7 minute read
The strawberry matcha filling your feed this year is usually built from three things: a scoop of matcha, a splash of milk, and a strawberry syrup or a handful of freeze-dried bits stirred through for colour. It looks the part. It also tends to taste mostly of sugar. Our Strawberry Matcha takes a different route. It is two ingredients, and neither of them is sugar.
Here is what that means, why the pairing works as well as it does, and how to make a cup at home that tastes like strawberries and green tea rather than a candied version of both.
How strawberry matcha became everyone's summer drink
Matcha spent years being softened for a wider audience. Cafés reached for vanilla syrups and heavy dairy to round off its natural bitterness, which built familiarity but also flattened the thing that made matcha interesting in the first place. The current wave runs the other way. Instead of masking matcha, the flavour is being built around it, paired with fruit that balances rather than buries.
Strawberry turned out to be the near-perfect partner. Matcha is grounding, grassy, a little bitter. Strawberry is bright, sweet, faintly tart. One sits under the other, and the drink holds together without much help. The look does not hurt either: a rosy layer poured over green reads beautifully in a glass, which is a large part of why the strawberry matcha latte became a spring and summer staple on café menus across Canada.
What's actually in our Strawberry Matcha
Two things. Katō Matcha Summer Harvest, and real strawberry. No sweetener, no flavouring, no additives.
That matters more than it sounds. Most flavoured matcha leans on added sugar or a natural-identical flavouring to carry the fruit note, because real fruit is harder to work with and costs more. Ours skips both. The strawberry is real fruit, freeze-dried and milled straight into the matcha, which is why the powder smells like strawberries before you have added a drop of water.
The matcha underneath is premium matcha from the Katō family in Uji, Kyoto, the same growers our founders Dave and Sarah have sourced from for years. The Summer Harvest is the bolder, more robust of their matchas, which is deliberate. A delicate matcha would vanish under fruit. A sturdier one holds its ground, so you still get real green-tea character in the cup rather than strawberry with a green tint.
One detail worth knowing if you care about provenance: unlike our loose-leaf teas, which are blended and packed in Ontario, the Strawberry Matcha is milled and blended in Japan, close to where the leaf is grown. The Strawberry Matcha comes in a 40g pouch and a larger 250g size, so a small tin runs roughly twenty to forty servings depending on how strong you like it.
The matcha half: calm energy, not a jolt
Matcha is powdered green tea, and because you whisk the whole leaf into water rather than steeping and discarding it, you take in more of what the leaf contains than you would from a brewed cup. That includes two compounds worth understanding, since they explain why matcha feels different from coffee.
Why the caffeine doesn't spike
A serving of matcha carries caffeine, though less than a typical coffee, somewhere in the range of 50 to 70 milligrams for a standard scoop. Alongside it sits an amino acid called L-theanine. The two together behave differently than caffeine alone. In a controlled study of matcha's effect on mood and cognition, researchers pointed to this caffeine and L-theanine pairing as the reason matcha is linked to a state people describe as calm alertness: awake and focused, without the wired edge. The effect is real, but keep it in proportion. It is a smoother lift, not a different category of energy, and it varies from person to person.
If steady focus is what you are after, this is the half of the drink doing the work. We keep a whole focus and productivity collection built around it.
The strawberry half: real fruit, in real amounts
Strawberries earn their reputation. A cup of them has more vitamin C than an orange for about 45 calories, along with fibre and the anthocyanins that give the fruit its red colour and much of its antioxidant activity. That is close to a full day's vitamin C in a single cup.
A word of proportion, since this is where fruit marketing usually overreaches. The strawberry in a serving of our matcha is a small amount of real fruit, not a cup of berries, so treat it as a genuine flavour built from a real ingredient rather than as a vitamin supplement. The point of the strawberry here is taste, and the little it adds beyond that is a bonus, not the reason to drink it.
How to make it at home
Matcha rewards a couple of small habits. Use water that is hot but not boiling, around 80°C, since boiling water scorches the powder and pushes it bitter. Whisk it properly, ideally with a bamboo whisk, until the surface is smooth and lightly foamed. Broken into steps, the rest is easy.
The clean way: whisked in water
This is how to actually taste what you bought. Sift or spoon half to one teaspoon of Strawberry Matcha into a bowl, add a splash of hot water, and whisk into a smooth paste. Top up with more water, hot or poured over ice, and you have a cup where the strawberry and the green tea both come through clearly. No milk, no sugar, nothing to hide behind. A proper whisk and bowl make this easier, though a small kitchen whisk will do in a pinch.
The crowd favourite: an iced strawberry matcha latte
This is the version most people picture, and the one we suggest right on the pouch. Whisk your matcha with a little hot water first, then pour it over a glass of ice and your milk of choice. Oat milk is the popular pick and pairs especially well with the fruit. The result is creamier and sweeter, and because the sweetness comes from the fruit and the milk rather than syrup, you stay in control of how sweet it gets.
The refreshing one: sparkling
Whisk the matcha with a small amount of water, then top with cold soda water over ice. You get a light, fizzy, faintly pink drink that leans into the strawberry's brightness. It is the most refreshing way to drink it on a warm afternoon, and it needs nothing else.
Is strawberry matcha actually healthy?
Fairly, with the usual caveat that the answer depends on what you put in the cup. On its own, whisked in water, it is green tea and a little real fruit, which is about as clean as a flavoured drink gets. Build it into a sweetened latte with syrup and a pile of whipped cream, the way many café versions are, and it becomes a treat, which is fine as long as you know that is what you are choosing. The advantage of making it yourself is that you decide. Our version hands you two honest ingredients and gets out of the way.
That is the whole idea behind it. Real matcha, real strawberry, and room to make it yours. If you want to try it, you can find Strawberry Matcha here in 40g and 250g pouches. And if you are still deciding which matcha suits you, this guide walks through the differences.
