Tencha (Matcha Base)
Tencha is the leaf that becomes matcha: shade-grown like gyokuro, steamed, then dried flat without rolling and stripped of stems and veins, leaving papery green flakes that are stone-ground into powder. It is rarely sold to drink as leaf, but brewed whole it delivers extraordinary sweetness and umami with very little astringency. The variable that matters most is the shading, since the weeks of light deprivation before harvest are what load the leaf with the sweetness matcha is prized for.
Tencha looks unlike any other leaf tea: flat, papery, broken green flakes rather than rolled or needle-shaped leaf, because it is never rolled. Higher grades are a vivid green with the deep marine-sweet aroma of shade-grown tea and very little stem. Browned flakes, lots of stem, or a flat vegetal smell indicate lower ceremonial or culinary grade. Since most tencha is destined for grinding, leaf sold to brew is a specialty item, so buy from matcha-focused producers and favor current-season, light-proof, refrigerated packaging. Provenance from Uji, Nishio, or Yame is a positive signal.
Tencha is produced in Japan's main matcha regions: Uji (Kyoto), Nishio (Aichi), and Yame (Fukuoka), among others. Like gyokuro, the bushes are shaded for roughly three weeks or more before harvest to raise theanine and chlorophyll and suppress catechin (bitterness) development. After plucking, the leaf is steamed and then dried in a special tencha furnace without any rolling; it is subsequently de-stemmed and de-veined so that only the soft leaf flesh remains. That refined leaf flesh is what gets stone-ground into matcha, but it can also be steeped directly.
Brew tencha cool and gently, like a delicate shade-grown green. Western: 60-70°C, 3 g per 150 ml, 60-90 seconds, 2-3 infusions. Gongfu: 65°C, 4 g per 120 ml, 45-60 seconds, ascending, 3-4 infusions. The papery flakes float and give up flavor readily, so keep the temperature low to protect the sweetness; boiling water flattens it just as it would gyokuro.
€25-50 (about $27-54) per 100 g for leaf-grade tencha; €60-120 (about $65-130) per 100 g for ceremonial-quality lots from named matcha producers.
Prices reviewed June 2026
Tencha is never rolled, which is exactly why it grinds into matcha so cleanly: rolling ruptures and twists the leaf cells, but tencha is dried flat and then de-veined, leaving brittle, flat leaf flesh that a stone mill can reduce to an ultra-fine powder.
The steps overlap in practice; this is a reading order, not a set of separate stages.
Matcha
Literally the ground form of tencha; tasting the leaf and the powder side by side is the clearest way to understand what stone-grinding adds and subtracts.
Gyokuro
The rolled shade-grown counterpart: gyokuro is the same shading principle finished as needle leaf, with more body and a more conventional brewed-tea presence.
Kabusecha
A lighter shade-grown green (10-14 days of shading versus three or more weeks), brighter and less intensely sweet than tencha's parent leaf.
Sencha
The unshaded reference: brewing tencha against sencha makes the entire effect of weeks of shading on sweetness and umami obvious.