I was the one pushing matcha, long before anyone wanted it
For years I was the person in the cafe saying “have you thought about matcha?”
Brisbane, Australia. In 2017 I was early. Cheerfully, persistently early. And the feedback I received was honest, which I’ve always been grateful for: they didn’t like the taste. Not the concept, not the colour, not the price — the actual taste of it. Underneath everything else, they said, it’s difficult.
I couldn’t really argue. I hadn’t come to matcha through flavour either.
What got me was the intention. The care in how it’s grown and shaded and stone-milled, the fact that someone decided this was worth doing slowly. I tasted it out of curiosity, the way I taste most things, and the love of the flavour came later — years later, honestly, and gradually. That’s a normal way to arrive at a tea. It’s just not a way you can sell to a venue with a Tuesday morning rush.
So I let it go, and carried on doing leaf tea and a few kilos of matcha a year for fellow tea nerds.
Then, in 2024, the asking started coming the other way. Wholesale customers began raising matcha with me, and there was a particular note in how they asked. Not “do you stock it” but “can you tell me what’s actually in this.” They’d been reading price lists where, next to made up grades (don’t get me started about ceremonial vs culinary) and price per kilo, there was a line for what the matcha had been cut with. Sugar, mostly. Sometimes milk solids. Set out plainly, as a specification.
I understood the frustration completely. These are people who can tell you the farm their coffee came from. Being handed something they couldn’t describe to their own customers sat badly with them, and it should.
So I helped — based on the way I had learnt matcha. Japanese first harvest, tea farmers and blenders I had met, landed in Australia every eight weeks for freshness. Then it grew, and kept growing, and I brought in a broker to help hold the demand. I built the relationships, kept the cycle, wore the price movement, delivered. And every eight weeks it came round again.
Here’s the thing I’d want to pass on to anyone thinking about adding matcha to their offer.
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Matcha isn’t a product line. It’s a business.
Leaf tea gives you room to move. A season long enough to plan around, stock that keeps its character while you find the right home for it, time to have a proper conversation with a producer. Matcha gives you far less of that. One harvest. A narrow window. Freshness that leaves visibly and quickly. Limited volume at the tier worth selling, and a global queue of people who all worked that out at the same moment. Every part of it needs someone giving it their whole attention.
Whole. And once something has your whole attention, you notice what it borrowed that attention from.
For me, it was the work I started this business to do. Sitting with a bar team working out how a tea holds against ice and alcohol. Going through a menu with a kitchen that wants tea doing something more interesting than waiting in a pot at the end of service. Training. Sourcing. Building tea programmes alongside hospitality people who genuinely want to understand what they’re pouring — and there are far more of them than the industry assumes.
I was doing less of that every month, and running matcha right at the edge of what I had. Which meant doing it well enough rather than doing it well. I couldn’t sit comfortably with either.
So I’ve been walking matcha back on the wholesale side.
It made me sad, and I’d rather be honest. I really like these customers. They came to me because they wanted a straight answer, and I don’t take their trust lightly. But matcha deserves someone whose entire focus it is, and that’s a genuinely good business for whoever wants to build it. It just can’t be a sideline done at capacity, least of all by me.
My lane is leaf. Sourcing it, teaching it, and building programmes with people who take it seriously. That’s what I’m best at, and it’s what I’d like to still be doing into the future.
Finding the joy again turned out to be mostly a matter of putting a few things down.
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I run a small tea business called The Steepery Tea Co in Brisbane, Australia, working with bars, kitchens and hospitality teams on tea sourcing, training and tea menu development.
