What Is Hojicha? And Why Matcha Drinkers Are Switching
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Hojicha is a roasted Japanese green tea made from the same plant as matcha, but roasted at high heat instead of shade-grown and ground. The roasting turns the leaf reddish-brown and gives it a warm, toasty, caramel flavour with almost no bitterness and very little caffeine.
- Caffeine: roughly 7 to 18mg per cup, versus 60 to 70mg for matcha.
- Flavour: toasty, nutty, caramel-like, closer to roasted coffee than green tea.
- Origin: 1920s Kyoto, born from roasting leaves that would otherwise go to waste.
Look at a specialty cafe menu in 2026 and you'll see it next to the matcha: a reddish-brown latte that smells like caramel and toasted grain. That's hojicha, and it's spreading fast. Global search interest in the tea has climbed 54.6 percent since early 2025. Searches for "hojicha latte" specifically are up 173 percent over the same window.[1]
We source hojicha from the same farms we buy matcha from, in Uji, Yame, and Shizuoka. Below is what the tea actually is, why the roasting process changes everything about it, and why so many of our matcha customers now keep a tin of both on the counter.
Hojicha (焙じ茶, pronounced hoh-JEE-cha) is a roasted Japanese green tea. It comes from Camellia sinensis, the same plant used to make matcha, sencha, and nearly every other true tea. The plant isn't what sets hojicha apart. The processing is.
Most Japanese green teas, matcha included, get steamed right after picking to lock in their colour and stop oxidation. Hojicha skips that path entirely. Producers roast the leaves at high temperature, usually around 200°C, in a drum roaster. That heat rewrites the leaf's chlorophyll and catechins into a different set of aromatic compounds. The green disappears. In its place: a deep reddish-brown leaf and a flavour that shares almost nothing with where it started.
Roast green tea instead of steaming it, and you get hojicha. Same leaf. New tea.
The story behind hojicha explains its character better than any tasting note could. In 1920s Kyoto, a tea merchant sat on a surplus of unsold bancha: the coarser, later-harvest leaves, stems, and twigs left over once the finer teas had been processed. He roasted the lot over charcoal instead of throwing it out.[2]
What came out of that roaster was nothing like the leaves that went in. Material once considered second-rate turned into a smooth, aromatic, reddish-brown tea with almost no bitterness. The merchant's logic traces back to mottainai, the Japanese principle that nothing with value should go to waste. A hundred years on, hojicha is still a household staple across Japan, and that resourceful, no-fuss origin is baked into how people drink it today: casually, daily, without ceremony.
Both teas start on the same farms, sometimes the same hillside. Here's where they part ways.
- Process: shade-grown, steamed, stone-ground
- Colour: vivid green
- Flavour: vegetal, umami, grassy
- Caffeine: ~60 to 70mg per serve
- Best for: mornings, focus, energy
- Process: harvested, roasted at high heat
- Colour: reddish-brown
- Flavour: toasty, nutty, caramel
- Caffeine: ~7 to 18mg per cup
- Best for: afternoons, evenings, winding down
With matcha, you drink the whole ground leaf, so you get everything in it: chlorophyll, caffeine, the full L-theanine load. With hojicha, you're drinking a steeped or whisked liquor, and roasting has already burned off most of the caffeine before it reaches your cup. Same source plant, two different deliveries into your body.
Talk to a regular matcha drinker who's picked up hojicha and you rarely hear "I switched." You hear "I added it." The two teas sit at different points in the day, so one doesn't crowd out the other.
Hojicha fills the hours matcha was never built for: the 3pm slump, the after-dinner cup, the nights you want ritual without stimulation.
A cup of hojicha carries roughly 7 to 18mg of caffeine. Matcha runs 60 to 70mg per serving. Coffee starts around 95mg and climbs from there.[3] That gap is why hojicha has taken off as fast as it has.
Two things drive the difference. Hojicha usually starts as bancha or kukicha, mature leaves and stems picked later in the season, and those naturally hold less caffeine than the young, shade-grown buds that go into matcha. Then the roasting takes another chunk out. What's left is gentle enough that Japanese hospitals have poured it for patients for decades, and parents have poured it for kids.
Come to hojicha from matcha and the first sip will catch you off guard. Matcha is vegetal, umami-heavy, grassy. Hojicha tastes like toasted grain, caramel, a light-roast coffee, nothing like the green tea it was three weeks earlier on the bush. Roasting strips out nearly all the bitterness, so you don't need sugar to make this taste good.
It takes to milk naturally. Whisk it into a latte and it turns a soft caramel-brown, pairs well with oat or dairy, and tastes indulgent without any added sweetness. For the exact method, see our how to make a hojicha latte guide.
Start with a latte. Then try all three regions, because they don't taste the same. We carry single-region hojicha from three growing areas in Japan, each roasted with its own character.
Refined, gently sweet
Bold, deeply roasted
Balanced, everyday
Not sure where to start? Our hojicha latte recipe covers the exact ratio, hot and iced, and how the three regions compare in the cup.
Same farms, same sourcing standards we hold for matcha, now roasted into a warm, low-caffeine tea for the hours matcha doesn't cover.
Shop the Hojicha Range- Google Trends / trade press coverage (2025–2026): global search interest in "hojicha" and "hojicha latte" growth figures, as reported across multiple 2026 food and drink trend analyses.
- Traditional Japanese tea history sources: the 1920s Kyoto origin of hojicha and its roots in mottainai, as documented across established Japanese tea retailers and tea history references.
- Comparative caffeine content: caffeine ranges for hojicha, matcha, and coffee as reported across multiple Japanese tea specialists and nutrition sources. Individual results vary by leaf, brewing method, and serving size.
