Matcha grades: what the words mean, and what Japan uses instead

What do matcha grades mean? The short answer

There are no official matcha grades in Japan, the United States or the European Union. Japan's industry body publishes a voluntary standard for what matcha is; an ISO technical report from 2022 describes it; neither grades it. "Ceremonial," "culinary," "premium," "latte grade" and "café grade" are English-market terms with no fixed meaning. Japanese makers sort by use — koicha, usucha, cooking — and sell named blends inside each; the raw leaf is ranked at the wholesale market and at a national competition, and the blender turns those rankings into a name.

The two vocabularies, side by side

The Japanese column is what appears in makers' catalogs. The English column is what importers and retailers print, and it varies by seller.

How Japan sorts matcha

By use. The first question in a Japanese catalog is not how good but for what. Koicha, thick tea kneaded from about 4 g of powder, is the demanding use, and a maker tags only the blends that stand up to it undiluted. Usucha, the whisked bowl, is the everyday use and takes most of the range. Cooking powders are milled from later, less shaded leaf, because their sharper flavor survives butter and sugar. Marukyu Koyamaen, for one, lists eleven standard blends in order and tags six as suitable for koicha; the rest are usucha. The English shop of the same house translates the categories as “principal matcha,” “matcha favored by tea schools,” “matcha favored by temple,” “limited edition,” “matcha for cooking” and “sweetened matcha” — and the word grade appears in none of them.

By name. Within a use, blends carry names — Tenju, Unkaku, Wako, Isuzu at Marukyu Koyamaen; at Ippodo, poetic names ending in -no-mukashi or -no-shiro — and the name is the grade. Each is a proprietary blend of tencha from several fields and cultivars, adjusted each year to keep its taste stable. At some houses the suffix carries a hint of the intended preparation or the picking; at all of them, the position in the house’s own list is what tells you where the blend sits. Houses also produce blends named for the heads of tea schools, gokonomi, which are ordered by those schools and bear their names, and a few for the abbots of Zen temples.

By competition. The national tea competition, held since 1947, judges tencha on appearance, aroma, color, taste and infused leaf. Its tencha division is dominated by Kyoto growers. A house that has won the top prize, the Minister of Agriculture award, will say so — Marukyu Koyamaen cites twenty-one first places and the 2020 tencha prize, and states that its Tenju is made from award-winning tencha — and that is the closest thing matcha has to a certified top tier.

By the market. Tencha is graded and priced when it is sold to blenders: 3,141 yen per kilogram on average in 2023, about 2.6 times the price of sencha leaf, with Kyoto first-harvest leaf far above the average and the 2025 harvest at multiples of that. This is where quality is actually ranked in Japan, by buyers who taste the leaf. The blender turns that ranking into a name and a use. The English market turns it into an adjective.

A house’s ladder, read as a grading system

If you want to see what a grading system looks like when a Japanese house builds one, read Marukyu Koyamaen’s standard line as the house prints it. Eleven blends in a fixed order, from Tenju at the top to Isuzu at the foot. The top six — Tenju, Kiwami Choan, Choan, Eiju, Unkaku, Kinrin — carry the house’s tag for koicha; the lower five — Wako, Yugen, Chigi no Shiro, Aoarashi, Isuzu — are sold for usucha. The house’s own description of the ladder, from its international FAQ: blends higher in the range come with less astringency, more umami and a rounder taste. That is a grading system with everything the English words lack — an order, a criterion, a use, and a maker standing behind it — and no word for “grade” anywhere in it.

Translate it to the English vocabulary and the ladder collapses. All eleven would be “ceremonial.” The top six might be “reserve” at one importer and “koicha grade” at another. Isuzu might be “daily” or “latte” or “premium,” depending on who is printing the tin. The information the house gave you — sixth place, koicha-tagged — is gone.

Where the English words came from

“Ceremonial grade” appears to date from the early 2000s, when importers in the United States and Europe needed a way to tell buyers that a powder was meant for drinking rather than for green ice cream. Kettl’s founder writes that the term was already in use when he began in Japanese tea in 2007 and that its origin is unclear; Mizuba places its emergence with matcha’s arrival in Western specialty markets; Tezumi calls it entirely undefined and unregulated. Ippodo, on its own site, says it does not use the term because it was invented to market matcha overseas and is not used in Japan. It was useful. It also had no floor: any seller can print it, and many do on powders that a Japanese house would sell for cooking, and on ground sencha that is not tencha at all.

Each English word, examined

Ceremonial. Signals intent for plain drinking, weakly. Says nothing about harvest, region, cultivar, shading or milling. Now universal in the American market, which means it distinguishes nothing.

Premium, super-premium, reserve. A seller’s own tiers. Sometimes honestly explained on the seller’s page; never comparable across sellers. “Premium” is a mid-tier at one importer and the top at another.

Daily, everyday. A newer honest word: the seller’s plain-drinking usucha. Closer to the Japanese idea than most.

Latte grade, café grade. The one place the English terms point at something Japanese makers recognize: a bolder, more bitter thin-tea blend for milk, or a food-processing powder such as Marukyu Koyamaen’s Wakatake, sold in kilogram bags for business use.

Culinary. At best, a real cooking or processing powder from a later harvest, milled for butter and sugar — a legitimate category in Japan. At worst, ground sencha. The word does not distinguish them; the ingredient line does.

Ingredient, industrial. Bulk powder for packaged foods; the green in a candy bar. Not sold to households under a name.

Organic. Not a grade at all. A farming certification — JAS, USDA, EU Organic, recognized as equivalent — that says nothing about harvest, cultivar or shading. “Ceremonial organic” is two independent claims, one of them defined.

What to read instead of a grade

Five disclosures do the work a grade pretends to do, and a maker can skip any of them.

1. Use. Koicha, usucha or cooking, in the maker’s own words.
2. Harvest. First harvest (ichibancha) for drinking; later pickings for cooking.
3. Region. A named district — Uji, Nishio, Yame, Kagoshima — over “Japan.”
4. Cultivar. Asahi, Samidori, Gokou, Okumidori: named cultivars are a stronger signal than any adjective.
5. Grower or field. Rarest of all, and the one that cannot be faked.

A tin that states all five is telling you the taste before you open it. A tin that says only “ceremonial” is telling you the price, and nothing else about what is inside.

Reading a Japanese tin

Japanese labels carry the sorting in kanji, and six terms cover most of it.

• 濃茶 (koicha) / 薄茶 (usucha) / 料理用 or 加工用 (cooking, processing) — the use.
• 一番茶 (ichibancha) — first harvest.
• 宇治抹茶 (Uji matcha); 京都府産 (Kyoto-grown) is the stronger claim.
• 品種 (cultivar) followed by a name — あさひ, さみどり, ごこう, うじひかり, おくみどり.
• 石臼挽き (stone-milled).
• 銘 — the blend name, which is what a Japanese buyer actually buys.

How to use the grade word anyway

The English words will not disappear; they are too useful to sellers and too familiar to buyers, and even the sellers who dislike them most say so. The practical position is to read “ceremonial” as “the seller intends this for drinking” and “culinary” as “the seller intends this for cooking,” and then to look past both for the five disclosures. Where a seller sources from a Japanese house and names it, ask which of the house’s blends is in the tin; the answer places it on a real ladder. Where a seller uses its own tiers, ask about harvest and cultivar; the answers tell you whether the tier means anything. And where a tin says only a grade, buy the smallest size, make one bowl, and let the bowl grade it.

What actually separates a top blend from a bottom one

Since the grade words do not say, it is worth being concrete about what does. Between the top and the bottom of a house’s ladder, five things change, and they change together.

The leaf. The top blends draw on first-harvest tencha from the most shaded fields and the cultivars selected for shade — Asahi, Samidori, Gokou — picked by hand. The bottom blends draw on first-harvest leaf too, at a good house, but from more leaf, more machine picking, and a broader mix of cultivars including Yabukita.

The shading. Longer cover for the top: twenty-five days or more under reed canopies for the finest fields, twenty under cloth for most tencha, less for the leaf that goes to cooking grades. Longer shading means more theanine and less catechin, which is the sweetness-to-bitterness ratio that separates a koicha blend from a usucha one.

The sorting. Tencha is sifted and cut to remove stems and veins; the top blends use the finest leaf-blade fraction, the bottom more of the whole.

The mill. Slow stone milling for the drinking line; faster milling, sometimes machine, for cooking powders. Texture follows.

The blend. The blender’s skill is in making each name taste the same year after year; the top names are the hardest to hold steady because they draw on the scarcest leaf.

Price tracks all five, and the market ranks tencha on them before any tin is packed. None of them is an adjective. All of them are things a maker can disclose, and the best ones do.

Grades in other languages

The English market is not the only one to invent tiers; other export markets have their own grade words, and none maps to Japan’s use-and-name system either. The confusion is the same in every language: the buyer sees a rank and the maker gave a purpose. Japan’s own vocabulary has the advantage of being what the makers actually print, and it is short enough to learn in an afternoon: three uses, a name, a harvest, a cultivar, and the position of the name in the house’s own list.

Two tins, one grade, read properly

Imagine two tins, both labeled “ceremonial grade” by their importers. The first names Marukyu Koyamaen’s Unkaku — fifth in the house’s standard line, tagged for koicha, first harvest by the house’s practice, blended in Ogura, Uji. The second names no house, says “shade-grown in Japan,” “stone-ground,” and nothing else. Both are ceremonial. The first has told you its position on a real ladder, its use, and its maker; the second has told you only that its seller intends it for drinking. If both are priced the same, the first is the buy; if the second is cheaper, it may still be good, and the smallest size is the way to find out. The grade word contributed nothing to that decision. The disclosures made it.

Why no one has written a standard

It is fair to ask why, if the grade words are so loose, nobody has fixed them. Japan’s industry association has considered it; its published description of matcha — shaded, unrolled tencha, finely milled — is under review because ground sencha is being sold under the name, and grading would be a further step. Two obstacles stand in the way. The first is that quality in matcha is a blend of judgments — shading, harvest, cultivar, sorting, milling, the blender’s hand — that the trade already ranks by tasting and pricing at the wholesale market, and no label scheme captures that better than a house’s own ordering does. The second is that the houses do not want it: a grade printed by a regulator would flatten the names that are their reputations. The ISO technical report of 2022 describes matcha and stops there, for the same reason. So the system that exists is the one this page describes — use, name, market, competition — and the grade words remain what they were when an importer first printed them, a translation for buyers who did not yet know the names.

A short glossary

• Koicha — thick tea; about 4 g kneaded with little water. Only upper blends are tagged for it.
• Usucha — thin tea; about 2 g whisked in 60–70 ml. Most blends are sold for it.
• Gokonomi — a blend made to a tea-school head’s preference and bearing that school’s name.
• Ichibancha / nibancha — first and second harvest.
• Tencha — the shaded, unrolled, destemmed leaf that is ground into matcha; ranked and priced at the wholesale market.
• Ceremonial / culinary / premium / latte grade — English-market labels with no defined meaning.
• Gokonomi houses — Urasenke, Omotesenke, Mushakojisenke, Yabunouchi, Enshu, Sohen; the schools whose heads’ names appear on blends.
• The competition — the national tea competition, judged since 1947 on appearance, aroma, color, taste and infused leaf; top prize, the Minister of Agriculture award.
• The five disclosures — use, harvest, region, cultivar, grower: what to read instead of a grade, in that order, noting which are missing.
• The market — the wholesale tencha trade, where leaf is tasted, ranked and priced before any blender names it; 3,141 yen per kilogram on average in 2023, about 2.6 times sencha leaf, and far higher for Kyoto first harvest during the shortage.

Numbers and facts at a glance

• Official grades: none, in Japan, the United States or the EU.
• Japanese sorting: koicha / usucha / cooking; named blends in a stated order; tea-school and temple blends.
• Marukyu Koyamaen’s standard line: eleven blends; six tagged for koicha; the house’s own words: higher blends are less astringent, more umami, rounder.
• The competition: since 1947; Minister of Agriculture prize; Kyoto dominates the tencha division.
• The market: tencha 3,141 yen/kg in 2023, about 2.6 times sencha leaf; Kyoto first harvest far above.
• Ippodo’s position on “ceremonial grade”: does not use it; invented to market matcha overseas.
• The five disclosures: use, harvest, region, cultivar, grower.