Many people have heard about green tea. It gets a lot of press these days for being a healthy, wholesome, nutritious and (perhaps most importantly) caffeinated beverage that somehow fights aging, cancer and fatigue. It has a thousand-plus year history of being enjoyed in various cultures from Asia. You can find it in many forms from straight loose leaf tea to green tea flavored ice cream, cookies, cakes and lattes.
But have you ever heard of Matcha? Do you know what it is?
Matcha is green tea in its powdered form. A special type of green tea is carefully grown and harvested at the peak of the leaves’ perfection.
These leaves are then ground in special stone grinders that gently break down the leaves into powder while leaving all the nutrients and chemical compounds in the tea fully intact.
The result is Matcha: one of the finest and most expensive types of green tea available.
Matcha is used in the famous Japanese green tea ceremony. Have you heard of this ceremony? It bears many connections with the Zen Buddhism tradition. Complete attention to the present and careful cultivation of awareness go hand in hand with Zen, and those qualities are everywhere in the tea ceremony.
However, you don’t need to be scared off by all this talk of formal tea ceremony and gourmet expensive quality tea. Matcha is a fantastic sipping tea!
Believe it or not, matcha is one of the most affordable drinks on the planet if you know where to find it and how to prepare it. Basically, if you can find a bulk supplier of Matcha (and there are plenty of those on the web), you can pick up a single large amount of Matcha (16 ounces is a nice start) that will last you for months to come.
You don’t want to have Matcha around for too long–it is a refined and therefore quite delicate tea, after all–but buying it in bulk and using only as much as you need in your daily tea and recipes will make it last a long time.
I hope you bring Matcha into your life today–it truly is a wonderful beverage that both tastes fantastic and also bestows many health benefits on those who drink it.
