Many of us get out of bed just to be able to savour our first cup of coffee. Whether it's a professionally pulled flat white in your local café, or a quick espresso at home before heading out the door, coffee has become for a lot of people as firm a fixture as brushing your teeth in the morning.
But that reinvigorating drink can come with some less enjoyable side effects, from sharp energy spikes and dreaded afternoon crashes, to disrupting your sleep and even causing headaches or stomach upset, depending on your sensitivity levels.
So it's unsurprising that matcha has emerged as an alternative to coffee.
According to experts, around 400mg of caffeine per day is safe for adults, with the average espresso clocking in at roughly 63mg. Matcha, on the other hand, can have between 38mg and 89mg caffeine, according to Harvard Health.
The difference, however, is how that caffeine is released.
Elaine Fitzsimons, founder of The Matcha Bar in Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, says she was partially drawn to the drink because it didn't give her the same sharp changes in mood as coffee.
"I can kind of feel a bit angry sometimes when I have coffee, my mood kind of goes weird whereas with matcha I don't get that", she said, speaking at TikTok's 2025 Trend Forecast event in Dublin today. "Even now in the cafe we get a lot of people coming in saying they're trying to get off coffee and they want to switch to something else."
She added: "It's not necessarily that it has less caffeine but its effects are different and it's a slower release.
"Matcha, for one, is packed with antioxidants and it has a compound called L-theanine in it that gives you a kind of relaxing effect, and it sustains the release of caffeine over four to six hours, whereas with coffee you might get a spike in the first hour or two, and then you have that crash. With matcha, you don't get that at all.
"From a functional point of view, it's a much more sustainable drink to be drinking. It's blown up on the Internet, it's blown up on TikTok for aesthetic purposes as well. It's pretty, it's green, you mix it with different colours and I think that's really helped to raise awareness around the drink."
Fitzsimon is one of the few business owners capitalising on the beverage's popularity in Ireland in recent months, and documented the creation of her matcha cafe on TikTok. There, she took followers through every step of the process, from designing the cafe and buying in materials, to recipe testing and launch day itself.
On the first day of business, queues snaked through Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, with scores of matcha lovers eager to get their hands on her creations. Since then, the cafe has gone from strength to strength, doling out ever more creative and delicious takes on the drink, from strawberry, pistachio and mango lattes to a comforting blue matcha made with vanilla, cinnamon and spirulina.
Some creations, although delicious, haven't made it to the cafe as Fitzsimons insists on using only fresh ingredients and natural sweeteners, which meant that a banana bread matcha recipe wasn't to be. A black sesame matcha latte, however, might be coming to a takeaway cup near you soon.
As for making matcha at home, Fitzsimon shared her top tips:
"Get yourself a good whisk, and when you are making the matcha play around with different quantities that you like depending on how strong you like it, because cups at home are different to cups in cafes. Make sure to not boiling water on it. You use 70 degree water, otherwise you'll scorch the powder."
