Matcha latte
Whisked matcha combined with steamed or cold milk. A modern café preparation rather than a traditional one, and the drink through which most people outside Japan first meet matcha — usually sweetened, and often made with a grade that would be harsh drunk plain.
Also called green tea latte, matcha milk.
What it tastes like
Creamy and grassy, with the milk rounding off matcha’s bitterness. A higher grade is wasted here and a very low grade still tastes flat, so a middle grade is the sensible choice.
What it is built on
Teas
- Matcha — Intensely savoury and thick-textured, with a bitterness that is part of the design rather than a fault. Lower grades tip from savoury into flatly bitter, which is the main reason people conclude they dislike it.
Brewing method: Whisking (bowl-prepared powdered tea) — Powdered leaf suspended in water rather than steeped and strained — the only common preparation in which the leaf itself is consumed rather than discarded.
Ingredients
- 3 g Matcha
- 60 ml Water at 75 °C
- 200 ml Milk or non-dairy alternative
- Sweetener, to taste
Preparation
- Step 1. Sift the matcha into a bowl.
- Step 2. Add a small quantity of water off the boil and whisk to a smooth paste, then to a foam.
- Step 3. Combine with milk, hot or over ice.
Serves 1. About 5 minutes from start to finish, including anything that has to simmer or cool.
Equipment
- Chawan (matcha bowl) — Any wide shallow bowl — a cereal or soup bowl — works perfectly well for whisking. What does not work is a mug.
- Chasen (bamboo whisk) — A small electric milk frother produces a usable suspension and a coarser foam. A metal whisk does not work well and will mark the bowl.
There is no single correct version
Modern and international. Not part of chanoyu, and describing it as ceremonial is a marketing conflation worth resisting.
The steps above are one workable account of how this is made, not the authoritative recipe. Households and regions differ on proportions, on order and sometimes on what counts as the drink at all.
Common mistakes
- Skipping the sift and the paste stage, which leaves lumps that milk will not disperse
- Buying a ceremonial-grade powder for a drink that buries it under milk and sugar
If it goes wrong
- My matcha is lumpy, gritty or will not foam — Undissolved lumps float on the surface, powder settles at the bottom, and no fine foam forms.
Sources
This page is TeaHQ synthesis. The proportions and the sequence are written from common practice as TeaHQ understands it, with no external source behind them, which is one more reason to read the note on regional variation as the more reliable part of the page.
This page describes how the drink is made and where it is made that way. It says nothing about what drinking it does to a person, and the quantities of milk, sugar or spice are recorded because they are part of the recipe rather than as any kind of recommendation.