How to Use a Matcha Whisk for the First Time

A new chasen arrives with its tines curled inward, stiff and closed. Take it out of the box, tip powder into a bowl and start whisking, and you will hear the first tine snap.

There are two steps before the first bowl, and they use different water. Rinse a brand-new whisk in cold water. Then, in the bowl, do chasen-tōshi — rest the tines for about a minute in hot water at around 80 °C, the same water you are about to make tea with. Cold first, hot second. Together they take under two minutes.

Every English-language guide I read collapses those two steps into one and calls it “soaking.” That is where the confusion about temperature comes from.

Step one: cold water, once, for a new whisk

A whisk that has never been used gets a light rinse in plain cold water first — a bowl or a basin, nothing elaborate. This is not the same as the soak that follows, and it happens once in the life of the whisk.

Not one of the eight guides I read mentions it. They all begin at the hot water.

Step two: chasen-tōshi, in hot water

Then the hot water, in the bowl, with the tines resting in it. Seven of the eight guides describe this step. None of them mention that it has a name.

Chasen-tōshi is not a preparation that happens before the tea — it is the first movement of making the tea. Water into the bowl, tines into the water, and you look at them. That water is then discarded — in practice into the kensui, the vessel kept beside you for waste water; at a kitchen counter, down the sink — and the tea begins with fresh water.

The form differs by school and by occasion, so I will not set it out as one fixed procedure. What carries into any kitchen is this: the tines soften and open, and while they sit there you get to inspect them.

What the curl is actually for

Here is the part that surprises people, and that no English guide I found explains.

The curl on the tines is not a working feature. It straightens out the first time you do chasen-tōshi in hot water, and it never comes back. A Takayama whisk maker, quoted by a Japanese tea-tool retailer, gives the reason plainly: the curl protects the tines in transit, and it looks well in the box.

So do not try to preserve it, and do not think you have damaged the whisk when it goes. A whisk that has lost its curl is a whisk that has been used once.

What you are looking at while it soaks

Only one of the eight guides mentions checking the tines at all. This is the part worth slowing down for, because wet bamboo shows what dry bamboo hides.

• Split tines. Bamboo splits along the grain, and a split tine has a loose sliver at the end of it. In tea practice a whisk with a split tine is not used — not because it whisks badly, but because a piece of bamboo can come away into the tea, and the person drinking should not find it in their mouth.
• Anything left from last time. Powder trapped in the head shows itself the moment the tines are wet. On a new whisk that will be nothing. On a whisk you have used before, it is the check on how well you washed it.

A new chasen occasionally arrives with a tine already broken in transit. Finding that now, in the water, is better than finding it in your tea.

How hot, and how long

The temperature is settled. Six of the eight guides say 80 °C (175–176 °F), and that matches practice, because it is the same water you are about to whisk with — poured from a kettle you have let come down from the boil. Nothing separate needs heating.

The time is not settled at all. This is what the eight guides actually say:

Fifteen seconds to fifteen minutes is a spread of sixty to one. That is not a disagreement about technique; it means most of these numbers were never measured.

About a minute is what I use, and it is enough. The tines are soft and open by then and you have had time to look at them. Longer does no harm in the moment, but bamboo left wet for a quarter of an hour takes longer to dry — and drying is what decides how long a whisk lasts.

Sift the matcha first

Matcha clumps in the tin. Tip it straight into the bowl and you will spend the whisking breaking lumps apart, which is exactly the motion that stresses the tines.

Push it through a fine sieve into the bowl: about 2 g, or two scoops of a bamboo chashaku, for one bowl of thin tea. Then roughly 60 ml of the same 80 °C water.

The motion: W, wrist, and never the bottom

Seven of the eight guides describe the same shape, and they are right about it.

• Whisk in a W or M, not in circles. A circular motion pushes powder to the edge and builds a slow, coarse foam.
• Move from the wrist, not the arm. The whisk should stay light in your hand. If your forearm is working, you are pressing.
• Keep the tines off the bottom of the bowl. Only one of the eight guides says this, and it is the most common way a beginner destroys a new whisk. The tines move through the liquid, just above the floor of the bowl. Scraping the ceramic is what snaps them.

Ten to fifteen seconds of brisk whisking is enough for thin tea. Then slow down, lift the whisk to the surface and draw it once through the middle to break the largest bubbles.

Why bamboo at all

The leaves were ground to fine powder in a small stone mill, and the preparation was whipped in hot water by a delicate whisk made of split bamboo.

— Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea, 1906

If your whisk has not arrived yet, you can still make a decent bowl — the methods that work without one, and what they cost you. Okakura is describing the Song dynasty, eight hundred years before he wrote it. The tool has not changed, and the reason is that nothing else moves powder through water without cutting into it. A metal whisk is stiffer than the foam it is trying to build.

When the bowl is empty

Only two of the eight guides say anything about what happens next, which is strange, because the first bowl is also the moment you decide whether this whisk lasts two years or two months.

Rinse it straight away — plain or lukewarm water, never soap — and dry it standing up. I have written that out properly in how to clean a matcha whisk without breaking the tines. For how long the whisk should last before any of it becomes urgent, that is here. And before a shop sells you a stand to dry it on, read this first.

Questions I get asked

Do I have to soak a new matcha whisk?

Yes, and twice over: a cold rinse because it is new, then chasen-tōshi in hot water in the bowl. A dry whisk is stiff, and stiff tines break.

How hot should the water be?

Around 80 °C (175 °F) for chasen-tōshi — the same water you are about to make the tea with. Straight from a boiling kettle is too hot. The first rinse of a brand-new whisk is cold water, not hot.

My whisk lost its curl after one use. Is it damaged?

No. The curl is there to protect the tines in transit and because it looks well in the box. It straightens on the first chasen-tōshi and does not come back.

Do I soak it every time, or only the first time?

Chasen-tōshi is every time. It softens the tines and lets you check them, and both matter as much on the hundredth bowl as on the first. The cold rinse is once, when the whisk is new.

Can I use the soaking water for the tea?

No. Discard it and start with fresh water for the tea itself.

Which whisk should I start with?

A hundred-tine Takayama chasen. More tines mean a finer foam with less effort, which matters most while you are learning — the reasoning is in eighty tines or a hundred.

Where this fits

The whisk I use is the hundred-tine Takayama chasen, and if you have nothing else yet it comes with a bowl and scoop in the starter set. For everything around the whisk — the powder, the bowl, the storage — start with the complete beginner's guide.

Written by Mio.K, who chooses everything in this shop by hand in Japan.