Buying matcha well

You now know what matcha is, how to make it, and how to read a label. This is the boring part that saves the most money.

Buy small

30 g is a month of daily bowls. A 100 g tin looks like value and usually becomes disappointment in week seven. Freshness is the single biggest variable in the cup, and it is entirely within your control at the point of purchase.

Buy from someone who answers

The test is simple: ask for harvest month, region and cultivar. A shop that knows, tells you. A shop that does not know is reselling a wholesaler's tin, which is fine for €12 and not fine for €40.

Where

• Specialist tea importers, usually online, with harvest dates on every product page.
• Refill and zero-waste grocers, which increasingly carry one carefully chosen matcha and can name the importer.
• Japanese grocers, excellent for everyday second-harvest matcha for lattes; less reliable for first-harvest.

Supermarket matcha is almost always culinary-grade powder priced as if it were not. It is not a scandal; it is just not what you want in a bowl of water.

Keeping it

Sealed, opaque, cool, dark. Not above the hob, not on a windowsill, not in a clear jar. Once opened, aim to finish within four to six weeks.

The waste question

Matcha is one of the few teas with no leaf to dispose of — you drink the whole leaf, so extraction is complete and there is no spent grounds problem. The packaging is where the impact sits: tins are reusable and widely recycled, sachets almost never are. Ask for tins, then refill them where you can.

Scored places nearby

Where a shop in our directory sells matcha, its Frogwise Standard score already tells you how it handles packaging, transparency and sourcing. Start there rather than with a search engine.