Marukyu Koyamaen matcha: how to read the lineup

Which Marukyu Koyamaen matcha should you buy? The short answer

There is no grade to choose. There are named blends in three families — the standard line, the tea-school blends, and the temple blends — plus a handful of specialty powders. The one rule the house itself publishes: in the standard line, Kinrin and every name above it are tagged as suitable for thick tea; Wako and every name below it are thin-tea blends. Everything else on the label is a name, not a tier. Buying from the United States is possible through the company's own international shop, on the company's terms, which are strict.

The house

Marukyu Koyamaen began growing and making tea in Ogura, a district of Uji, in the Genroku era (1688–1704), and its head office and plant are still at Terauchi, Ogura, where every international order is packed. It describes itself as a grower, procurer and blender — the three roles a Uji house can play — and its reputation in Japan rests with the tea schools it supplies and with the competition record it lists on its own pages: twenty-one first places at the national tea competition, nine at the Kansai competition, two wins at the national tea-appraisal contest, and first place with the Minister of Agriculture prize in the tencha division of the 74th national competition in 2020. The company’s own phrase for its approach is “making teas with quality as the highest priority,” and its catalog is organized to match: by use and by name, not by grade.

The standard line, top to bottom

The house lists eleven standard blends — “principal matcha” in the English shop, 定番の抹茶 in the Japanese — in a fixed order, and tags six of them “also recommended for koicha.” That order and that tag are the closest thing to a grade the company publishes. Prices move often during the shortage and are left to the retailer.

Source: Marukyu Koyamaen, Motoan online shop catalog, "定番の抹茶" and the "お濃茶にもおすすめ" tag; English International Online Shop, "Principal matcha." Checked September 2026. Cultivar, harvest date and field are not published for the standard line; the blends are proprietary, as at every Uji house.

What the two groups mean

Koicha is matcha kneaded thick — about 4 g of powder to a few sips of water — and it exposes everything: bitterness, astringency, any roughness in the leaf. A blend the house is willing to tag for koicha is a blend it expects to hold up undiluted. Usucha is the whisked bowl most people mean by “matcha,” about 2 g in 60–70 ml, and a usucha-only blend is not a lesser tea so much as a tea made for that dilution. The house’s own description of the ladder, from its international FAQ, is as plain as it gets: blends higher in the range come with less astringency, more umami and a rounder taste, and it suggests trying several to find your own.

The order matters more than any adjective. When a retailer calls Wako “the top usucha” or Isuzu “entry level,” they are reading the same list you can now read yourself. What the catalog does not say is which cultivar, field or picking date went into a tin; those belong to the blender, and the blend changes year to year to keep the taste of each name stable.

The tea-school and temple blends

Twenty-four blends carry the name of a tea school’s head — Urasenke, Omotesenke, Mushakojisenke, Yabunouchi, Enshu, Sohen — and four carry the name of a Zen temple abbot, Daitokuji and Shokokuji among them. “Gokonomi” (御好) means the blend was made to that house’s preference and bears its name; the English shop lists them as “Matcha Favored by Tea Schools” and “Matcha Favored by Temple.” Several of these are also tagged for koicha.

These are the blends you will see on the shelf at a Kyoto tea lesson. For a reader outside that world the practical point is simple: a school blend is a named blend like any other, with the same koicha-or-usucha tag to read. The name tells you whose taste it was made for, not that it outranks the standard line.

Beyond the ladder: cold-whisk, low-caffeine, cooking

Three corners of the catalog do not fit the ladder and are easy to miss in English.

Cold-whisk usucha. Two blends, Suzukumo (涼雲) and Awaraku (泡楽), are sold as “mizutate” — matcha made to be whisked in cold water, listed under a patent tag. If you make iced matcha at home from a standard blend and find it dull, this is the house’s own answer to that.

Low-caffeine matcha. The catalog lists a 低カフェイン抹茶, a reduced-caffeine matcha, in its limited section. Matcha is caffeinated tea in every ordinary form; this is the one place in the range where that changes by design, and the company does not publish a milligram figure in the catalog.

Cooking matcha. Two grades of 料理用抹茶, “Tokujo” and “Tokusen,” are sold for cooking and confectionery — “Matcha for Cooking” in the English shop — alongside sweetened green-tea and milk mixes that are not matcha at all. Wakatake (若竹), the name cafés abroad reach for in milk, is sold in Japan as a food-processing matcha in kilogram bags — a business-use product rather than a drinking blend, which is why it is absent from the consumer ladder above.

Buying from the United States: the international shop and its rules

This is the part most English pages get wrong, and the house has written it down. Marukyu Koyamaen runs two online shops. The Japanese “Motoan” shop delivers only to addresses in Japan, sells matcha on an irregular schedule, limits orders to one per address per month, and refuses hotels, forwarding companies and logistics warehouses — which closes the proxy-buying route through a Japanese address. The International Online Shop, in English, is the opposite: it is designed for customers outside Japan and does not deliver to Japanese addresses at all. Everything below is from its own FAQ and notices, as of September 2026.

What it ships and how. All orders leave the head office plant in Uji by air only — EMS through Japan Post, or DHL, UPS or FedEx — with a tracking number emailed on the day of dispatch; processing takes several business days. There is no free shipping, no gift wrapping (customs), no discount for bulk or repeat orders, and no delivery-date selection. Prices are quoted in yen, tax-excluded, with a handling fee on each matcha item; the USD figures on the site are references, and the card is charged in yen through Stripe. Duties and taxes at the destination are the buyer’s, and a parcel refused at customs is not refunded.

When matcha is available. Since a notice in May 2026 the house no longer announces restock dates, because announced restocks were overwhelmed by traffic and bots. Matcha is restocked at random, only during Japanese business hours on weekdays; not every blend, packaging type or size appears in each restock; and the company answers no individual inquiries about timing. It also rotates the list of destination countries “randomly” so that customers in different time zones get a fair chance — a country that is temporarily suspended simply does not appear in the checkout list. In practice a buyer in the United States checks during Kyoto’s working day, sees what is there, and takes it if the country is available that day.

What it refuses. Since April 2026 the shop declines orders for business purposes — cafés, reselling, proxy shopping, group buying — and since November 2024 it deducts 10% of an order’s total from any refund when a purchase is judged to be for resale. It publishes a running list of unauthorized resellers and proxy services (last updated September 4, 2026, as of this writing), and it disclaims any liability for product bought through them. The message is consistent across both shops: the house has decided its scarce tins go to households and practitioners at list price, one at a time.

What arrives. All Marukyu Koyamaen tea carries a best-before period of seven months from packing, stamped on the bottom of the tin as year.month.day; the house says international orders arrive with about five to six months left. Tins shipped directly carry no verification sticker — the company says none is needed when it ships them itself — but the house runs a QR-code verification system for its authorized channels and has published a warning, with photographs, about counterfeit tins found on an Indonesian marketplace in July 2026. A resold tin without a code, or with a short date, is telling you what it is.

The shortage, in the company’s own notices

Marukyu Koyamaen has published its rationing rules rather than let retailers describe them. From November 11, 2024, its five directly run shops limited matcha purchases; from December 1, 2024, the JR Kyoto Isetan counter stopped selling matcha in store at all, moving it online. A later notice set the rule at one matcha item per person and reserved the right to refuse groups assembled to buy more. The international shop’s FAQ, dated October 2024, explains the cause in the house’s own terms: demand had exceeded production capacity, the leaf for matcha can be procured only once a year, and the stock laid down for annual production was likely to run out before the next harvest — so a quantity limit was placed on every matcha product.

The Japanese online shop suspended matcha orders outright, then resumed in August 2025 on an irregular schedule with one order per delivery address per month, no date-specified delivery, and no shipping to hotels, forwarders or warehouses. Large formats went first: sizes of 100 g and above were withdrawn in early 2025, leaving 20 g and 40 g tins. The international shop’s rules, above, are the overseas face of the same decisions.

Two shops, two sets of rules

What the name does not tell you

“Tenju” is not a grade name. It is a blend name, like every other on the list. The house ranks its standard line by order and by the koicha tag, not by a scale.

“Uji” here means the trade definition. Uji tea can be grown in Kyoto, Nara, Shiga or Mie and finished in Kyoto; Marukyu Koyamaen grows and blends in Ogura, Uji, and does not publish the origin mix of any standard blend.

“Ceremonial” on a retailer page is the retailer’s word. It does not appear in the maker’s catalog, in Japanese or in English. The catalog’s own vocabulary is koicha, usucha, and the name.

A low price on a marketplace is a question, not a bargain. The house sells at list price to everyone, refuses resellers, and has found counterfeits abroad. A tin far below list, without a verification code, from a seller on the company’s published list, is three warnings on one listing.

Which blend, for which bowl

The house’s own advice is to try several. If you want a starting point, read the ladder against the preparation rather than against the price.

Positions follow the catalog's ordering and tags. The house does not designate a latte blend; the latte row is common practice, not the maker's instruction.

Two practical notes. The 20 g tin is ten bowls, which is two weeks of daily usucha and the right size during a shortage in which the best-before is seven months and an opened tin should be finished within a month. And a first koicha is better made from Kinrin or Unkaku than from Tenju: the kneading takes practice, and the top of the line is not the place to practice.

Reading a tin

Turn it over first. The date on the bottom, year.month.day, is the best-before, seven months after packing; five months left is normal for a direct order, and less than two is a reason to ask where it has been. On the label, the name — Tenju, Kinrin, Isuzu — tells you the blend, and the position of that name in the list above tells you whether the house sells it for koicha. Nothing else on the tin is graded, and nothing else needs to be. Sift 2 g, 70°C water, fifteen seconds with the whisk, and the name will tell you the rest.