My matcha latte costs how much?

The matcha drinks at Kin Bakeshop are so popular that some customers wait hours for their fix.

- STEPHANIE YANG

BARISTA Julia Peng sifts matcha powder at Kin Bakeshop, a Santa Barbara cafe experiencing limited supply.

The little Santa Barbara cafe was going through more than 4 pounds of the Japanese tea on its busiest days when it started getting tough to get a reliable supply.

The matcha dealer called in the summer to say that after a decade of importing from Japan, she had been forced to start rationing supply. There was no longer enough of the potent powder for everyone.

Kin Bakeshop found new supplies and hiked its prices, but the customers kept coming, said Tommy Chang, owner of the cafe.

"It’s like the harder that it is to get your hands on it, the more people want it," he said. "They just need their matcha. They'll come here no matter what."

A growing thirst for matcha is roiling a delicate supply chain from Japanese tea farms to California’s cafes. The tea leaves are grown in the shade, specially processed and then stone-ground into the bright green, earthy powder used in drinks and desserts.

As matcha’s bold aesthetic and health benefits have taken social media and consumers by storm, Japanese production is under strain from an aging population and hotter climate. That’s sent prices surging, and businesses scrambling to secure supply.

Exacerbating the problem is the fact that coffee shops are doubling and tripling down on their demand by heaping more matcha in drinks, said Lauren Purvis, who supplies Kin Bakeshop and other local cafes with tea and matcha. Traditionally, she has trained shops to use three grams of matcha in one serving, but recently she said some are using as many as nine grams, a fact that shocked her producers.

"A lot of my producers are like, 'We have never seen a moment like this in the history of Japanese tea," " she said.