Single-Origin vs Blended Matcha: The Cultivars Behind Them

Most matcha is a blend: a tea merchant mixes tencha from several fields, often several cultivars, to hold one house flavour from year to year. Single-cultivar matcha, ground from one plant variety such as Okumidori, Samidori or Asahi, is the newer category. Buy it to learn what a cultivar tastes like. For a daily bowl, a good blend is usually the better tea.

Some matcha blends contain upwards of fifteen different tencha, by the count of the online Japanese-tea retailer Tezumi ¹. Tencha (碾茶) is the shaded, steamed, flat-dried leaf that a stone mill turns into matcha, and Uji’s merchants have been combining lots of it since the early Edo period ². Single-cultivar matcha, ground from one variety of tea plant, is the newcomer. Tezumi wrote in 2023 that it had caught on especially overseas ¹.

Both make good tea. The label words that separate them are looser than they look.

Single-origin vs blended matcha at a glance

What “single origin” means on a matcha tin

The phrase has no fixed meaning in matcha. Sellers use it for three different promises.

One region. The loosest, and in Tezumi’s phrase the minimum: “a geographic location, say Uji or Yame” ¹. “Uji tea” has a written definition, adopted by the Kyoto Prefecture Tea Industry Association in 2004: tea grown in Kyoto, Nara, Shiga or Mie and finished inside Kyoto by a Kyoto firm, with Kyoto leaf given priority ⁵. A tin of Uji matcha can draw on four prefectures and still be correctly labelled. The same caution runs through all of Japan’s tea regions.

One farm or producer. Tezumi adds that “in common usage it also implies that the tea comes from a single farmer/producer,” and that is how it uses the term ¹. One farm can still grow, and mix, several cultivars.

One cultivar. “Single cultivar means that the tea is only made from one cultivar of the tea plant,” in Tezumi’s wording ¹. That names the plant. Unless the label adds a grower, a merchant can combine Okumidori from three farms into one tin and call it single-cultivar with a straight face.

The strongest claim is all three at once: one cultivar, one named grower, one harvest year. When a tin says only “single origin,” ask which of the three it means. A seller who knows will answer in a sentence.

Why matcha has always been blended

Blending has its own word in Japanese tea, gōgumi (合組), and its own trade, the chashi, whom GJTA calls professional tea blending masters ³. The platform promoting Uji’s tea landscape for World Heritage listing records that in the early Edo period Uji’s chashi blended by gōgumi to suit the taste of tea people in Kyoto and beyond. Until the late nineteenth century, growing tea for matcha in Uji was reserved to those same chashi ².

The reasons have held steady. Tea is a farm crop, and the Global Japanese Tea Association points out that “it is essentially impossible to obtain the exact same tea with a 100% identical taste and aroma profile year after year.” GJTA is candid that consistency is only one motive: blending can also “control costs, raise a tea’s market value, or ensure an adequate supply of leaf material when there is a shortage.” Its summary is plain: “the majority of Japanese tea is still blended. Matcha is a striking example of this” ³.

Ippodo, the Kyoto house, set out its own method in April 2026. Its matcha is “produced by blending tea from multiple tea fields, rather than just one,” for complex flavour and stable quality, and the firm places “the most importance on the taste” ahead of fragrance and colour. It also concedes that the strength of the seaweed-like aroma that shading gives its leaf “varies to some degree from one production lot to another,” and that it works to keep the overall fragrance “within a certain range” ⁴. That second sentence is the chashi’s job description.

Kyoto’s wholesalers still work this way. They buy crude leaf, aracha (荒茶), from growers, sort it and blend it to their customers’ taste ⁵, and they trade with one another when a blend needs leaf of a particular character ⁶.

Chamei: the name instead of the recipe

A finished blend is sold under a poetic name, and the components almost never appear on the tin. Tezumi calls disclosure “incredibly rare” ¹. The name is the chamei (茶銘). Some are o-konomi (御好), blends named as the preference of an iemoto, the hereditary head of a tea school. Yamamasa Koyamaen’s catalogue shows the pattern: for Urasenke’s grandmaster Zabōsai it lists Senri no mukashi (千里の昔) and Yūwa no shiro (悠和の白), with matching pairs for Omotesenke and Mushakōjisenke ⁷. By a loose convention, a mukashi name often, though not always, marks a thick-tea grade and a shiro name a thin-tea one, as usucha vs. koicha explains.

The named matcha of the three Sen schools is, in the usual case, a merchant’s blend carrying a grandmaster’s preference. Tezumi grants that single-origin tins may be very good and still “simply not of the style preferred by most tea ceremony practitioners” ¹.

The cultivars behind the bowl

One plant dominates Japan’s tea fields. Kyoto’s tea research institute, on a page last updated in 2022, puts yabukita (やぶきた) at about 68 percent of the country’s cultivated area ⁸. Even in Kyoto it holds 802.9 of the 1,411.8 hectares that the prefecture’s 2023 survey breaks down by cultivar, about 57 percent ⁹. Kyoto’s own breeding pulled the other way: nearly every green-tea cultivar bred in the prefecture is for shaded tea, tencha and gyokuro (玉露) ⁸.

For the Uji selections the year is the institute’s breeding year. For the national cultivars it is the year of naming or registration. Years and descriptions are from the Kyoto institute ⁸, the breeding report ¹⁰, the World Green Tea Association ¹¹ and NARO ¹². The hectares cover all tea types in Kyoto Prefecture, not tencha alone ⁹.

Samidori, Asahi and Uji-hikari: the Uji selections

Kyoto grows these three as its main tencha cultivars, hand-picked under intensive care ⁸. Samidori’s new buds are pale green, glossy and fresh, and its tencha has a clear, bright colour with excellent aroma and flavour. Asahi is “particularly excellent” as tencha and turns up again and again in competition entries. Uji-hikari makes soft, uniform tencha that takes its colour well ⁸.

Two of the three rest on very little ground. The whole prefecture grew 23.2 hectares of Asahi and 22.1 of Uji-hikari in 2023, each less than a fifth of its Samidori ⁹.

Okumidori: the national cultivar that took root in Kyoto

Okumidori came from the national tea station in Shizuoka, a 1953 cross of yabukita with a Shizuoka native selection, registered as Tea Norin No. 32 in June 1974 ¹⁰. It buds about eleven days after yabukita and is picked about eight days later, which lets a farm that grows both spread its harvest ¹¹. The World Green Tea Association’s cultivar note is unusually frank. In our translation: “Its quality is not especially distinctive, but it has no faults or quirks, and it is an easy cultivar to use” ¹¹. The same note records that Aichi rates it highly as tencha, and that Kyoto’s sencha districts use exactly that pairing with yabukita. Kyoto now has 173.9 hectares of it, more than any cultivar but yabukita, across all tea types ⁹.

Saemidori and Seimei: from the south

Both come from the national station at Makurazaki in Kagoshima. Saemidori, yabukita crossed with asatsuyu, was named Tea Norin No. 40 in June 1990 ¹⁰. NARO rates its colour and taste above yabukita’s and notes it takes shading well, though its handbook lists it for gyokuro and kabusecha rather than tencha ¹². Its life as an early sencha is in the sencha guide, one of the seven Japanese green teas.

Seimei is the only cultivar here whose breeders name matcha outright. Registered in March 2020, it is suited, NARO says, to making tencha “as raw material for matcha and powdered tea, for which demand has risen sharply at home and abroad” ¹².

What a single-cultivar tin is for

Single-cultivar matcha is the best way to learn what a cultivar tastes like, and a blend is usually the better bowl.

The cultivar notes above describe leanings: Samidori’s bright colour, Asahi’s standing in competition, Okumidori’s clean, faultless middle. A chashi combines those leanings so no single one tips the bowl, then does it again the next year when the weather has moved every component ³. A single-cultivar tin gives up that correction on purpose. Tezumi, whose own range includes single-origin teas, states the cost plainly: “Quality and flavour can be inconsistent between years.” It still calls the named blend “the standard for matcha, both in and out of the tearoom” ¹.

That missing correction is the single tin’s use. Take two cultivars from one producer, same harvest year, same grade, whisked the same way, and the plant becomes the main variable left. Side by side, the table above turns into something you can taste.

How to choose

• For daily usucha: a blend from a named house, reordered. Consistency is what the chashi is paid for. Grade, freshness and milling matter more than origin, and they are set out in ceremonial vs. culinary matcha.
• For koicha: a blend again, ideally a house’s thick-tea grade.
• To learn cultivars: two single-cultivar tins from the same producer and harvest year. Okumidori against Samidori is a sensible first pair: a national all-rounder beside an Uji selection.
• On any “single origin” tin: look for the cultivar, the grower or prefecture, and the harvest year. A tin that names none of the three is selling the phrase. The rest of the vocabulary is in reading a tea label.
• Watch for tea names that sound like cultivars. Yamamasa Koyamaen lists a matcha called Samidori among its house tea names, beside poetic ones such as Matsukaze (松風), and its catalogue says nothing of cultivar ⁷. On the front of a tin, a cultivar’s name may be a chamei. Look for the words “single cultivar.”

Asahi and Samidori came out of Uji’s seedling bushes in 1954, inside a trade where the chashi decides what reaches the bowl. Tasting one of them alone is the recent liberty, and the quickest way to learn what a chashi has to work with.