Deconstructing Matcha's Flavor

 

Ryan Ahn (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Specialty matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan and this is my co -host Zongjun

Zongjun (Sam) Li (00:05)
Hello, hello.

Ryan Ahn (00:07)
and we're the co -founders of Sanko Matcha Products.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (00:10)
Yeah, so we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha sharing some startup stories and interview experts.

Ryan Ahn (00:18)
Yeah, and today we're going to talk about deconstructing matcha's flavor. How do we describe what we're tasting? How do other people describe what we're tasting? And what are different theories and tools we can layer on to better understand not only how to taste, but how others taste and how different methods of tasting can be helpful in different ways.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (00:41)
and essentially how human being understands flavor and communicate our inner understanding of certain things, which is actually, I don't know if it will ever be correctly communicated across languages or even within languages.

Ryan Ahn (01:01)
Yeah, it's a very abstract thing. I mean, flavor is one of those things that's literally going inside your own head. I can't exactly tell exactly what it is you're tasting. It's not like we take a photograph of something and we can both look at the photograph and we can both, we're both seeing the same picture and we can probably use relatively similar language to describe it. The same might not be true for flavor at all.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (01:21)
Yeah.

Yeah, it's much less tangible than describing color or describing sounds. Flavor, smells are just actually very, very abstract.

Ryan Ahn (01:39)
Yeah, indeed. And therefore, there's a lot of different techniques for tasting. So to give a little bit of backstory, both Zongjun and I have worked in product development before, and in our previous position did a lot of work in sensory analysis. So the science of taste, and then applying machine learning and artificial intelligence models on top of it to better make sense of it. But there's many different types of tasting and many different types of quote unquote professional tasters.

And it's unfortunately, I'm kind of embarrassed by it. At one time, Professional Taster was written on my business card. So it is a title I have held professionally. But there's many different types. And they can have their different specialties. And ours was more specifically for formulated products, like any of the sodas or...

Zongjun (Sam) Li (02:16)
haha

Ryan Ahn (02:31)
highly processed foods mostly. But you can easily take very similar theories and methodologies of tasting and put them on other product categories. people who make that transfer might not have as much experience in any one of those categories. So they might not be quite as descriptive in being able to really nitpick the subtlety and nuances within a product.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (02:53)
Yeah, so Ryan, what do you think are some of the common types of tasting?

Ryan Ahn (02:59)
Yeah, so there's many different types. So if anyone's really familiar with the wine world or you watched like the Netflix documentary Somme, where there's people taking a master sommelier test and there's tons of blind tasting, you know, they take a wine glass, they swirl it around, they smell, they say a bunch of flavors, colors, the acidity, and start rattling off all these things and they say, oh, okay, I think this is a Chardonnay from California, blah, blah, blah. And that's deductive tasting.

Let's be able to taste a bunch of flavors and have a knowledge structure in your head where you can use deductive logic to say, okay, based on my other tasting experience that I have and my knowledge about these products, this is probably what it's for. And those people are highly trained in deductive tasting, to be able to taste something blind and know what it is. That is a very specific skill set.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (03:51)
Yeah, it's very different from, you know, plain descriptive tasting. You know, you're just trying to describe the flavors that you can taste instead of, you know, in deductive tasting, you are actually tasting information. You are tasting the implications of certain flavor that's hidden behind all those descriptions.

Ryan Ahn (04:07)
Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. And then on the pure descriptive side, you have professionally trained panelists, So like if you've ever seen someone who is like a professional ice cream taster, and yes, that is a real job. And unfortunately, I've had to go through a lot of those tastings and, you know, having a caramel ice cream once is enjoyable. Having 15 in a row is quite difficult.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (04:36)
Oh wow, I'm still jealous because at some point I was a professional instant noodle taster. Imagine tasting 20 instant noodles in a row.

Ryan Ahn (04:38)
haha

Hahaha!

can be quite difficult too. You have to really have an iron stomach.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (04:49)
Yeah,

Ryan Ahn (04:50)
descriptive analysis tasters who are highly trained, and this training usually takes months. And that's where they'll give you like a vanilla stick or some cinnamon or all of these different references. And you're highly trained on all of these references. Sometimes they're physical references like that, or sometimes they're chemical references like vanilla, which is chemically synthetic vanilla. And they really learn.

sort of the flavor fingerprint of all of these things. And they can taste something and they can rank the intensity against those attributes. So let's say they're tasting a new vanilla ice cream because they've been highly trained on what those specific types of vanilla are. You can have very sweet expressions, you can have phenolic expressions, you can have very spice driven expressions, and they're able to rank the intensity to profile the vanilla in that vanilla ice cream.

So you have tasters like that, which are super common in the food industry. And then you also have tasters who are judges. So you have tea competitions in Japan, for example, and there's people that go around against a set of criteria and judge a product. And in Japanese matcha tasting, it's subtractive. So every product starts at a perfect score, and then points are deducted based on different flavors that they taste, based on appearance and other attributes as well.

So they're really looking for flaws in the way they're making quality judgments about any particular tencha or matcha, tencha is unground matcha, any tencha sample, which would then later be turned into matcha. And then the other type of testing, which we did a lot of, is just straight consumer testing. You give consumers products and you just ask them about it. What did you taste? What did you like? And...

There's different ways you can do that. It can be more natural language where they can just give you descriptors, what they taste. It could be a little more structured where they're ranking across different attributes saying, I find it this sweet or this bitter, and I like this or I don't like that about a product. And then you can make inferences about how to make it better. So I'd say those are the major buckets of the different types of tasting, taste tests that you can run within the food industry.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (07:16)
Yeah, that's all very interesting. I mean, you can have all these tasters being trained or build up all these formative experience in different ways. But what's actually going on in each individual's head? Sometimes you will never know. You cannot really just dig someone.

spring out and you know like trying to make comparison of you know which neural link is you know shining at the same time. It's much hidden and it's most of the time hidden behind the barrier of language.

Ryan Ahn (07:57)
Yeah, exactly. You know, all we really have to communicate the sense of taste, the sense of smell, is language. At least that's the only way we have right now. And you know, our words convey a lot of meaning, and they can convey a lot of meaning at different levels. So kind of at your most basic level, you have these like really broad flavor categories. Things like bitter, things like sweet, flavors like umami.

And they really can encompass a lot of different flavors like a lot of different foods and flavors are bitter or sweet, etc But you can also go certain level deeper, right? So you can say, you know, I taste something fruity But okay, which fruits is it? Is it more like a mango or more like a citrus fruit or more like? papaya And then you can go even deeper and deeper and deeper to get more and more descriptive So, you know if you're tasting citrus is it a lemon?

If it's a lemon, what type of lemon? Is it overripe? Is it underripe? Is it juicy expression? Is it a dry expression? And you can kind of do this to the nth degree. And it's like increasing resolution. You're getting more and more descriptive and sort of more and more true to your perception.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (09:11)
Ryan, I'm gonna stop you right there, because it's risky to go more granular in flavor description, right? It's much easier for you to hit the barrier that the partner or the subject that you're trying to communicate your feeling might not have the experience of that's very certain descriptor that you are trying to give. For example, if you describe this...

drink tastes like Meyer lemon, but you know, most Chinese people probably have never heard of a Meyer lemon or, you know, calamansi lime to someone from Midwest America. They probably have never seen a calamansi before. So that's very risky sometimes if you are trying to go more granular in describing flavors.

Ryan Ahn (10:01)
Yeah, that's an excellent point. I was actually at a sensory science conference in Scotland a few years ago, and there was a talk given, and someone made it, it was a very international crowd, so there's people from all over the world. And we were there, and we were with some people that we worked with who were Japanese, who were sitting next to us during this talk, and they were talking about the concept of everything flavor.

And for anyone who doesn't have the reference, everything is a flavor that's usually put on a bagel. And it's some mixture of dried onions, garlic, salt, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds. And this term, everything flavor, was very abstract. And they were like, what is it? And then I was like, oh, I was having a really difficult time describing what that was. Because you start to see it in other products, like everything bagel crisps, everything pretzels. I'm sure there's an everything ice cream.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (10:42)
haha

Hahaha!

Ryan Ahn (10:59)
And you know matcha is the same right like to a lot of people matcha is a flavor What is matcha flavor right let you have an ice cream or candies?

Zongjun (Sam) Li (11:09)
Right, it's really a big bucket that you can actually fill a lot of flavors into it.

Ryan Ahn (11:16)
Yeah, and interestingly enough across different product categories you have these contentious tasting notes. So in coffee for example, it's very common in the coffee world to describe a coffee as quote tea -like, Does that refer to texture? Does that refer to flavor? Does that refer to sort of its tannic nature and the astringency of it? Like,

I don't know. I'm not in their head when they're using that descriptor.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (11:47)
Yeah, tea.

Yeah, this is really, you're trying to use a very complex thing to describe another very complex thing. Cause you know, like what exactly, what kind of tea are you referring to? Also like that can be a total valid question too. Like is it a red tea? Is it a green tea? Is it a hay cha? You know, those can be very different from each other even though they're both teas.

Ryan Ahn (12:15)
And this is one reason why there's so much training in what's called descriptive analysis tasting, because they really need to make sure that my lemon is the same as your lemon is the same as someone else on that tasting panel's lemon. And they almost calibrate you the same way you would calibrate an instrument in chemistry. It's like human tongue and nose as an instrument that needs to be calibrated.

from which then you can make better comparisons, then you've removed some of the

notes when you're buying a matcha, You don't know if your particular term, lemon, is the same for everyone, or even what expression of lemon it is.

when you see that arises a tasting note.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (13:03)
Yeah, I mean, if you want to use this method to do taste testing, this is really, I would say the requirement, like otherwise there is no ground truth. People are just talking over each other, using their own formative experience or feelings that, you know, like there will be no reference or benchmark and that the analysis will be meaningless at the end of the day.

Ryan Ahn (13:21)
Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And well, at least not with other technologies to interpret that data, which is something we were working on. But yeah, I mean, it's a real problem. I was watching just a tea review earlier today, a matcha review on YouTube, and the reviewer kept using the term porridge. He really likes a porridge note in his matcha. And I have no idea what he means by porridge. He has a British accent. I don't guess he means.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (13:59)
porridge, like congee,

kind of a ricey soupy flavor.

Ryan Ahn (14:01)
oatmeal or kanji?

Yeah, I don't know. I still don't know. But you know, same is true. I mean, even Japanese language is full of flavor terminology that people just might not know. Like umami, you know, a lot of people now understand the term umami, but go back, I don't know, 10, 15 years, right? It was not a flavor descriptor that the average American knew.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (14:09)
Yeah.

Ryan Ahn (14:28)
Um.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (14:28)
Yeah, it's the yummy flavor.

Ryan Ahn (14:31)
MSG and the savoriness. But it's important when you're communicating across the industry that people can understand the terminology you're using. And a really good example of that is the flavor descriptor ooika which is something loosely translated to the taste of shade. And it's highly prized in the best top, top, top matcha. And to be honest, I don't really know what ooika

Zongjun (Sam) Li (14:33)
Yeah.

Ryan Ahn (15:01)
tastes like. I don't speak Japanese, I didn't grow up in this environment, I haven't had that much matcha with people who are Japanese native speakers while consuming references that they also said were the flavor ooika Like I haven't been inculturated to fully grok that term.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (15:21)
Yeah, I mean, it's really, I would say, very similar to a lot of those complex flavor as a result of certain processing methods that are very category specific or cultural specific. One example will be like natural processed coffee, right? There's a very distinct natural processed flavor when you natural process a coffee. Or if you, you know,

use carbonic maceration to process grapes and you end up having wines that have all these very bright red fruits, like strawberry kind of taste that's very distinct. So I guess this kind of flavors as a result of a processing method will be similar to what ooika would do to tea.

Ryan Ahn (16:15)
I mean, unless you've had the reference to it, it would probably take a long time to adopt that type of description. I know in my early tea journey, tasting a lot of Chinese tea, there's a lot of Chinese tea flavor descriptors that we just don't have in English, like returning sweetness, hui gan. And like you just have to hang out with enough people physically tasting the same thing, hearing the way they describe it.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (16:22)
Yeah.

Yeah, we can, yeah.

Ryan Ahn (16:43)
and then connecting that sensory experience, the flavors that you're experiencing, to those words. And it just takes time. And unless you're having those tasting experiences together, it's really hard to understand this new flavor descriptor and to fully, semantically understand the connotations behind it.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (17:01)
Yeah, really takes some formative experience to understand, you know, all these very high level terms. It's not something like bitter or sweet or even something like umami or even something like, you know, fruity, you know, like these are two low level common terms that, you know, people naturally would have, you know, some level of understanding. But if you go to higher level, um,

flavor communication, that really takes a lot of, you know, experience, information, understanding, and communication with other people that have the shared experience to have a really, a clear, tangible explanation of that specific terms. Otherwise, like this is really almost a socially construct kind of a way to communication.

communicating flavors.

Ryan Ahn (18:01)
Yeah, and I think it's one reason why it takes so long to acquire preferences. Like if you want to put yourself on a natural upgrade cycle trying to find the best of anything, you have to work. It takes effort to appreciate something. And such a large part of that is knowing what to look for, have a label for it, and then be a part of the culture that appreciates that thing. And quality is almost a social construct.

by what other people agree is quality and what they value in those flavor profiles.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (18:34)
I totally agree. I'm once again going to talk down the very famous quality indicator of matcha, especially in the Japanese community is the nori notes. I don't like nori notes in matcha, but that's a very distinct, high quality indicator of matcha for a lot of people, for you, Ryan.

Ryan Ahn (18:57)
Well,

yeah, I really love the umami notes, the nori notes, and to my knowledge, actually, the best descriptor that I know of to describe the flavor of ooika is nori. So perhaps you don't like oika, which is good for your wallet.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (19:12)
Yeah.

But

if you really think about it, a lot of these descriptions in matcha is not really a common good quality indicator in the Western world or even in China. This tastes grassy, tastes green, tastes vegetable, tastes like nori, seaweed.

All of these are very common in matcha, but not necessarily good flavors that people would normally perceive as high -quality indicator elsewhere.

Ryan Ahn (19:52)
Yeah, no, for sure. And then, but really, those are just tasting notes, but there's so much more to the profile than what's being communicated with the standard language, whether or not it's the body, the texture, the smoothness, the bitterness, the astringency, the natural sweetness, the fresh characteristics, the herbaceous, sometimes fruity quality, sometimes roasted qualities.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (19:56)
Oh.

Ryan Ahn (20:17)
There's so much more behind it than just like three or four flavor descriptors usually.

So, Zongjun, what are some of the best ways to get someone to fully grok, to fully understand and comprehend a flavor that's in your mind based on something that you tasted? We were talking quite a bit earlier, before this recording, that if you look through the Chinese literature of tea tasting and flavor tasting, it's actually highly abstract.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (20:23)
Yeah.

Oh yeah, very, you know, analytical or descriptive tasting in China and also in a lot of countries are a fairly contemporary notion.

And these are all like very high level abstract description of the feeling after consuming this tea or this wine. For example, like it reminds me of, you know, the rainy feeling in the mountain, or it reminds me of when wind blow through a pine forest. Or it reminds me that afternoon I was, with, all these people.

in that fine gathering over the mountain. So, you know, it's really vague, really abstract, really poetic, really scenic. It's not really something that you can necessarily replicate in terms of a very tangible feeling in terms of a physical...

experience that you can feel.

Ryan Ahn (21:57)
Yeah, makes sense. And another thing that this more abstract way of communication can also communicate is the time intensity of products. So you can talk about flavors in a highly static way, where you can say it has notes of strawberry and a hint of citrus, and is a little bit bitter, not astringent, and some umami. But that's a static flavor profile.

It's not communicating at all what something tastes like when. And some of the best products, some of the highest end wines, coffees, teas, matchas have very delightful time intensities. It's the way the product presents itself to you. It may enter the mouth soft and creamy and then light. And then as it sits in your mouth, you get this mouthwatering umami.

and these beautiful top notes that remind you of things like fresh cut grass, maybe lemon peel, and then you swallow it, and you get a slight crisp astringency in the end, and then a clean finish, and then it leaves a sweet aftertaste in your mouth. That description is very different than just a bunch of tasting notes. And there's a really interesting coffee company in San Francisco that really took

both of these things to heart, not only having a bunch of flavors descriptors and time intensity, but putting it in almost a poetic way to describe what they were tasting. And they used to contract out English professors from Stanford to write the tasting notes as almost poetry or a story. So I'm going to read one. This is from Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco.

I forget the name of the coffee, but these were the tasting notes. It said, the sugar cube tasted normal, like sugar. Then it seemed like flowers were everywhere and their fragrance suffused the world. Bergamot oil dripped into grape juice puddles from marshmallow skies.

gives you a really interesting sense of what that tastes like. Very animated visual. And there's a lot more communication being packed into that than just a bunch of tasting notes.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (24:17)
Yeah,

it's really beautiful. And these are still very specific descriptions of certain flavors that you can associate with. And if you go back in time, people wasn't necessarily thinking about using very specific terms to describe flavor.

I wonder how they essentially would communicate with the lack of this kind of terminology or vocabulary sets.

Ryan Ahn (24:54)
that's totally true. I mean, you have to have the shared references to be able to communicate. I think that's one reason why you don't see a whole lot of tea companies that are able to market their products to a completely different culture. Like you see a lot of tea companies that are just focused on one geography, one region of the world, because they're able to put everything in terms in a way that the local audience can appreciate it.

and they know how to market it to them. Like if you go to the average Japanese farmer that's producing Tencha to then create Matcha, right, their ability to get someone in Florida or in New York to appreciate that product through the language barriers, et cetera, they just don't have enough understanding of how to communicate to consumers in a language that they're used to, even if they speak English, like in language and descriptors and terms.

et cetera. It's kind of like really good song lyrics. Like, you know that TikTok trend where that girl was singing two days into college, and she had all of these great lines. And it was just a ridiculously relatable song, great song lyrics. And then it became a viral sensation. Kind of similar thing for tea descriptors. Like,

Zongjun (Sam) Li (25:51)
Yeah, totally agree.

Ryan Ahn (26:16)
They're like great lyrics where you can just really resonate with them and understand what someone else's experience was and be able to impose that onto your own experiences to decide whether or not you would.

So bringing this back to matcha and tasting matcha and deconstructing its flavor, it might be most useful to talk about the way tea competitions judge matcha. So in terms of the matcha competitions, they're looking really at the complete sensory profile, including color and appearance, and then deducting points for flaws. So they also really

expose the tea in its preparation for flaw maximization. So using high temperature water, a lot of agitation so that all of those flavors come out and can be expressed and be judged on all of those attributes. And then points are deducted for things that are considered less than ideal. But you know, I find it interesting, the people who are qualified to do these are very highly,

experienced and credentialed tea tasters, usually in the tea industry. But to what degree their preferences map on the rest of us, I think is a really interesting question to ask, especially in the matcha -drinking West.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (27:38)
Yeah, their standard of high quality might not necessarily translate to other people's preferences in other places. But they end up filtering a lot of these products in the very, very beginning that you inevitably will only left with the options that they think is good for you to try or to pick.

But there might be something that's not up to their standard, but can still be very tasty for other people.

Ryan Ahn (28:16)
I think there's great opportunity where that lies because usually they're not going to be at a competition level price.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (28:23)
Hahaha, yeah.

Ryan Ahn (28:24)
And I'm not saying the competition tea is bad or that it doesn't match the preferences of everyone. I've had a lot of competition grade or near winners or winners in matcha and I love those products. They taste incredible to me, to my preferences and the flavor experiences that I've been through. But I've also prepared them for people who haven't had very many matcha experiences. And some of them flat out hate it.

and find it weird and disgusting. And others certainly wouldn't pay the 5X price for that versus something they would enjoy more that's sort of a more normal matcha blend or a cheaper cultivar.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (29:08)
Yeah, and some of the cultivars or tea that are farmed in different methods, for example, like organic farming, that's not very common in Japan, but they still exist. And some other teas, they sometimes have certain flavor attributes, like sometimes some roasted notes.

I really like those flavor notes in my tea. So that can be a very wallet -friendly preference to have.

Ryan Ahn (29:44)
Yeah. And also they're reviewing it under a very certain consumption scenario. They're drinking it unground. So it's not matcha yet. It's just tensha. And they're just drinking it with water. And the vast majority of the world, especially outside of Japan, consumes matcha with milk. So it seems several layers dis -removed from...

you know, what something could actually be optimized for when you're drinking a competition grade tea.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (30:17)
Yeah, and if you look into the future, like the market for matcha in Japan is continuously shrinking and the market overseas in Western countries are growing rapidly fast. And there's gotta be one day that the global audience preference is going to flow back to Japan and enforce.

farmers and judges to cater the preference that's outside of Japan or outside of their own preferences.

Ryan Ahn (30:54)
Yeah, it'd be really interesting if a bunch of coffee professionals at SCA, Specialty Coffee Association, who are preparing matcha, matcha lattes for the majority of the world's cafes, if they were to do a competition, what flavors would rise to the top just based on international preferences from people who are used to thinking about flavor and quality, but are not necessarily...

part of the same culture of drinking matcha all the time, producing it all the time, and only having that very specific lens. I bet you get very different award -winning teas.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (31:33)
Yeah, definitely.

hope that will happen one day soon. I'm really looking forward to have my matcha very, you know, tweaked into the preference of a matcha latte.

Ryan Ahn (31:45)
Yeah, that'd be a cool first, it'd be just a cool product in general. It was creating a matcha that was specifically optimized for a latte. You know, beyond just culinary grade, barista grade, but something that really, to the nth degree, created a fantastic and refined product that was meant to be in a latte.

So Zeng Jun, just to sort of bring it back to the topic around deconstructing matcha flavor. What advice would you give to people who are new to drinking matcha or drink matcha regularly to be better descriptive tasters on what they're tasting, where they can taste more detail, notice more subtlety and nuance? What are some good techniques to use?

Zongjun (Sam) Li (32:31)
Well, definitely try a lot of variations, starting from different cultivars, different producers. It really takes a lot of experience to start building up your vocabulary to taste the difference. For me, in the very beginning, I don't really necessarily think that matcha can taste so different across different cultivars and producers. They are all...

of this green powder like drinks that look at least look very similar to each other. But if you actually spend time investigating the difference between them, the nuances are in mass. You can actually taste a lot of different flavors across these different cultivars.

So I guess, you know, like starting from a vertical tasting across different cultivars will be a good way to start. And then you can, you know, investigate into different regions, different producers. And then you can also start trying, you know, mixing with other things like milk or oat milk. You might end up finding, you know, new flavor combinations that you would like.

Ryan Ahn (33:53)
Yeah, and seeing the profile change, it's quite interesting. A lot of the high -end matcha cafes in Southeast Asia, actually some of the good ones will have two flavor profiles for every matcha that they have. The flavor profile with water and the flavor profile with milk. And they'll look totally different. Like one of them will be, verdant, slightly sweet, lemony.

And then when you mix it with milk, they have like roasted peanuts, chocolate, and something else. And like it basically turns into a different product. Not a super predictable flavor outcome when you mix it with other things.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (34:36)
Yeah, absolutely. So really just, try and, uh, and also talk to people, people, my other people who likes matcha, my, you know, end up tasting different things that you might not, able to notice, but happens to a lot of, um, things too, like coffee and wine that, uh, once people pointed out to you, you can start tasting that notes. Uh, you can, you can notice it very, uh, uh,

very easily, but without other people telling you or priming you, you might not necessarily notice the flavor, which is very interesting. People's brain can be very easily incepted sometimes.

Ryan Ahn (35:18)
I mean, this type of tasting is highly social thing. And like part of the primary reason for even putting your experiences to language is to communicate it with others. And really the physical, I mean, while you can communicate a lot online, right? Doing this physically where you know that you're both tasting the same tea, the same product prepared in the same way. And like, and the way you're experiencing it versus the way someone else is, you're going to have some overlapping perception.

where you both said you tasted the same things. And then there's also going to be some things that you might have noticed that they didn't, and some things they noticed that you didn't notice. And you're like, oh, you know what? That's what that note was. It was a Froot Loops note or something. I don't know. And having those flavor discussions is also what makes drinking matcha fun, or consuming any food or beverage, where there's a degree of appreciation or connoisseurship behind it.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (36:13)
Yeah, by the end of the day, communication is really the keystone of culture and society.

and it's what makes us human.

Ryan Ahn (36:23)
And it makes the whole matcha industry grow. The reasons that these types of movements grow is because new passionate matcha consumers have to come from somewhere. And the best evangelists for that are the people that love it and want to share it with others and kind of can prime them to appreciate it. Like, oh, try this one. It has a note of this. And oh, this one's very umami. You might notice a lot of savoriness. Oh, this one is not very bitter. And it's actually really refreshing.

And you know, you can give people those early formative experiences they need to develop a passion for it when you employ flavor notes and language for flavor really well.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (37:07)
Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan Ahn (37:08)
I think that is all we have time for. So as always, thanks for listening. If you like this podcast, please consider sharing it with a friend or giving us a five -star rating

care.

Zongjun (Sam) Li (37:23)
Take care, bye bye.