much when it comes to flavor. High catechin levels produce astringent and bitter flavor notes. These leaves will also be less colorful, often producing a matcha with yellow or brown hues. When you open a new package of matcha it should be a bright green color.
2. Air + Sun
Once the leaves are ground into a fine powder proper storage is critical to preserve matcha’s delicate flavor. Because matcha is ground to a fine powder it is highly sensitive to oxygenation and provides more surface area to be affected by oxygen. Prolonged exposure to oxygen causes matcha to lose flavor potency and can also intensify bitterness. A muted and flat color matcha often indicates over exposure to air. This can happen due to a poorly sealed container or as a result of one buying a giant bag of matcha that is opened and reseal dozens of times.
Matcha is also highly sensitive to heat and sunlight. When stored in clear glass containers or sunny shelves, matcha will lose flavor potency and turn a pastel color such as sage green. This is why so many good matcha brands such as Kenko, Breakaway, and Pantager talk extensively about their storage practices to ensure freshness.
A Quick Experiment With Air
Method: Three different matcha drinks made with the same grade matcha, water temperature, and water to powder ratio. Only difference is the amount of time each powder was exposed to air before being mixed with water. From top to bottom, the first bowl was made immediately as the powder was sifted into the bowl. The second bowl was exposed to air for 5 hours before the powder and water were mixed. And the third bowl was exposed for 12+ hours.
Results: The color difference was slight. However, the third bowl tasted 5x times more bitter than the first. The second bowl also tasted more bitter than the first, but nowhere near as bitter as the third.
Conclusion: The longer matcha powder is exposed to air, the more bitter will the whisked matcha taste. Dark and airtight containers will help preserve true matcha flavor.