Q&A: Otto Boyer

“WHISKING THE MATCHA IS ALMOST LIKE A MOMENT OF BLOOMING, WHEN THE FLAVOUR COMES OUT IN ITS TRUEST FORM”

Interview: Mark Riddaway

It was while growing up in Hong Kong that Otto Boyer first discovered matcha. “We spent a lot of time visiting Japan,” he explains. “My parents had lived out there and my dad speaks Japanese.” Matcha – an energising beverage with a vivid pea-green colour – has for hundreds of years been deeply embedded in Japanese culture. Having fallen in love with the drink, Otto struggled with its relative scarcity in London. “Over here, I wanted to have matcha as an option in my day-to-day routine, but it was so hard to find.”

His solution to this problem was certainly a robust one: co-founding a business that imports single origin matcha from Uji, close to the historic Japanese city of Kyoto, and sells it through four London-based matcha bars, the newest of which, Whisk by JENKI, opened in Borough Market in 2024. “My wife Claudia and I set up JENKI about five years ago,” says Otto. “We weren’t married at the time, and it felt like a big gamble. We knew that either our relationship wouldn’t survive, or the business wouldn’t survive, or that both would be great.” Thankfully for them – and for the London’s growing ranks of matcha afficionados – it’s very much the latter.

Let’s start with the basics. What is matcha?

In simple terms, matcha is very finely ground green tea leaves. With other types of tea, you’re typically steeping the leaves before discarding them completely and drinking what’s left behind. With matcha, you’re ingesting the whole of the tea leaf. Matcha can be made elsewhere around the world but the best matcha is made in Japan, using a method developed over hundreds of years. It’s the same plant used for other teas – the Camellia sinensis plant – but you’re only picking the smallest, sweetest, most succulent leaves at the top. You’re steaming, drying, deveining and de-stemming the tea leaf itself, then grinding it into an ultra-fine powder using traditional stone mills. It takes an hour to manufacture 30 grams of matcha, so it’s a time-intensive process.

Is all matcha made that way?

No, there’s a huge range of quality. A lot of what is sold as matcha on the high street is made in China using methods that aren’t even close to the traditional Japanese production process – it’s really just ground-up green tea. It ends up being this muddy brown product, with quite an earthy, bitter taste. What we’re trying to do is educate the London consumer as to what quality matcha can taste like. We sell what is commonly referred to as ceremonial-grade matcha – the highest grade – but even within that bracket there’s a lot of variation. A matcha sourced from Uji will taste quite different to a matcha sourced down in Kagoshima, which has a more tropical climate and different soils. Every producer has their own tea master, whose job it is to blend the tea to create the flavour profile they’re looking for. It’s a true artform.

How would you characterise the profile of the matcha you sell?

It’s very approachable – mellow and smooth with sweet, nutty and slightly umami notes. We’ve purposefully chosen one that isn’t too bitter and punchy so that it’s accessible to a matcha newbie. When we first started JENKI, we toured around a lot of different farms trying to find the ideal supplier. We wanted a family-run farm that was still using very traditional methods, milling the matcha using stone mills. We love that we’re championing that sense of heritage, but mostly it’s about the quality – modern machines simply can’t create the same texture. We’ve never found a matcha that can compare to how smooth and mellow ours is.

As an energising drink, how does matcha compare with coffee?

I’ve been an avid coffee drinker in the past, but I can’t drink coffee after lunchtime. Matcha has a different concentration of caffeine and contains a compound called L-theanine which acts as a caffeine uptake regulator. So, instead of a sharp jittery spike followed by a crash that makes you think you need another coffee, matcha offers five or six hours of caffeinated energy with a very gradual uplift and a very slow tapering off. It’s longer lasting, but that gradual uplift will give you a calmer, more focused energy. When we started in 2021 with our first bar in Spitalfields, we also served coffee as a way of pulling people in. We’d then ambush them with a crash course in what matcha was and why they should try it. Pretty soon, we were able to ditch the coffee and people kept coming back for the matcha.

While the matcha you use is produced in an age-old way, your menu is far broader and more creative than you’d find in a traditional Japanese tea house. What’s your thinking?

Part of what we’re trying to do is make matcha a little more accessible to people who are used to drinking coffee. The traditional Japanese style, just matcha with water, we call a ‘matchacano’. We have matcha lattes and a ‘flat green’, which is basically a flat white with matcha. Most of the products we sell are straight-up matchas, but we’re also trying to appeal to a younger generation who want sweetness, colour and creativity and are interested in health benefits, hence our shakes, syrups and boosts.

You hand whisk every single order. What does that involve?

The traditional way to prepare matcha is with a bamboo whisk in a bowl with warm water – not boiling water, as that will burn it. Whisking releases the full flavour within – it’s almost like a moment of blooming, when the flavour comes out in its truest form. You’ve got to work it quite vigorously, resulting in a foamy solution full of bubbles, with no lumps anywhere. Some bars will prepare their matcha in batches in a blender, but it’s just not the same. We insist on doing it to order.

How did you go about establishing your business?

Claudia and I started by doing some small pop-ups in markets. We did our first one in Brick Lane, which was a disaster – we were there on a Saturday morning with a health product, and everybody else was there looking for greasy hangover cures. That was an eye-opener. We then did a pop-up in Old Street station the week before Covid arrived. Covid was a time where we could really focus on what our offering should be. We opened our first bar in July 2021. We didn’t have any employees apart from me, Claudia and my younger brother. I think we did four and a half months behind the bar, seven days a week straight. We’re in a very different place now. We’ve got nearly 80 people in the team, working across four bars. We’ve now got two identical twins as well, so there’s a lot going on!

As you grow, what kind of employer do you want to be?

Actually, the process of onboarding with Borough Market was really interesting, as the questions they asked made us really think about the standards we want to uphold as employers. Paying the London Living Wage, as an example, is really important to us. Building a work culture we can be proud of is also really important. We want people to enjoy coming to work. Ensuring we find ways of continuing to make that happen is probably one of the most satisfying parts of growing a business.