The matcha wave has been sweeping the UK for years now and even we, as the founders of a maté brand, did not remain entirely unaffected. One of us enthusiastically joins every new matcha latte craze going on and the other has to wait at the corner of the block for the queue to finally move along.
That feels like the right starting point for a comparison.
The Matcha Moment
Adele discovered matcha in the early 2010s, before it was everywhere, before every café in London had a matcha latte on the board. There is a particular pleasure that comes with being an early adopter. You saw it first. You understood it before it needed explaining. And then one day those same people were queuing outside a café for a matcha soft serve and sending you photographs as though the discovery was theirs. It is not smugness. It is the satisfaction of having paid attention at the right moment.
This is exactly the feeling we are trying to create with Matelo. Not about matcha, but about maté. To find the people in the UK who are curious enough and open enough to discover maté before it becomes obvious. The people who will recommend it to friends who look at them blankly and then, a few years from now, will be sending photographs from a maté bar in Shoreditch as though they found it themselves.
If you are reading this now, you might be one of those people. We hope you are.
Matcha works best in specific moments. In a café that takes it seriously, where the preparation is careful and the quality of the powder actually matters — some of which we wrote about in our favourite inedependent cafes post. When a coffee would overwhelm the palate and something gentler is needed. Or simply as a treat, a small considered pleasure that does not feel like an indulgence you will regret.
These are real reasons to drink matcha. They deserve to be taken seriously.
Matcha Benefits: What the Science Actually Says
Matcha is ground green tea, specifically tencha leaves, shade-grown to increase chlorophyll and L-theanine, then stone-ground into a fine powder. Unlike a cup of brewed green tea where the leaves are steeped and discarded, with matcha you consume the entire leaf. This matters because the concentration of both caffeine and L-theanine is significantly higher.
L-theanine is the compound that gives matcha its reputation for calm focus. It moderates the caffeine response, softening the spike and extending the duration. The result is alert without anxious, focused without jittery. If that sounds familiar, it is because maté works in a very similar way and we wrote about exactly why in our piece on the no jitters promise.
This is why matcha and maté are often mentioned in the same breath. Both deliver caffeine alongside compounds that moderate its effect. Both have cultural histories that predate their current moment of global popularity by centuries. Both attract people who have found coffee too much and are looking for something that does not overwhelm.
Yerba Maté Benefits: The Science Behind the Calm Energy
Yerba maté comes from the Ilex paraguariensis plant, native to the subtropical forests of South America. The Guarani people were drinking it long before the Spanish arrived, long before it spread to Argentina and Uruguay and Paraguay and Central Europe and eventually, slowly, to a can in the UK. If you want to understand where that journey started for us, you can read the full story of where Matelo began.
Like matcha, it contains caffeine alongside moderating compounds. In maté's case the key companion is theobromine, also found in cacao, which softens the adrenal response and extends the energy curve. The caffeine content in a can of Matelo, 96mg, is similar to a strong coffee and significantly more than most matcha preparations.
The flavour is earthier, drier, more savoury. Less ceremonial in its preparation, more social in its tradition. Where matcha has the tea ceremony, maté has the gourd passed between people in the afternoon.
Matcha vs Yerba Maté: Flavour, Caffeine and Occasion
Flavour. Matcha is vegetal and slightly sweet, with an umami depth that sits in the same green, grassy register as a really good herbal gin and tonic with cucumber or a fresh herbal cordial. Maté is earthier and drier, with a clean bitter finish that sits closer to a Negroni or a well-pulled espresso with no milk. They are not similar drinks that happen to share cultural cachet. They taste genuinely different and appeal to different palates at different moments.
Caffeine. A traditional matcha preparation contains roughly 40 to 70mg of caffeine depending on the grade and the amount used. A can of Matelo contains 96mg. If you want a lighter lift, matcha. If you want something closer to coffee's energy without coffee's edge, maté.
Occasion. This is where the real difference lies. Matcha works beautifully in the morning or as a considered midday moment. A matcha latte is a treat as much as it is a caffeine delivery mechanism. Maté belongs to the afternoon. The longer, slower, more sustained part of the day.
Preparation and ceremony. If you drink maté in its traditional form, there is a whole world that comes with it. The gourd, the bombilla, the specific angle of the leaves, the temperature of the water, the order in which you pass it. It is a ceremony in its own right but a rugged and social one, born from the grasslands of South America, from gauchos and shared afternoons and the kind of ritual that does not require precision so much as presence.
Matcha has its own ceremony and it could not be more different. The bamboo whisk, the ceramic bowl, the measured grams, the careful temperature. Japanese precision distilled into a single cup. It is meditative, controlled, exact. Beautiful in its own way but asking something quite different of the person making it.
Both ceremonies reflect the cultures that created them. Japanese craftsmanship and attention to detail on one side. South American warmth, communality and a certain beautiful disregard for over-engineering on the other. The drinks taste like where they come from.
For those of us who want maté without the ceremony, a can of Matelo asks nothing of you except the decision to open it.
The Chemistry of Calm Focus
Both drinks deliver calm, sustained focus rather than a caffeine spike. But the reason is different.
Matcha contains L-theanine, an amino acid that promotes relaxed alertness and moderates caffeine's effect on the nervous system. It slows the adrenal response, which is why matcha drinkers describe a smooth, focused energy rather than a jolt.
Yerba maté contains theobromine, an alkaloid also found in cacao. Theobromine works differently from L-theanine — it dilates blood vessels, relaxes smooth muscle and produces a gentler, longer-lasting stimulation. The subjective experience is similar but the mechanism is entirely its own.
Neither drink is simply caffeine. Both have a compound that changes how that caffeine lands. That is why both sit in a different category from coffee — and why they feel different from each other despite arriving at a similar place.
How Each Drink Is Made
The production philosophies are almost opposite.
Matcha is shade-grown green tea, harvested young, dried and ground to a fine powder. When you make matcha you whisk the powder directly into water and consume the whole leaf. Nothing is discarded.
Yerba maté is harvested from a different plant entirely — Ilex paraguariensis, native to the subtropical forests of South America. The leaves are dried, sometimes smoked, aged and then steeped. The liquid is extracted and the leaves are left behind. You drink what the plant gives up, not the plant itself.
This distinction matters more than it might seem. Matcha's flavour comes from consuming the whole leaf, which is why it tastes grassy and turns the water green. Maté's flavour comes from extraction, which is why it tastes earthy and dry with a clean finish.
Chimarrão, the Brazilian green maté, sits closest to matcha in character. Made from younger, unsmoked leaves, it is lighter and more vegetal than the aged Argentine style. If you already drink matcha and have never tried chimarrão, it is the natural bridge between the two drinks.
Matcha or Maté: Finding Your Moment
Adele will continue to order matcha in cafés that do it well. That is not changing. The early adopter pride has softened into genuine appreciation and the specific moments matcha serves are real and not going away.
But maté and matcha are not in competition in the way maté and coffee are. They occupy different occasions, different moods, different parts of the day. You do not choose between them the way you choose between coffee and maté. You find the moment that belongs to each.
If you are already a matcha drinker you probably already understand the pleasure of a drink with cultural depth and considered energy. Maté is the next chapter of that same curiosity. The drink the world knew about centuries before you did. The drink that is only now arriving in the UK in the register it deserves.
And just like matcha in the early 2010s, the people who find it now will one day have a story about how they got there first.
Which, if you are anything like Adele, might be exactly the kind of thing worth discovering.
Our earlier piece on yerba maté vs coffee covers that comparison in full. And if you are ready to try maté for yourself, you know where we are.
Know Your Maté is Matelo's series on the science, culture and history of yerba maté. Matelo. Steeped in Culture.