What water temperature for matcha?
Updated By Mio.KEvery guide gives you a number, and the numbers agree with each other: somewhere between 70 and 80°C. I make this tea every week with water taken straight from a kettle that is just about to boil, and it is not bitter. So either I am doing it wrong, or the number is answering a question nobody asked.
The short answer: use water just off the boil, and stop there. Temperature is not the first thing to change if your matcha tastes harsh — the amount of powder and the whisking are. Cooling the water is the fix people reach for first because it is the only one with a number attached to it.
Whether to drink it hot at all is a separate question: is matcha supposed to be hot or cold.
First, the thing you can stop worrying about
Read enough matcha guides and you will meet the same argument: hot water destroys the good things in the tea, so keep it cool to preserve the catechins and the L-theanine. Several articles cite research to back it up.
That research is about steeped tea, and matcha is not steeped. The studies measure how much of a compound comes out of a leaf and into the water at a given temperature, because with leaf tea the leaf is thrown away and only what dissolved reaches you. Temperature decides how much you get.
Matcha is the whole leaf, stone-ground, held in suspension. Nothing is discarded. You drink the powder, so you consume what is in it regardless of the water temperature. There is no extraction step to optimize. Applying infusion research to matcha is a category error, and it has been repeated so often that it now reads as common knowledge.
So the anxious question — am I ruining the health benefits — has a short answer, which is no. What remains is taste, and taste is where the number turns out to be borrowed.
Where 70 to 80°C actually comes from
It comes from the tea next to it on the shelf.
Sencha genuinely wants water below the boil, and gyokuro wants it cooler still — down around 60°C, sometimes lower. Those are leaves steeped in water, and the temperature controls what comes out of them. Too hot and you pull the harsh compounds forward and lose the sweetness. That advice is correct, well established, and completely load-bearing for leaf tea.
Matcha sits on the same shelf, is sold by the same shops, and is written about by the same people. The number came with it. But the mechanism did not, because there is no leaf left to over-extract.
What happens in a tea room
The kettle sits over the fire all afternoon and stays just under a rolling boil. Water is taken from it and goes into the bowl. Nobody waits for it to cool, and nobody owns a thermometer.
The tea is not bitter. What carries that is not the water. It is the amount — about two grams of powder to sixty or seventy milliliters — and it is the whisking, which breaks the powder into the water fast enough that nothing sits in one place getting strong.
I am describing what I was taught and what I do weekly. The forms differ between schools and between teachers, and I am not going to present mine as the only way. But the kettle is the kettle everywhere, and it is hot.
The old manuals agree, in their fashion. Okakura, writing in 1906, records Luwuh reading the water by eye: “the first boil is when the little bubbles like the eye of fishes swim on the surface.” The reading happens as the water comes up to the boil. Nobody in that account is waiting for it to come down.
So what does temperature change?
Something, but less than the guides imply, and only once the other two things are right.
| Water | What you taste |
|---|---|
| Just off the boil | What a tea room serves. Clean, with the bitterness sitting behind the sweetness. This is the target |
| Boiling hard, poured from height | Slightly sharper at the back of the throat. Noticeable, but small next to using half a gram too much powder |
| Left to stand a minute or two | Gentler. Worth trying if you have already fixed the amount and it is still sharper than you like |
| Cool — below about 60°C | The powder stops suspending properly. Streaks, and grit at the bottom. This is the real failure, and it is the one the guides never warn you about |
Note which end of that table is dangerous. Water that is too hot costs you a little sharpness. Water that is too cool costs you the drink — the powder will not go into suspension and you get a gritty, separated bowl. People chasing a low number arrive at the worse of the two failures.
If your matcha is harsh, change these in this order
- The amount. Two grams — two heaped scoops — to sixty or seventy milliliters. Most harsh bowls are simply too strong. A scoop is smaller than people assume.
- The whisking. Fast, from the wrist, in a W through the bottom of the bowl, for fifteen to twenty seconds. Slow whisking leaves pockets of concentrated powder that taste like the whole bowl is bitter.
- Sifting. Clumps survive any temperature and carry concentrated bitterness inside them. A sifter removes them before the water arrives.
- Then, and only then, the kettle. Let it stand a minute. If that is what fixed it, you have learned something about your own taste rather than about matcha.
If it is still bitter after all four, the cause is probably the powder itself, and three questions will separate the remaining causes.
Is it different for lattes and iced matcha?
No, and this surprises people. The water belongs to the whisking step, and the whisking step is the same whatever you are going to do afterwards. Whisk into a small amount of hot water first, then add milk or ice. What you must not do is start cold — matcha will not suspend in anything cold or fatty, which is the whole problem with matcha lattes and with iced matcha.
My answer
Use the water from your kettle, just off the boil. Get two grams and a fast whisk right, and the temperature stops being interesting. If you own a thermometer, by all means use it — but you are measuring the least important of the three things in the bowl.
The full method, with quantities, is on how to make matcha. If the foam is the part that is failing, that is the whisking and the whisk, not the water.
Questions I get asked
What temperature should water be for matcha?
Water just off the boil. That is what a tea room uses, taken from a kettle held just under a rolling boil all afternoon. The 70 to 80°C figure in most guides is borrowed from sencha and gyokuro, which are steeped leaves where temperature controls extraction. Matcha is not steeped.
Does boiling water ruin matcha?
No. It costs you a little sharpness at the back of the throat, which is small compared with using too much powder or whisking slowly. Fix the amount and the whisking first. If it is still sharper than you like, let the kettle stand a minute.
Does hot water destroy the nutrients in matcha?
No. That worry comes from research on steeped tea, where the leaf is discarded and temperature decides how much dissolves out of it. Matcha is the whole leaf in suspension, so you consume what is in the powder whatever the water was.
Can the water be too cool?
Yes, and this is the failure worth avoiding. Below roughly 60°C the powder stops going into suspension, and you get streaks and grit at the bottom of the bowl. Too hot costs you a little flavor; too cool costs you the drink.
Why is my matcha bitter even with cooler water?
Then it was never the water. Look at the amount and the sifting. Two grams to sixty or seventy milliliters, sifted, whisked fast for fifteen to twenty seconds, is the thing to return to.
Should the water be cooler for a matcha latte?
No. Whisk into a small amount of hot water, then add the milk. The water belongs to the whisking step, not to the finished drink. Starting with cold milk is what makes lattes clump.
For where this sits among everything else, see my complete guide, Matcha at Home: A Complete Beginner’s Guide.