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There is a version of flavoured matcha that gives the whole category a bad name. Bright green powder, a fruit name on the label, and a long ingredient list underneath: added sugar, artificial flavour, sometimes a colour to keep things looking vivid. It tastes sweet and vaguely citrusy and not much like either fruit or tea.
Our new Yuzu Matcha is the argument against all of that. It is our Katō Matcha Summer Harvest blended with real yuzu, and nothing else. No sweetener, no flavouring, no additives. What you taste is a genuine Japanese green tea meeting a genuine Japanese citrus, which turns out to be one of the more natural pairings in the tea world once you understand where both come from.
Here is the fruit, the tea, and how to drink the two together.
What yuzu actually is
Yuzu is a citrus fruit, and one of the most distinctive on earth. Botanically it is Citrus junos, most likely a wild hybrid of a sour mandarin and the hardy Ichang papeda, first grown in the highlands of China and now most closely tied to Japan. It looks a little like a small, lumpy grapefruit, golden-yellow and bumpy-skinned, rarely bigger than a tennis ball, with large seeds and not much flesh inside.
That last detail matters, because yuzu is almost never eaten like an orange. The flesh is scarce and sharply sour. What people prize is the peel and the juice, both carrying an aroma that is hard to describe until you have smelled it: bright and tart like lemon, but rounder and more floral, with notes of mandarin and grapefruit and something green underneath. It is unmistakable, and a little of it goes a long way.
Yuzu is also unusually tough for a citrus. It is the most cold-resistant of the group, able to grow high in the mountains where other citrus would not survive a winter. That hardiness is part of why it took hold in Japan, introduced from China more than a thousand years ago and now grown mostly in the west of the country, with Kōchi Prefecture alone accounting for around half the national harvest.
A fruit woven into Japanese life
Yuzu is not just an ingredient in Japan. It is a small seasonal ritual. On the winter solstice, families run a yuzuyu, a hot bath with whole yuzu fruit floating in it, releasing their oil and fragrance into the steam. The custom goes back to the Edo period and is tied to a bit of wordplay, since the words for winter solstice and for a curative hot-spring soak sound alike. The idea is simple and lovely: a fragrant, warming bath at the darkest point of the year, said to keep colds away and invite good fortune.
In the kitchen, yuzu turns up wherever a dish wants brightness. Its zest finishes soups and grilled fish, its juice goes into ponzu, and yuzu kosho, a paste of chilli and yuzu peel, is one of the great Japanese condiments. Its perfume has more recently caught the attention of French and Italian chefs, which is why you now see yuzu in desserts and cocktails well outside Japan.
All of which is to say: pairing yuzu with matcha is not a novelty. It is two of Japan's most beloved flavours, both built on aroma, meeting in a glass.
The matcha underneath
A flavoured matcha is only as good as the matcha it starts with, and ours starts with Katō Matcha Summer Harvest.
We source it directly from the Katō family in Uji, just south of Kyoto. Uji is the historic heartland of Japanese matcha, the region where shade-growing and stone-milling were refined centuries ago, and the Katōs have been working there for generations. They have their own quiet traditions, including playing Mozart to the plants as they grow, which is the kind of detail you can take or leave but which tells you something about how they treat their tea.
The Summer Harvest is picked later in the season than the delicate spring flush. That gives it a bolder, fuller character, less about fine, subtle sweetness and more about depth and body. It is a premium grade matcha built to hold its own, which is exactly what you want in a flavoured blend. (If you are new to how matcha grades and harvests differ, our guide to choosing quality matcha walks through it.) A softer spring matcha would disappear under the citrus. The Summer Harvest stands up to yuzu and meets it as an equal, green and full underneath the bright top note of the fruit.
It is single-origin and stone-milled, blended, and packed in Japan, with nothing added but the yuzu itself.
Why "made with real yuzu" is the whole point
It would be cheaper and easier to build a yuzu matcha the usual way, with a yuzu-flavoured powder or a spoonful of sugar to round it off. Plenty of blends do. The trouble is that you can taste the difference immediately. Added flavouring reads as sweet and one-dimensional. Real yuzu reads as complex, a little tart, a little floral, with the slight bitterness that makes citrus interesting rather than candied.
Because there is no sweetener in the tin, the tea tastes like what it is. It is not a dessert in a cup. It is green tea with citrus, the way an unsweetened iced tea with a squeeze of lemon tastes clean rather than sugary. If you have been let down by fruit matchas before, this is the difference: nothing is doing the work except the tea and the fruit.
That also makes it far more versatile, because you decide how sweet it is. Straight, it is bright and grassy and refreshing. With a little honey or a sweeter oat milk, it leans toward dessert. The choice stays with you.
Recipe: Yuzu Matcha Tonic
This is a sparkling, refreshing, non-alcoholic drink that leans into the citrus. The tonic water adds a gentle bitterness and fizz that flatters yuzu the way it flatters gin. It comes together in a couple of minutes.
You'll need:
- 1 teaspoon (2g) Yuzu Matcha
- 30ml hot water, around 80°C
- Ice
- 150ml chilled tonic water
- A slice of lemon or, if you can find it, fresh yuzu
- Optional: a small drizzle of honey if you want it sweeter
Method:
- Sift the Yuzu Matcha into a small cup or jar to avoid clumps.
- Add the hot water and whisk (a bamboo whisk, or an electric frother) until smooth and frothy.
- Fill a tall glass with ice and pour in the chilled tonic water.
- Slowly pour the whisked matcha over the top. It will settle into a layered green-over-clear look before you stir it.
- Add a slice of citrus, stir, and taste. Add a little honey only if you want it sweeter.
The result is bright, fizzy, and grown-up, the kind of thing that feels like a cocktail without being one. It is also a good introduction to the tea for anyone who thinks they do not like matcha, since the tonic and citrus carry the flavour so easily. For more ways to use it, our matcha recipes are a good place to wander next.
Where to start
Yuzu Matcha is for the days when a plain bowl of matcha feels like a lot and you want something brighter, and for anyone curious about a citrus most people have never actually tasted on its own. It rewards the same simple treatment good tea always does: nothing to hide behind, and nothing added that doesn't need to be there.
You can find Yuzu Matcha alongside the rest of our Katō matcha, all of it sourced from the same family gardens in Uji. Start with a straightforward iced cup to meet the flavour, then make yourself a tonic when you want to show it off.
