Pusha Tea (Part II): What Makes Matcha The New Cocaine?

This is (also) culturally inappropriate.

How I'm doing? / All things considered

Let's be specific / My mama cheek, I miss it I wanna kiss it

Nige asking for siblings / I know he meant it

V miscarried, we hid it / I'm glad he missed it

I’ve now sat beneath train tracks on a hot summers day listening to “All Things Considered” (not that one) for the two hundredth time and nearly kicked over my tiny table one-man-concerto at the sly sincerity and vulnerability of Pusha T’s opening four bars: the heart sting that longing for your mother as you look into your own child’s eyes unable to express to either of them—though needing them to know more than any others —the bottomless grief of losing another child before they could draw breath.

Say it with me: “Happy 70th birthday Babzy.”

Oh, you thought this was superficial rap group on a seemingly-surface-level album relying only on longtail drug puns? You thought I was just writing satire? White guy likes tea and rap music a little too much so sandwiches them together messily and you’re supposed to be impressed?

Gals, guys, ghouls—I’ll tell you now. This series is not going where you think.

Want proof?

Good news friends. It’s in chai now. Good chai. Great chai. Matchai.

Didn’t see that coming, even way down there in BrisBen on your BornDay, did ya?

You wanted it to be one way. But it’s the other way.

To combat a heat stroke near you—and while supplies last—you too can get matchai-high-as-a-prayer-flag in the Himalayas, flapping unconcerned as to whims of windy tangents sending sweltering slabs of Japanese concrete colliding into all sides of your conscious. Just visit my beloved Chiyaba in Nakameguro (who’s food menu has become more robust but who’s vibe under the train tracks will always be the only Tokyo home I’ve ever known).

So go, go, go!

Sorry, the spice must be getting to me already, only two sips in.

First, we should recap. In Pusha Tea (Part I), we asked a major 🔑 question: Is Matcha the New Cocaine?

And we did so after celebrating the arrival of the 2025 harvest on my doorstep, courtesy of Sensei On The Block, and collectively dreamwove a future Clipse x Matcha collabo waiting patiently on the rim of the universe’s tongue ready to be ciphered to life.

Well, in this second installment, we will continue to Let God Sort Em Out as we investigate the criteria of this seemingly-surface-level reframing of the absurdity of our present green fairy dust moment (that people have been posting about on reddit since at least 7 years ago).

To begin, let us ask a couplet of inquisitive follow ups…call it a minor 🔑 alert:

How would the new cocaine need to be different from the old cocaine — and where would we start drawing our lines in this heaping pile of fresh ground powder?

The thrill? The fear? The sex? The price? The cross-the-border peril?

Play it cool, homie. Just do as Malice says:

Hands 3 and 9 on the wheel as I'm crossing the state line / Dumb, ditty, dumb, ditty, dumb

That’s not a popeye grin you’re glimpsing glaring back at you. Just that this confetti medley of spice & matcha in my glass is strong enough that I gotta sip it with one eye closed.

MY CONNECT HAS PONY TAILS TIED BACK

Wherever I’ve traveled on this rock, there is one line of questioning I always get.

Do I want drugs? Do I have drugs? Do I know where to get drugs?

Blame the long hair. Dead giveaway. Beard hasn’t made things any better. I’m far too many people’s imagined ponytail haired connect, even during my stint in Medellín, where the O.C. (old cocaine) was chirping around town like cicidads along a Japanese summer street stroll.

I may have sailed several psychedelic adventures in this life, but I’ve stuck to a blood oath to steer clear of O.C. and death stixxx. Addiction runs so deep in my blood as to be unavoidable. A strand of my very DNA. Best I can do is choose my addiction wisely. This is how I became the only guy veering off Parque Lleras onto a Medellín side street in 2015 negotiating the cost not of a bag of powder but of a stainless-steel strainer fit for steeping my far fatter sack of genmaicha with considerable healthy green frosting—call it the laced blunt of the tea world— that I hauled down to the Ciudad de la Eterna Primavera. I was surrounded by coffee & coca but I was still a tea man.

Oddly enough, my script flipping powder preferences earned me respect and the nickname Luigi by a small army of golden-hearted local models that took me under their águila wings and cast me in their music videos as Most Kissed.

Want proof that teas open doors?

Oh I’ma stop you right there Dweez, I hear you howl, would you give this whole bit a rest?

You’ve never even tasted the O.C.!? How are you going on and on about the N.C.? The O.C. is illegal. It’s dangerous. It’s powerful, like really, powerful. It makes you do crazy things.

Brother. I’m over here sitting and staring at the floor for an hour every morning. If I’m not high, what am I?

Plus, where have you been?

Legal is the new illegal. Sane the new insane. Subtly the new power. Most importantly, honesty is the new secret. Remember: the bad guys already won. Doing right is the new doing wrong.

Plus, the O.C. is not exactly something you can broadcast on the New Sugar: social media. Anything that could be called the N.C. would need to be safely and happily shared online. Bragged about. Tagged for clout. Snagged, no doubt, before the supplies run out. Then, re-posted and recapped throughout.

If it’s illegal and needs to be done in secret—that’s O.C. written all over it.

Matcha may be, at its core, a slow drug in a fast world—but that can’t stop, won’t stop us from trying to make it go faster.

Those footsteps you hear approaching might have come with a sack fulla Presidential faces but let’s let Saint Lamar’s verse on Chains & Whips spell out what most of these new wave matcha dealers thus far refuse to admit but Uncle Sam-uel Jackson has no issue calling out:

N***** want the tea on me, well, here's the ginger root

I generate residuals, bitch, get off my genitals

They said I couldn't reach Gen Z, you fuckin' dickheads

You must be full of that ginseng, here comes the jinx, yeah

They genetics been synthetic, screamin' they genius

A finger wave, they all fall, n***** is Jenga

WE GOT IT 4 CHEAP

“Good matcha shouldn't exist,” has become my favorite refrain of Ryan Ahn, cohost with Zongjun (Sam) Li of the Matcha Specialty Podcast—a place that has become something of a community hub for all of us micro minty-tone maniacs and—on the right mornings and under the right guises, something of a laugh track for the state of affairs in which we find ourselves now.

Ahn goes on:

“That is... it's fighting against you at every turn. From farming practices, to milling, to preparation - there's a lot that contributes to the food science miracle that is matcha. High-quality suspensions, stable foams, principles of extraction, and more!”

We’ll get to the "miracle” ‘and more!’ part next dispatch but for now what you need to know is that Ahn & Li are science-grown souls. Taste technicians. Flavor forensicsists. A spinoff faction of the Tea Technique universe of Knowledge Obsessed Gentleman Scholars who are seeking Culinary Alpha. They want the freshest, best tasting matcha possible for as many people as possible. The demand we treat the latte legions with the same respect that we do the take-it-straight-edgers. However people want to freak it, their brand, Sanko, is out to make products that satisfy all three of our mouths.

Call them the Walter White’s in this story of our collective attempt at Breaking Good.

After Kickstarting their obsidian one-dimensional-vessel designed to make 1D the multi-D of the classic chawan preparation for those cafes whisking matcha bowl by bowl, they are now full-steamy-foam-ahead on dialing in a countertop machine to as-closely-as-possible mimic the classic ishiusu stone grinding mills that turn shade grown tencha tea into matcha powder.

When it’s said and done, these future professors in the art of pulverization will ideally have their machines in cafes with serious matcha programs around the world—and maybe, someday, on all of our kitchen counters. They dream of a future where every gram of matcha could be milled fresh, mitigating the O2 danger zones surrounding the 2000 square feet of surface area 20 grams of the microscopically jagged little pill particles. A matcha speck is essentially a sitting duck once exposed to air. Imagine your particles rawly nude, splayed out like overzealous, unsunscreened beach goers on Yuigahama in low tide.

In essence, these geniuses are on a quest to lather us in sunscreen and take us so high we enter the sun. (or the Son).

And I love them for it. We all do. I’ve enjoyed every conversation they’ve had from farmers like Pau (also of Tea Nursery & Raw, Grilled, Boiled fame) on the ground in Japan to vendors running shops in places like Australia. I even recommended their podcast a could dispatches back. I’ve also appreciated how the more they’ve learned about matcha, the more they’ve realized the incredible amount of work that goes into a single 20-gram jar of that good green ish. Yes, down to picking it themselves. Yes, to down to acknowledging the workplace dangers traditionally shaded agriculture requires

When Ahn says things like, “Good Matcha shouldn’t exist,” he means it. You can hear his voice crack, the astonishment in his chuckles after uttering this bizarre truth.

True on the most obvious levels:

- The laborious shading process that has to happen for weeks for the plants to transform in ways that make tencha possible.

- The elaborate and outrageously sophisticated factories that exist to create, from these freshly picked leaves, through air-pressurized tubes that separate the riff raff, vines that are separated from sheets of leaf, red brick ovens that bake the goods, all to create these 4x4 millimeter tencha particles.

- Which then gets ground, slowly, in the dark, at a rate no faster than 40 grams per hour on those ishiusu stone mills to their ideal 5-to-20-micron size, monitored by careful souls wearing radioactive-waste-clean-up suits.

- Oxygen free packaging that has to preserve this insanely sensitive and potent loot.

And what he says is also true on less obvious levels.

That becoming a tencha farmer is an insane undertaking, especially when compared to other more-profitable and less-fussy agricultural options. He means that choosing to make matcha is a impractical life choice that we all benefit from. It’s for this reason that he, and guests like Marc from New Jersey’s Ooika, concur that since such an impossible product does exist in this modern world we have been paying far, far too little for what we get.

We my have got it for cheap, but it ain’t cheap no mo.’

Matcha, even as it gets more expensive, should probably cost way, way more. This, of course, is what no one wants to hear. Least of all the people who see matcha as anything built for speed: supplement, casual picker upper, or food additive. This may start to be something everyone shouldn’t have all the time, however they want to have it, now & fast.

While the tea-nerd benchmark has been $1 per gram for good tea for a couple decades now, seeing prices like Tea Dealer’s $240 for 20 grams price for a silver (not gold) medal competition winning Asahi cultivar elicits a level of sticker shock. Fifteen years into my daily matcha habit, these are the highest prices I’ve ever seen.

That’s a 12x increase in what used to be “high” price. The leap from where we are now to today’s cocaine prices is only about 5x from that—and that’s gram to gram. It gets wilder if we go dose to dose.

Others peddlers aren’t far off. Kettl, just this week, posted a price increase explainer alongside a photo of an individual (seasonal picker? full-time farmer? buddy in town who comes over to pick in during harvest season? we don’t know) framed in a way that makes her look, oddly, Nunny. Citing low yields, record prices, high demands and sprinkling 15% tariffs on top, a growing number of Kettl matcha options are dancing around the $100 mark (a hundred dollar bill, look at you, look at you) for 20 grams. At 2 grams a serving, that’s $10 bucks per bowl of usucha if you whip your own work.

Chappy has confirmed that a modest line of cocaine is 0.15 grams—and if a gram on the low end is $60—that’s a $9 a serving of that O.C. white girl for comparison. In this hypothetical, you’d be saving a buck to skip your usucha and use the 80s stock trader, brick phone totter, way to wake up in the morning.

So, yeah, the guys flying the matcha freak flag the highest over at Specialty Matcha HQ, Sam/Zongjun — just like their Kettl predecessors before them—have got it wrong.

This isn’t where wine was in the 1970s. This isn’t third wave coffee before it crashed on global shores. Matcha is not the New Wine. It’s not the New Coffee. It’s the New Cocaine and we are already shaking around doing pirouettes in its disco crystal ball emerald saw-dust snow globe already.

MY LEG WAS PULLED, THE JOKE’S ON ME

So am I warning you? Am I tipping you off? Encouraging you to go get yours before the next drought?

I’ll get to my purpose by the end of this series but for now I’m just here to point out that this is all…hilarious.

Hilarious because I’ve been on a fifteen-year-slow-motion freakout about this. A freakout that saw me languish in Yamomotoyama/Ito En/Aiya/Rishi purgatory for years only to try my first Yame matcha in November 2016 during Tea Master’s opening week in Downtown Los Angeles, proceed—on the strength of the non-repackaged non-downsized non-marked up Seiju alone—to convince Diagoro San to let me annoy people all evening about matcha most Friday nights for 2 years until 2019, eventually culminating in my writing the definitive and psychotic tea guide to Los Angeles for the best damn local news org in SoCal (that should win a Pulitzer for its ICE reportage—including the E.I.C. posting the protest sign of the year: "I only want ICE in my matcha”), and finally to Daigoro San letting me go to Hoshinoseichaen in the first of my Shincha Season commissioned dispatches for Tea Master DTLA.

This freakout only came to a head when a friend called me to ask how to easily explain what’s happening in the matcha situation. He’s a Japan pop cultural expert and was about to sit for a panel and was told he’d be asked about the topic. I’ve watched this drug take hold—and see flashes of the fear and the sex come sliding through the tea room najiriguchi minidoor into the culture’s DMs.

It started with the fear.

That look in Kettl founder Zach Mangan’s eyes when I asked him on a casual visit to his Brooklyn shop in spring 2019 whether the Yame matcha he served me came from Hoshinoseichaen. It sure tasted like it. Is it possible that he was relabeling/renaming/resizing it? I wanted to talk about nitrogen fertilizer. He wasn’t having it. I thought we could be buds—still hope we can my boy! But his ducking my emails after, even the complimentary and correctional ones (like when I told him page 26 of his 2022 book had mislabeled Sanetomo, Japan’s third shogun, as an Emperor, misspelled Minamoto as Monamoto and, egregiously, left out the part that Eisei’s hangover cure pitch happened here in my beloved Kamakura), signaled that his Way of Tea has bent away from my open arms for now.

Then there’s the story I’ve heard now two versions of on the Specialty Matcha Pod about visiting a farmer in that same village of Hoshinomura—perhaps, 倉住星渓園 a smaller producer, just a couple buildings down from Genta San’s legendary pottery kiln—who told them that the matcha shortage made him feel “怖い,” Japanese for afraid. He elaborated to say that the shortage meant some people would never even get to try real matcha as the gap starts to get filled with stepped on product. These farmers, some of whom don’t want the smoke—at least not this kind of it, got the same fear their pushers got.

Peer into the hype-marketed Rocky’s Matcha. How dazzling the ruthlessly rims were damaged on the chakra-cleansed whips when corners got cut on the way down from the Topanga shaman’s house to slingshot this late-to-the-party flu-flammer-chic brand to the top of the unauthorized resale heap. I just know he must have been playin Drakeo (R.I.P to The Ruler).

Literally half of Los Angeles who walked into Tea Master between 2016-2019 tried to coax Daigoro-San’s magical soft serve recipe out of him and get info on his sources. But the jars of Hoshinoen’s matcha were right there in the store. Naïve? Or just unafraid?

We now know that everyone is stealing sources, relabeling, and backstabbing their plugs— but as is the case in the New Cocaine, instead of storming the Tony Montana palaces like Sosa, they smile and shake each other’s hands afterwards, side-mouthing oscillating Tyler The Creator mantras from P.O.V.:

Is it “Call me Mr. Brella how I weather the storm?” or a “I need God to play the lead in my biopic” kind of day?

What—if not the New Cocaine—would make people act in these chameleonic ways?

And you’ll say Dweez, what are you doing, these people have businesses, how are you going to critique their moves. Because, friends, I think what the whole industry needs right now is a morsel of self-awareness about what’s really going on.

You know, honesty. The thing the world never likes to give rappers credit for—but who often keep it realer than we’re ready to hear.

May I present Malice’s last verse in “I’m Not You”—from their debut album, Lord Willin’, back in 2002—call it a statement of honest-intent-to-sell:

But where there's demand, someone will supply

So I feed them their needs, at the same time, cry

Yes, it pains me to see them need this

All of them lost souls and I'm their Jesus

Deepest regret and sympathy to the streets

I seen 'em pay for they fix when they kids couldn't eat (So sorry)

And with this in mind, I still didn't quit

And that's how I know that I ain't shit (I ain't shit)

Ah, yes, honesty. At last. Some sweet honesty. The new secret, remember?

SPENT SUMMERS WITH MY CONNECTS LOVE THAT MOUNTAIN AIR

Getting hot in here, ain’t it?

Yeah, I hear you say, why are you Grilled Dwwezing all these nice salespeople by calling them drug dealers? These are people that have actually been to the source, grown relationships over the years. They have plucked and processed the leaves and posted beautiful photos and 4K videos of their exploits. Most of all, they respect the farmers!

Ah yes. They remind us over and over that this is about the farmers—and yet, they forget the most important thing about the farmers, even as they trip over how many generations deep a grow-crew runs. Because there’s one more reason matcha is impossible. It’s even less-obvious, less-convenient, and far more important…one we’ll get to in Part III of this series.

For now, the honest truth is that these dealers—bless them—are in it for the same reason the brothers Clipse and the Queen were in the dope game: for the dough.

And if players big and small, new and old, in this runaway-from-the-rest-of-the-tea freight train car that is the “matcha industry,” aren’t willing, with the self-aware candor of young Malice to compare themselves to something parallel to fertilizer in this vicious growing cycle, then at least they can admit they are serving fiends and profiting off a culture they don’t understand.

If you don’t want to hear anymore about the thrill or fear or the money, then at least talk about the sex. Go watch Matcha Bae, whose account speaks for itself. Then, there’s the wavvvy/basssed Rave Estate. Let the Soviet straightforwardness poureth over.

So who is it that’s culturally inappropriate here?

The influencers are culturally inappropriate because that’s their job.

The new wave dealers are culturally inappropriate because they’e convinced themselves they’re just selling a product.

The traditional tea practitioners are culturally inappropriate because they don’t often know even the basics of how matcha is produced.

Even the farmers are culturally inappropriate—because, from the best of my knowledge—none of them are playing the Clipse catalog back to back during harvest season (much less playing it at for the plants themselves to keep them company during long night of the shading weeks).

But, here’s the thing: I spot it because I got it.

I’m the most culturally inappropriate one around. I understand matcha the least. Call me the ringleader in this culturally inappropriate circus.

And I can only recommend the lot of us order these Obobu x Gentle Artificats “Matcha Psycho” t-shirts so that we’re at least properly identifying ourselves to the innocent passersby. (*imagines a whole gang of us sipping $12 per bump matcha in silence while rocking our seersucker farmcore jacket with the rows of tea bush lining*).

Hate if you full drawn to it but at least its honest excess.

Take it from me, if you’ve not had a matcha that made you stir a bit below the waste, then you’ve not visited the real N.C. swamp just yet. But before you @ me with virility jokes (matcha is not, as far as I can tell, either of the ‘blue pills’ you have in mind), let’s wipe this black mirror clean.

And don’t worry about wiping the powder off your face before going back out there champ—because we’ve not even gotten into the Clipse non-album cuts yet—because like the N.C. dust dealers playing whack a mole thinking they’re getting one over on us, let the Old Kanye spell it out how it’s possible that even when Nobody Knows, Everybody Nose:

Hundred dollar bills, look at you, look at you

A hundred dollar bills, this ain't new, this ain't new

From that Paris, Lindsay, Britney, Mary-Kate and Whitney

People say that they clean, motherfucker, don't bullshit me!

Of course that’s before Lupe Fiasco—remember him?—asks me in Part I opener retrospect, "How it feel up on this high-rise?"

But let’s let Pusha play us out, almost like he’s got his hand up the back of today’s pinocchio puppet pushas:

All I hear is "Oh, key," every line is "O ki'"

All you rappers okey-dokey

See you next week for Part III!