Everything you need to know about Matcha

hey tea heads this is dawn from a leaf in this video everything that you need to know about matcha in this video I'm going to be talking about what matter is what you should be looking for when purchasing matcha and why you should be drinking matcha this video is going to go into the basic tea education playlist if at any point in time you enjoy this video then please give the video the thumbs up the more thumbs in the air the more tea videos are going to come your way and if you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel yet and go click that button okay so match is all the rage at the moment we've seen a massive rise in popularity in match over the last few years and I thought it was a good idea to finally make a video just to increase everybody's knowledge about match I'm especially those people who are discovering it for the first time so mattre is a stone ground green tea traditionally used in Japanese tea ceremonies what most people don't know is that this way of brewing tea is actually an ancient way of brewing tea 2,000 years ago they were brewing tea in this way in China and this traditional way of brewing tea has persisted only in Japanese tea culture in the form of matcha but you can't just take any old green leaf grind it into a powder and call it matcha it needs to go through a specific process so you start with good green tea varietals mostly most matter out there is made with the Yabba kita varietal although you give very high quality matcha made from the aqua Midori sama Dory and Asahi varietals so but most of them are made with the Abu Keita the area that it's grown is obviously of fundamental importance good green tea growing prefectures in Japan will produce the best mattress so Kyoto Aichi Shizuoka will produce the best matcha tea the match the the the T to make matches normally picked in early to mid-may about 20 days before they pick they start to shade the tea plants from the Sun they do this traditionally using reads and then piling straw on top of the reeds but nowadays they use it they use fabrics or black vinyl which we'll cover over the leaves and gradually over the 20 days they will increase the amount of covering to increase the amount of shade so the plant is growing in increasingly low light conditions what happens is the plant starts to freak out the plant starts to produce high levels of chlorophyll and also the Fenian levels in the leaf remains high because when you shade the leaf the theanine does not break down as quickly into other compounds like tannins so you get high levels of theanine and chlorophyll and that's really important when you talk about the health benefits of matcha which we'll talk about later so they pick the leaf in mid-may really dark leaf full of thinning chlorophyll they then steam it to stop the oxidation process just like any other green tea they steam it for 15 to 20 seconds and then they will dry the tea at this point the tea is called Archer Archer is like the midpoint process to make matcha tea they then take the archer and they take away the central stem and veins so they'll devein the leaf so you're just left with this lovely supple meaty part of the leaf they will uniform the size of the leaf and they will dry it again at this point the tea leaf is called 10 cha then the tea master will come and taste the tension from different plantations or different fields in the same plantation to get a flavour of the of the different qualities of the 10 sure and then the tea master will make blend so they will blend the tension to get the right flavor profiles for the match so that they would like to produce once the blending process is finished they will then grind the tension into matcha they use round stone mills with a central hole the stone wheels are grinding on each other and the tensor is slowly sent down the hole in the mill and out comes micro-fine matcha powder it needs to be micro-fine under 10 microns and the process of the Stone grinding needs to be at low temperature to make sure that you don't denature the nutrients and you don't affect the color and the flavor of the matcha this process the grinding process is very slow it takes about an hour to make about 30 grams of matcha so it's a very slow process so that's the process to make matcha now there are three general grades of matcha you've got your ceremonial grade at the top then you've got standard grade matcha and you've got cooking grate matcha so there are many different stages in the processing of matcha and if you take any shortcuts or you don't have the right level attention of detail in different in any of the different stages you will produce lower grade matcha so for example the leaf is not shaded fully for 20 days or the leaf is the picking is the second flush not the first flush that will affect the grade how much attention to detail was put into the deveining of the errata if it's not been deveined properly then the resulting tea will be coor so it will have more of the ground veins and stems and that will produce a lower grade matcher if they want to produce the tea at a faster rate then maybe they'll they'll speed up the grinding process or they won't use stone mills they'll use machine other machines to grind the tea again that will affect the grade so cooking grade is the match that you're using for your match ice creams to dust over truffles etc then you've got standard grade which is just decent match are made from tension and then finally you've got ceremonial grade in order for it to be ceremonial grade it needs to be shade-grown for at least fifteen days it needs to be properly deveined it needs to be stone-ground at low temperature and at a very small particle to make a very nice micro fine powder which makes a very smooth drink you can also get things called green tea powder and this is basically not match her usually made in China but sometimes also made in Japan and it's just a very very poor quality tea which is ground into powder I would stay well away from any of that when you are selecting your tea make sure you ask your tea supply if the matcha is radiation tested if the tea leaves that make the matches radiation tested they should unequivocally and very quickly say yes this is all radiation tested with the crisis that happened in Fukushima you want to make sure because you are consuming this leaf you want to make sure that the matcha or the tea leaves has been completely passed as radiation free I would also advise purchasing organic matter for the same reason you're consuming the leaf therefore you don't want to be consuming any potential fertilizers or pesticides that were sprayed on the plant so organic is the way that I would go I know that 10 years ago there weren't very high quality organic matches out there but nowadays there are so I would stick with organic match if at all possible so the best way to judge matcha after you've asked all those all those questions is by eye here is a ceremonial grade matchup but it's a ceremonial grade match from a supplier that we decided not to purchase from I'm going to show you what that looks like so you can see it's quite yellow it's it's not particularly vibrant green color let me show you a comparison with the ceremonial grade matcha that we decided to purchase so if I show you them side-by-side you will I'm sure well notice a big difference in the color so nice vibrant dark green compared to a kind of cocky yellow color this these are both meant to be ceremonial grade matches but you can see visually how much higher quality this one is so use your I trust your your eye on match you can certainly tell a lot about the quality also make sure that once you purchase good matcher that you store it properly this is exactly the same matcher as this but this has been stored in a glass jar so light has been able to affect this and there was a large amount of air in the jar this matcher was stored in a light and airtight tin so again if you look at the color difference here between the same matcher stored incorrectly you can see how it affects it so matcher is very reactive and therefore you want to make sure that you store it correctly and also try to drink your your matcher this the year that it was picked so this was picked in May 2015 it's now January 2016 so come June July 2016 we switch over and we go to the new harvest and because again it's very reactive it will age quite quickly so those are the markers for what you should be looking for when purchasing your matcher let's talk a little bit about why you should be drinking mature because matcher is you're consuming the whole leaf you're getting a hundred percent of the power of the leaf you're getting a hundred percent of the nutrients when you brew any tea with water you get maybe 35 to 40 percent of the nutrients extracted into the liquid that you drink but with mature because you're consuming the leaf you're getting a hundred percent that means all the health benefits of any tea specifically a green tea is ramped up and supercharged so antioxidant levels if you compare matcha antioxidant antioxidant levels with a brewed green tea a good quality brew green tea and a shot of matcha is about 10 to 20 times difference so that means one shot of matcha is the equivalent in terms of antioxidants as drinking 10 to 20 cups of a good quality green tea there are some sellers out there that report 137 times the amount of antioxidants compared to green tea what they're doing is using one study that compared matcha with a Starbucks green tea so it's a bit of an eye comparison if you compare it with a really good quality green tea and a match it's about 10 to 20 times more antioxidants not just antioxidants you also got higher levels of vitamin C higher levels of vitamin B higher levels of all the minerals that are in green tea that are very good for you so supercharge green tea but then remember the amount of theanine in this powder is much much higher than any other tea theanine is a remarkable amino acid it contributes to the flavor of the tea so it gives this kind of vegetal savoriness which turns to sweetness which is which is so nice in tea but it has incredible health benefits theanine only exists in tea and in one species of mushroom I'm not even sure if that mushroom is edible so if you want to be consuming theanine from foods you need to be drinking tea feening is able to cross the blood-brain barrier there aren't many compounds that can cross the blood-brain barrier but theanine can so it directly affects your brain chemistry and what happens is it controls stress it does this by increasing your GABA levels GABA is a neurotransmitter which acts like a break on your nervous system helps you to relax and calm down so it controls stress the second thing it does is it boosts or improves your mood so it does this by affecting your dopamine levels so you get of that feeling of well-being calmness and happiness thirdly it improves your cognitive abilities it makes you more aware more creative it does this by stimulating alpha brainwave activities radically so if you look at scans of people's people have done brain scans after drinking theanine you get a huge southern activity in alpha brainwave activity and lastly it boosts your immune system so improves your ability to control stress boosts your mood improves cognitive function and in boosts your immune system that's what theanine does and theanine in matcha is at its highest level one thing you should be aware of because again you're consuming the leaf the caffeine level of matcha is the highest compared to any other tea so if your caffeine sensitive then tread carefully start with small amounts and see how you react a lot of people use matcha now as a kind of espresso or coffee replacement to give them that pick-me-up at the beginning of the day some people can handle it some people find that they can't metabolize caffeine as quickly and therefore our caffeine sensitive so again that's something for you to consider some people including myself find that if you drink matcha on an empty stomach in the morning that you feel slightly nauseous a lot of people find that if you just keep drinking it over a few days that that reaction goes away my opinion is just drink matcha after you've eaten something if you find that you're getting nauseous after drinking mattre an empty stomach don't worry it's nothing to be concerned about just make sure that you drink it after food so that's something to be aware of okay I think you've gotten a lot of information about matcha I'm going to be doing another video about how to make matcha so stay tuned for that other than that that's it tea heads if you made it to the end of this video then please give the video the thumbs up check out our playlist and let us know if there are any videos that you would like us to make if you're ever in London then come visit us in Camden to say hi and taste our wares if you have any questions or comments then please fire them over other than that i'm don made from a leaf thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea stay away from the teabags keep drinking the good stuff and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea bye

Channel: Mei Leaf

Views: 632,133

Rating: 4.9482603 out of 5

Keywords: matcha, matcha tea, shizuoka matcha, organic tea, organic matcha, ceremonial matcha, green tea, matcha green, matcha health, matcha antioxidants, japanese tea, grüner tee, japanischer tee, чай, зеленый чай, китайский чай, японский чай, матча, мацця, путь чая, gong fu cha, gong fu brewing, uji matcha, uji hikari matcha, koicha matcha, teaware, tea ware, tea tasting

Id: zzMyC_9iaMQ

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2016