Matcha Sunrise @ Katzentempel
I'm back with another store report! As said in previous reviews, these are more about the drink experience than the matcha powder itself, since lots of other things are combined in the drink :)
General Info
The Katzentempel is a cat cafe franchise in Germany with a ton of different shops all over the country with a fully vegan selection. I haven't been there in a while and they changed their menu a bit, including this drink! It's iced matcha with spirulina, mango ice cream and vegan whipped cream.
The drink is obviously supposed to remind you of a sunrise with a blue sky and the mango as the sun :) I have a bit of an aversion to consuming blue food (not naturally blue-ish food like blueberries, but artificially blue stuff) but I got over myself for this!
Taste
The spirulina has no taste and is just there for color and the supposed superfood health benefits, as is the matcha, I think. The matcha taste is not super pronounced; not very grassy, not super bitter, and generally fine together with the rest. No umami, just a generally creamy and soft mouthfeel and a fruity sweetness due to the slowly dissolving mango ice cream and whipped cream in it. Maybe a hint of mint. It is unassuming and mild. Reminds me of the Starbucks Lavender Matcha but with mango instead. The combination works well!
I would say though that the matcha is not nearly intense tasting as the Starbucks one, sadly. It's more subtle and easily overshadowed my the added sweetness. Could be due to the powder itself or the amount of powder used.
The liquid portion is empty pretty quickly, just a few sips, and then you are left with just ice, ice cream, and whipped cream - extremely rich and sweet! The cream does taste awesome, but is a little too much for me. The second time I had it (2 days later), I ordered it without the whipped cream and that was better for me.
To find out more about the matcha itself that they use, I also ordered a normal iced matcha latte with oat milk for comparison, so there are less factors distorting the taste. I was just wondering how much the ice cream, whipped cream and maybe even spirulina powder were covering up potential issues with the matcha.
Drinking this, I found their matcha powder isn't great. You can tell it is fresh and has a good enough color, but it tastes very cheap and low quality on its own. It's very bitter, grassy, and a bit coarse and clumpy. It's visible it is not old or oxidized, but it could have a more vibrant, intense, deeper green color. It looks a bit washed out.
Conclusion
The drink looks pretty, is fun, something new and mango and matcha surprisingly go well together. But it is very little actual matcha experience and can be overly sweet and too rich for some. They could use a more vibrant, darker, higher quality matcha to make it pop more visually and taste-wise and elevate both the Matcha Sunrise and their other matcha drinks alike. I would order it again for fun (without whipped cream), but it's not that great of a matcha drink.
๐ต๐ต๐ต 3 out of 5 matcha bowls.