Not gonna lie, I was pretty impressed with this matcha!
It’s an unsweetened “Ceremonial Grade” matcha (in brackets because honestly Ceremonial Grade is just a marketing term – it’s not regulated at all) with added vanilla flavouring, and frankly the quality of the matcha itself seems solid. Very smooth and fresh with a natural creaminess and a bit of a vegetal kind of crispness to it. This is my own bias coming though, but I much prefer a matcha with emphasis on notes of cream, florals, or cooling vegetal notes over something really grassy and umami forward with the more oceanic elements of Japanese green tea. This was more the former, so a better fit to my own preferences…
The vanilla itself is light but that’s to be expected when you don’t have anything else in the match to act as a carrier for the flavour, like sugar would. I find the taste itself, though delicate, very pleasant though. It’s silky and has an almost vanilla cake batter quality to it. Not necessary “true vanilla” but definitely not just cream/custard. I bet it would make an exceptional latte (hot or iced), though I was just having it plain. And I really appreciate that the absence of sweetness means full control with prep!
Yeah, I’d probably drink the shit out of this one again.