Matcha has never been easier to find. Every café has it. Every grocery aisle has it. There are even matcha energy drinks now.
Real Uji matcha, though, is harder to buy than it has been in a long time. Both of those things are true at once, and the gap between them explains most of what is confusing about matcha right now.
The bottleneck is a leaf, not a powder
Matcha starts as tencha. Tencha is tea leaf that has been shaded for weeks before picking, then steamed, dried, and de-stemmed. Only after all of that does it go to the stone mill.
You cannot make tencha quickly. The bushes have to be covered at the right moment in spring, for the right number of weeks, and the harvest window comes once a year. A farmer who wants to switch from ordinary sencha to tencha needs shade structures, different processing, and years of patience before the plants deliver anything worth grinding. New plantings take about five years to become useful.
So when global demand for matcha multiplied, tencha could not follow. It is still catching up.
Why Uji specifically is the tight spot
Not all of Japan felt this equally. Kagoshima, in the south, grows tea on flat land with mechanised shading, and it has held its volume steady. Most café and latte-grade matcha now comes from places like it, and that supply is reasonably comfortable.
Uji is different. The fields are terraced hillside. The best lots are hand-picked. There is not much land, and none of it can be expanded. Kyoto Prefecture's own projections put Uji tencha at its pre-shortage baseline for 2026, and that depends on the spring weather behaving.
The shortage, in other words, is not a matcha shortage. It is a first-harvest Uji shortage. Those are two very different problems, and only one of them affects what ends up in a ceremonial bowl.
What this does to the shelf
When authentic supply runs short and demand does not, the gap gets filled. Some of it gets filled with older stock. Some with second or third harvest leaf sold under a first-harvest halo. Some with powder that is not from Uji at all, wearing a label that says otherwise. Japanese producers have been raising the alarm about products marketed as "Uji matcha" that never came from Kyoto.
The word "ceremonial" is no help here. It has no legal definition anywhere. Anyone can print it.
What does help is specificity. A named region rather than "Product of Japan." A harvest year. A single garden rather than a blend of whatever cleared at auction. A price that makes sense given what tencha actually costs right now, because genuine first-harvest Uji cannot be produced cheaply in 2026, and anything priced like a commodity is telling you something.
Where we sit
We buy from one garden in Wazuka, in the Uji region of Kyoto. It is first harvest. It is stone-milled. That is a small amount of tea in a year, and it is the same small amount whether demand doubles or halves.
We would rather tell you that than pretend the supply is limitless.
It is not, for us or for anyone selling the real thing.
