Vytautas Butkus

Vytautas Butkus is a Japanese tea culture researcher and the matcha lead at Popcha. He first encountered matcha in 2019 during a research exchange in Kyoto - what began as an interest in Japanese aesthetics turned into a long study of the people who grow and stone-mill tea for a living.

He now spends part of every year in Japan, most recently in Uji and Nishio, meeting the small producers Popcha works with. Vytautas writes the Popcha journal to translate what he learns on those trips into something useful for European matcha drinkers: which farms matter, why grade names mean different things in Europe than in Japan, and how to brew a cup that tastes the way it's supposed to.

Based in Amsterdam. Drinks 2–3 bowls a day, usually a Samidori or Okumidori cultivar, 1.5 g whisked with 70 ml of water at 75 °C. Equally annoyed by superfood marketing and by the dismissive "it's just green powder" take that misses what makes matcha actually interesting.