Prices collected 28 August 2026 from Kettl’s own listings.
Kettl is a Japanese tea importer with cafés in Brooklyn and Los Angeles and an office in Fukuoka. It sells 45 matcha, from $26 for a small tin to $900 for a kilo, and it is one of the very few shops that tells you who grew every single one.
It is also expensive, and the way it is priced traps a lot of first-time buyers. Here is the short version.
What to buy
| If you want | Buy | Price | Per bowl |
|---|---|---|---|
| The cheapest way in | Soukou, 20 g | $26 | $2.60 |
| To drink it regularly | Kiyona, Suiteki or Shiromatsu, 40 g | $45 | $2.25 |
| The cheapest bowl in the shop | Suiteki, 100 g | $80 | $1.60 |
| A named single cultivar | Okuju, 30 g | $45 | $3.00 |
A bowl is about 2 g, so a 40 g tin is twenty bowls.
The one thing to know before you buy: Kettl’s house format is a 20 g tin, and 20 g tins are the most expensive way to buy anything here. The same shop’s 40 g tins cost about half as much per bowl, and its 100 g bags about a third. If you are buying to drink rather than to try, skip the little tins.
The 20 g trap
Kettl sells the same matcha in several sizes, and the size changes the price far more than most people expect.
| Size | Typical cost per bowl |
|---|---|
| 20 g tin | $4.50 |
| 30 g tin | $3.00 |
| 40 g tin | $2.25 |
| 100 g bag | $1.75 |
That is the same shop, often the same tea. A 20 g tin is a tasting sample priced like one.
The little tins are also where the range is widest — from $2.60 to $15.00 a bowl. If you have seen a screenshot of a Kettl price and been shocked, it was almost certainly a 20 g tin.
Only one tea is sold in three sizes you can actually buy as a customer. Suiteki costs $2.25 a bowl in the 40 g tin, $1.60 in the 100 g bag, and $1.30 by the kilo — so the step from a small tin to a bag is where nearly all the saving is.
Should you buy the kilo? Probably not. Moving from a 40 g tin to a 100 g bag already gets you most of the saving. The kilo takes another 19% off, and it is a kilo of matcha to get through before it goes stale.
Why it costs what it costs
Kettl publishes the auction prices it pays for first-flush Kyoto tencha, the leaf that becomes matcha:
| Year | Auction average |
|---|---|
| 2024 | ¥5,402 / kg |
| 2025 | ¥14,541 / kg |
| 2026 (Kettl’s estimate) | ~¥23,000 / kg |
The leaf roughly tripled in two years. That is the matcha boom arriving at the farm gate, and every importer is dealing with it.
You can see it land on the shelf. Comparing Kettl’s prices now against the last archived version of each page:
| Tea | Then | Today | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hukuju, 1 kg | $375 | $600 | +60% |
| Uji Homare, 1 kg | $400 | $600 | +50% |
| Uji Homare, 100 g | $65 | $85 | +31% |
| Soukou, 20 g | $21 | $26 | +24% |
| Kiyona, 40 g | $38 | $45 | +18% |
The bulk sizes moved most, which is what you would expect if the cost of leaf is what is driving it.
Soukou is the one we can follow furthest back. It has been on the shelf since 2019:
| Price (20 g) | |
|---|---|
| 2019 – 2020 | $18.00 |
| 2020 – 2024 | $19.75 |
| 2024 – 2025 | $21.00 |
| 2025 – today | $26.00 |
Flat for five years, then up 24% in one.
What Kettl tells you that most shops don’t
This is the real reason to buy here rather than somewhere cheaper.
Every one of Kettl’s 45 matcha lists:
- the growing area
- the cultivar
- the production year
And 40 of the 45 name the person or family who grew it — Shinya Yamaguchi, Yasuharu Maeno, the Koyama family, the Tsuji family, and a dozen more.
Almost no other shop does this. Most matcha in the US is sold with a grade word and an adjective. If you care about knowing what is actually in the tin, that is what the price premium is buying.
One thing it does not buy you: a quality ladder. Within a single grower’s range, Kettl’s prices move more than threefold. The price is not telling you which of that grower’s teas is better — the descriptions are.
No “ceremonial grade” here
Kettl does not use the words “ceremonial” or “culinary” at all. It uses the Japanese distinction instead: usucha (thin tea, whisked with more water, the everyday bowl) and koicha (thick tea, a paste, for a formal serving).
That is a more useful label than “ceremonial,” which means nothing in particular and is not a Japanese classification at all.
What we can’t tell you
Nobody here has tasted it — Kettl does not ship to where this was written, so this page is about what the tins cost and what the labels say, not how the tea tastes.
Drinkers are divided. One Reddit thread argues the pricing is fair for the growers involved; a newer one is titled “Disappointed with Kettl.” We are pointing at both rather than picking one.
Which one should you actually buy?
If you are trying Kettl for the first time: Soukou, 20 g, $26. It is the lowest ticket price in the shop, from a named grower in Yame, and it has been on the shelf since 2019.
If you already drink matcha daily: any of the three 40 g tins at $45 — Kiyona, Suiteki or Shiromatsu. At $2.25 a bowl they cost 13% less than Soukou and give you twice as much tea.
If you want a single cultivar you can look up: seven do. Okuju, 30 g for $45, is the cheapest at $3.00 a bowl; Sakamoto’s Organic Saemidori and Tsuchiyama are next at 20 g for $38.
If you are stocking up: Suiteki’s 100 g bag at $80 is $1.60 a bowl, the cheapest sensible quantity in the shop. The kilo saves another 19% and costs $650.
Questions people ask
Why is Kettl matcha so expensive?
Two reasons. The leaf itself roughly tripled at auction between 2024 and 2026. And Kettl’s house format is a 20 g tin, which is the most expensive way to buy matcha anywhere. Buy the same shop in 40 g or 100 g and you pay half or a third as much per bowl.
Is Kettl matcha worth it?
We haven’t tasted it, so we can’t answer that part. What you can check is what you’re paying for: a named grower on 40 of 45 tins, and the area, cultivar and harvest year on all 45. Almost nobody else publishes that.
Which Kettl matcha is best?
No price list can answer that — within one grower’s range the price moves more than threefold. What we can tell you is which is cheapest per bowl in each size, and that’s above.
Is Kettl matcha ceremonial grade?
Kettl doesn’t use that term. It labels tins usucha or koicha instead, which is the actual Japanese distinction.
Where should I start if matcha is new to me?
Read what a gram of matcha costs across the market first, then come back. Kettl sits at the expensive end, and it helps to know what the middle looks like. Our matcha brands comparison lines Kettl up against eleven other shops — it has the highest ceiling of the twelve.
Kettl lists 183 products; 45 of them are matcha, sold in 53 different sizes. Per-bowl figures use 2 g, a standard bowl. Prices are Kettl’s own list prices, read from its product pages on 28 August 2026; the “then” prices come from archived copies of the same pages.
No brand paid to appear here, and this page carries no affiliate links.