There’s a premium matcha version of Japan’s favorite cheap chocolate cookie snack, and we need to know if it offers anything the standard one doesn’t.

Black Thunder is one of Japan’s favorite brands of chocolate snacks, consisting of a cocoa cookie with plain biscuit bits inside and covered in chocolate. It’s not only one of Japan’s most constantly satisfying sweet treats, but one of its cheapest too…but Black Thunder isn’t always black, or even a dark chocolatey brown in color.

Depending on what part of Japan you’re in, you can find unique regional flavors too. So in Kyoto, you can find green Black Thunder with a matcha flavor, tapping into the local tea culture. But on one of our recent visits to the city, we were surprised to see that Kyoto also has a special gold-box Black Thunder, which it turns out is green tea-flavored too.

Officially, the green-box Black Thunder is called “Kyoto Black Thunder” and the gold-box version, which just made its debut a few months ago, is “Kyoto Black Thunder Koicha.” Cha is the Japanese word for “tea,” and koi describes something with a deep or robust flavor, so you could think of Kyoto Black Thunder Koicha as “Kyoto Black Thunder Strong Matcha,” and sure enough, the company says that every piece of Koicha Black Thunder uses 2.6 times as much matcha as the standard green tea Black Thunder does.

▼ The Koicha has matcha chocolate chips inside…

▼ …while the standard matcha Black Thunder does not.

However, that extra matcha comes at a price. A 20-piece box of Kyoto Black Thunder will cost you 1,452 yen (US$9.80), while Kyoto Black Thunder Koicha comes in a box of eight for 1,296 yen. That means the strong-matcha version is more than twice as expensive as the regular Kyoto Black Thunder, so is it worth the extra cost?

There was only one way to find out.

Procuring a box of each, once we were back home we opened them up for a head-to-head taste test.

▼ With its motif of shoji sliding paper door patterns and tea leaves, the standard Kyoto Black Thunder wrapper actually signals its marquee ingredient more clearly, but the premium-priced Kyoto Black Thunder Koicha’s does look fancier.

We tore open the wrappers, and even if we hadn’t known ahead of time that the Koicha uses more matcha, it would have been easy to deduce from how much deeper its shade of green is.

The difference in color was so pronounced that we wondered if maybe all that extra matcha might have made it heavier too, but when we weighed them, the difference was negligible, with the standard matcha Black Thunder coming in at 13 grams (0.46 ounces) and the Koicha just one gram more, 14.

We started with the standard Kyoto Black Thunder, and it was everything we’d expected it would be. As a brand, Black Thunder is all about straightforward deliciousness, and the matcha version doesn’t make any attempts at misdirection in its flavor profile. You get the sugary sweetness of the chocolate, a solid crunch with just the right little touch of airiness, and some surprisingly strong green tea notes. It’s not going to surprise anyone, but it’ll satisfy just about anyone who has any sort of fondness for matcha.

And the Koicha? Take what we said about the regular matcha Black Thunder and double it, or maybe we should say multiply it by 2.6 times. The addition of the matcha chips inside actually doesn’t change the texture to any significant degree, and the chocolate parts are as tasty as ever, but now with an intense matcha sensation accompanying them.

So which will we be buying on our next trip to Kyoto? That depends who we’re buying them for. We’re confident that the standard Kyoto Black Thunder’s flavor is such a people-pleaser that it’ll put a nice smile on the face of any friends, family, or coworkers who you give it to as a souvenir, and it’s not at all lacking in matcha-flavor. On the other hand, if we’re shopping for a souvenir for a hard-core matcha sweets enthusiast, say, maybe ourselves? Then we’ll be happy to splurge for the Kyoto Black Thunder Koicha.

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