Who's behind this

Why this site exists

Search for the best matcha to buy in Canada and you will get American pages. Prices in USD, brands that will not ship here or will ship here for thirty dollars, and a top pick chosen from whoever runs the best affiliate program. Underneath that sits a category where the two words buyers rely on — ceremonial and culinary — are regulated by nobody and mean whatever the seller wants.

So the useful thing was not another opinion about tea. It was the arithmetic: what a tin actually costs to land in Canada, per gram, after shipping and tax, and whether the expensive one is worth it once you have done that sum. Nobody was doing it. That is the whole reason this exists.

Lasse Pettersen

I am not a tea expert, and this site will never pretend otherwise. There is no certificate, no apprenticeship in Uji, no decade in Japanese tea. What I have is a working knowledge of how things get sold online and a low tolerance for numbers nobody checked.

I run an independent SEO consultancy on the Georgian Bay shoreline in Ontario, which means I spend my working life reading how businesses present themselves and finding the gap between the claim and the evidence. Matcha retail has an unusually wide one. That is a useful instinct to bring to a buying guide and a useless one to bring to a tasting note, so the two are kept apart here: I will tell you what a tin cost, where it came from and what the label left out, and when I tell you how it tasted, it is because I bought it and drank it.

Everything on this site is paid for out of my own pocket. If that ever changes, how we test says exactly what happens next.