Matcha Retail in Uji and Kyoto

 

 

Ryan And Zongjun (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Specialty in Matcha podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my co -founder, Zongjun Hello, hello. Konnichiwa. And we're the co -founders of Sanko Matcha products. Yeah. So we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And today we are having our very first episode record in Kyoto, Japan. Yeah, we're in Japan.

So we're trying to record a couple of these throughout our trips. We're sourcing, trying to meet farmers, trying to understand more about the traditions and the way these products are marketed and sold domestically. And also talk to farmers and see like, what is it like from the people that are on the ground and try to get the perspective from the outside in and from the inside out. And something that we're realizing, we were just talking about this last night.

is that matcha and learning about matcha is less about finding the truth and more about finding perspective. Like you find people, even the people we have talked to so far this trip just have radically different ideas about perspective and things that we were expecting to get pushed back on saying, no, not traditional. We don't want to do it this way.

They're actually, everyone's very open -minded to it in places that we didn't expect. Yeah, like truth is almost an illusion. Like there's no such thing as truth. There are things that people do and people believe in those things that they do. But, you know, like they might actually be contradicting to each other. What exactly is the best matcha? Or what is real matcha? What is real matcha? Or authentic or traditional?

And even the shading mechanisms, we were at one of the museums in Uji, and these shading canopies, they were an innovation 400 years ago. At some point, what we consider traditional now was innovative. And you can say the same thing about industrial ishiusus, or the granite stone mills that make matcha. Used to be that everyone milled their own matcha at home. The product that you bought

150 years ago was Tencha. And then you milled it at home. And really it was just for the elite, people who had the time, the luxury, the taste, it cultivated their preferences and had the hardware to physically create this matcha. So even saying that these new industrial motorized ishi usus that mill matcha, that is an innovation that, you know, a lot of the times when you're from the outside looking in,

You know, it's seen as this must have. Without it, it's not really true matcha. And it does produce a higher quality product than a lot of the smaller hand milled Ishii uses for sure. And I believe that a lot of the producers that if they do do it by hand, they actually mill it twice because there's just not enough time in the grind phase. it's so interesting searching for these different perspectives. Yeah. And not to mention about like the

endless pursuit of womanliness in the current -day matcha. That's actually very modern. Like people back in the days as we talked to farmers that were actually working in Wuji, they don't really like they don't fertilize their matcha to the nth degree as we are seeing nowadays. And there were no such thing as they call it Hinjoong, so the cultivars. Everything was Zairai.

back in the days. Or seed propagated. Yeah, seed propagated matcha. you know, like it's all of these that we are perceiving as a status quo or norm nowadays is really not that traditional. Yeah. And we taste some of the matcha that were produced in a more organic, more natural

I think it's better to almost call it a garden. Yeah, garden method. It's very good, very tasty. Yeah, and they're not crazy umami bombs. Right? Like it seems like the Japanese mass market preference might even be different than the Japanese specialty preference, which is much more complex and less one -dimensional as some of these just straight fertilized umami bombs that we've all had. Well, like you really...

see that kind of quality differentiation and it's actually reflected by the price of in retail scores. You don't necessarily see that in know in Uji or in you know farmers doing the farmers conversation they don't necessarily categorize their piece quality in terms of know umami yeah in terms of how the retail scores are doing yeah but i mean if you do go to Uji as a tourist you will see that.

Yeah, know all of these retail retail stores in the Uji Main Street, of course Yeah, you really have to go underneath the surface to make some of these discoveries. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, so today we wanted to talk about what it's like to be a retail customer In Japan in Kyoto in Uji when you go to these very traditional matcha houses blending houses traditional matcha brands What it's like trying to understand what products they have to offer

and what the range of flavor profiles are. So we have some experiences that we would like to share. And then some sort of reflections on what our observations are so far and some of the different perspectives that we've heard. So we are going to talk about a few specific brand names here. And we're actually going to talk about some tasting notes that we did. But by no means should anyone please don't take away that this is like

review episode. We're reviewing matcha. We're going to try our best to remove our subjective judgment. We will share our subjective opinion about our preferences and whether or not we liked it, but by no means is it a judgment and it's very much a reflection of our own taste. Yeah, I cannot be totally contradicting to your own preference and we're definitely going to save you from some

very loud sipping noise ASMR. Yes, we already tasted it. We took the notes. So without further ado, we went to one of the coolest retail experiences you can have from Matcha when you come as a tourist to Kyoto. And I will not attempt to butcher the name. I'm horrible with names. I'm horrible with pronunciation. And by the way, I very little

or limited Japanese language skills, but Sam has a decent amount. So between his Japanese and the people that we're trying to purchase from in their English, some communication does happen, but I'm sure it's a very different experience shopping at these places if you're fluent in Japanese. But Sam, do you want to talk about the experience of walking into the first place that we went to? Yeah, let's go one by one. The first one is Liyuan.

The name means willow and sakura flower garden. It's a very nice retail store sitting in the middle of Kyoto city. And as you walk in, the whole store is laid out with a giant tatami mat sitting in the center. And you're sitting right next to the tatami. And they will come by and greet you with a very ice cold gyokuro

and as you sipping the gyokuro tea, they presented you with a menu and they expect you to choose from it. If we can taste the matcha, we ask what are these matcha taste like? And the answer is no, you cannot taste the matcha. And the answer is going from left to right. The left is most bitter. The right is most sweet. And this is like if you've ever been to a Japanese restaurant,

It's like this very long menu on this elongated printed sheet of paper. And it looks like there are about 25 different choices as it goes across the paper, ascending in price. And there's very little we have in front of us right now. So Sam, with your language skills, can you sort of break down what you're seeing on that top row? Yeah. So the entire menu is break down into two

largely two categories. So the top row is matcha and the bottom row is gyokuro, sencha, and bancha and all the other miscellaneous tea. And for the top row, you have all of these poetic names, something something shiro, something something mukashi, with an endorsement sometimes by some iemoto of certain schools. So iemoto are like

the headmaster, the head of that institution. Like the Iyamoto of Omotesenke endorses this product. It's a blend for them or Urasenke or some of the, I think some temples too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there will be a nice little note saying that, you know, if this tea is suitable, more suitable for Usucha or koicha And then you have the price underneath.

This tea retail in Japan is much more affordable than what you'll find online in the States or in Europe. And this is like one of the oldest and most reputable tea garden in Japan, in Uji.

or a tea blend house. I think it's not all their tea. Yeah, that's right. Some of their teas will have a note saying that this is straight from their own garden and some others do not have that note. So I would say it probably implies that they would procure tea from other gardens too. And just to further contextualize this place, I know that Kettle macha mill Club will sometimes buy Tencha from this producer.

considered to be a very famous blend house and they'll mill it fresh. my impression of this house goes way back. Does it? Yeah, to 2017. that's right, with the Koike. Yeah, with Koike San. So during the Cha Kapuki event with the Koike in New York, one of the game tea is Lyoen. The other is kanbayashi.

So I remember that very vividly. You have a great memory. All the matcha helps. so we asked about all of these blends, these 25 blends, like what's the difference? Why is the most one more expensive and why is the cheapest one the least expensive? We asked what the cultivars were, we asked how fresh it was milled or

Like if they have a guarantee, is this, how old is the oldest one on this list? Like how old, like when do you no longer willing to sell it? They told us three months. So everything is supposedly milled within a three month window. It's a lot of inventory to hold. But although, I mean, with all these endorsements, they probably have a lot of local.

buyers, right, for all of these Iemoto right, they're using a lot of tea, and all of these institutions are. But supposedly it's all milled within three months, but nothing was refrigerated, surprisingly. When we got the tea itself, at least it was not cold, or at least the can wasn't cold. I don't know if they transferred it to order and it was in the refrigerator, but it's unclear if it's cold storage within those three months.

Very unclear. most of the tea... Actually, I think that's the only tea house or tea store that we went to that doesn't have a refrigerator. All of their matcha is just sitting on the counter. Yeah, that's true. And for all the other stores that we've been in, they always have a little glass refrigerator that people just store their matcha in it. And you can see through.

This is something that is important to note. I went to the store about two years ago and I bought a lot of matcha that I was kind of consuming over the next couple of months when I came home. This store uses paper packaging. So it's a standard tin where there's like one thing that slides down to close the tin, but they put a piece of paper around it. So it's an unsealed tin. It's not modern packaging technology, which is both very romantic.

But by the time I opened it, I bought a lot of tea. So maybe a month or two after I came home, I opened it and compared it to some of the modern package tea in these perfectly sealed containers. I bet some of them are nitrogen flushed too. To remove the oxygen, the quality degraded very quickly. Like this is clearly a local institution. You're meant to buy locally and consume quickly.

This is not modern packaging technology. If you come here and you buy something, don't camp on it. It is not sealed. It's not really properly sealed. It's not a criticism. It's just you have to modify your behavior to the way that this is intended to be, the way I'm presuming it's intended to be consumed. Well, it's also good to see that a lot of these tea houses are adapting to new technology. That's true.

Even some of the most traditional houses that are using the nitrogen flushing perfect sealed can really preserves the product in a radically better way to make it more accessible for all of us. I mean, back in the day, bet, you know, with the before this technology existed, by the time this can got to you and before modern air freight travel, it wouldn't have been as good. Yeah. When when matcha was debuted, you know, in the early days of Paris, you know,

Expos or when in the early days that came to New York it was this packaging technology Even if it was great tea, it's not good anymore. It's not as good anymore. It tastes like seawater I don't know like when people talk about Japan like especially traditional industry industry in Japan like people like to Almost romanticize like the traditional way like traditional is always better

But we sometimes forget that this is also a land of technology. Very true. People are very innovative and very technology driven here in Japan too. So, you know, like there's nothing wrong about it. I think it's a good practice that your matcha can sit much longer and fresher in the fridge. absolutely. You know, some institutions, just have to modify your own behavior.

this tea not modern packaging technology. It's just a continuation of the way it's been done, which is a beautiful experience to have, but maybe don't buy in bulk here for later unless you're going to transfer it to different packaging. Bring a nitrogen flush machine with you if you've decided to procure here. So...

They weren't able to answer a lot of our questions around what was most expensive or least expensive. We got no information about the cultivar, which we actually did from other houses. So they're holding very secretive information onto that. And there's very little information we can get from the name. So, Zongjun can you list out a few of these names just to add a little color of what a consumer has to work with when they go through these 25 different matches? I see.

You have from the cheapest, which is one of the matcha we end up buying and tasting, it's Gokumukashi. Literally means extreme nostalgia. Okay. Very nostalgia. It way back. You have Matsu no Shiro so pine white, and you have mountain peak white.

You have Little Road White, you have Cloud on the River White, and you have Hatsumukashi, which every single house that we have been to almost all feature this beautiful Hatsumukashi. But as we learn, it doesn't really mean anything. It can be sold for like 500, 600 yen per can or like 40, 400 yen per can.

Actually, let's put a pin in that. That's super interesting to note is we keep seeing Hatsumukashi, everywhere and we became very curious. So we started looking around different vendors online while we were here in Japan. for Ipporo, for example, think it locally it's 600 yen and they kind of recommend that it's like confectionary grade or latte grade. Very cheap. 600 yen is like $4. Very cheap. And then, and other vendors, it's like,

Usacha or koicha thick tea grade where it's very much intended to be consumed on its own. So imagine you're someone, and you're just getting into matcha and you're looking around online and you try a can, I like this Hatsumokashi, I really like this blend. And then you try a different house. What we're learning is that it's a completely different product. And actually the poetic name,

doesn't mean anything brand to brand to brand. You actually need to know blank person or blank companies, Hatsumukashi. That part of the name is indeed meaning, I mean, it might have some poetic meaning specific to that house, but it has no meaning between vendors. So what really, you need to know both parts, blank person or blank things, poetic name. Yeah.

And well, like we have learned, you know, perspective from one of the retail store telling us that, you know, like Mukashi is usually good for koicha and Shiro is usually good for usucha. So put in other words, Mukashi is usually higher quality because you can drink it more concentrated and Shiro is you, according to this person, it's usually lower quality.

and can be suitable for more dilute scenarios. But it's not always true. So like in Ryuouen for example, Gokumukashi is the lowest tier of their matcha category, their matcha scheme. And you actually have two mukashi named matcha in the very lower end tier of this list.

And in our tasting, we just tasted a bunch of matcha that we're going to talk about in a second. That was the only one we didn't attempt to make in koicha The thin tea was enough. We were not going to try that 4 X -concentrated. Very, very interesting. also learned from one of the farmers that we end up visiting is that a lot of these are just, they're basically a retail marketing.

strategy. yeah, farmers don't care about these names. They do not. This is a layer much further downstream. This is fiction, actually. Yeah. Like when you talk about like these brand fictions, these brand stories, like it is fiction on a per house basis. You can think of them as different cinematic universes, right? One company can be Harry Potter. Another company can be Star Wars. Another company can be Tolkien.

And the words between them are not transposable. Yeah, it's almost like parallel universe. Hatsumukashi doesn't mean it's... Hatsumukashi is not Hatsumukashi is not Hatsumukashi. They all live in different lives with different price tag. Very interesting, very confusing. Very confusing.

So as clueless consumers for this particular house and what all of these mean, other than saying endorsed by Omotesenkei, Udesenkei, whatever, or this temple, that temple, we said, okay, this will be a cool experiment. Let's buy the cheapest one and let's buy the most expensive one on this spectrum and compare them. So that's what we did. And we just tasted them. So the first tea that we taste is Gokumukashi.

We paid 864 yen, so about six bucks. For 40 grams or 30 grams. think it's 30 grams. Let's see. 36 grams. okay.

Interesting. Not standard grammage. guess so. 36 grams. Okay. We either were cheated 4 grams from our 40 gram can or given an extra 6. Excuse me. It's a mandatory tax for the matcha cup in Kyoto. But it's noted that it's suitable for usucha and that's all the information we have.

was a beautiful color. Honestly, if you saw this in a store or in any retail shop or at someone's home, you would like think, wow, this person has some very good matcha. And this is a fine example of color being actually a very bad indicator. The color was amazing. It foamed up amazing. We got amazing microphone. The appearance is deceiving. The appearance was incredible, like really, truly incredible.

So when people talk about beautiful color matcha, it really is just for the eyes Especially in this case. Well, I mean like appearance for matcha is a very important criteria in matcha grading and matcha competition. Very true. by no means this one did not point on color. This was way better than a lot of the random ceremonial matcha powder. Like if you go to Whole Foods

and buy like a random ceremonial matcha powder, this is probably better than that. I mean, it's indeed a fresh product that's almost guaranteed. Yes. Yeah, it's true.

Very fresh, very local product. And by the way, we prepared this as usacha. We used the standard recipe of 2 grams to 60 milliliters of water. The water was 75 degrees Celsius. And we used local, not, we bought locally some water, some spring water at the 7 -Eleven. It's mineral water from Uji mountain actually. very nice. you the label.

So what do you taste, Ryan? So our tasting notes was that it was definitely sharp and had some bitterness and structure, but probably in a way that it would be very nice in a milk context or a dessert context. If you want a really high quality matcha, like a matcha tiramisu or something, it has the pungency and intensity to cut through something. So I wouldn't necessarily say it was a bad thing and it was a fine usucha otherwise. There were some nori notes, but

The more we talk about nori notes, especially across this set, like not all nori is the same. This was the slightly more marine fishy nori than like the more pure delicious. Or I would say not all umami is the same. this is nori. Even with nori. No, I think there's flavor variation. Yeah, that's true. That's true. But this one is like very nori. Cheap, cheaper nori. Seaweed, sea salt.

I don't like this tea. It tastes very bitter, very pungent. It was very one -dimensional, very powdery, very green, very little umami. I thought very little umami, but I got the nori smell. Kind of like if you go to a random grocery store and get, if you're making sushi at home and you're just buying nori, or nori that's used in a kimbap, Korean kimbap without the sesame oil, they have similar quality smell.

It's not a bad thing. It's a little marine. There was no aftertaste and it was indeed very powdery and kind of had a weird mouth feel. the powder texture is definitely coarser than the other tea that we have drank today. But honestly, from our preferences, it was not that bad. From where we are in our consumer journey, it is...

head and shoulders better than a lot of the other stuff that the mysterious self -graded ceremonial grade or super ultra premium ceremonial grade that you'll find in other places for literally five to six times the price. So nothing to complain about here. All right, the most expensive. Would you like to introduce that tea? Yeah, so this one also

It has a very poetic name. 金書の昔 It means like the 昔 of the top of the textile. Whatever that means. I mean, I'm literally reading the kanji. It could have a slightly different meaning in Japanese. But it's not endorsed by any of the iemoto

But it does have a tag saying that it's a very premium, premium grade product and it's suitable for koicha And it also has a special tag saying that it's from their home garden. very interesting. And it has a price tag of 3780 yen. So what's the grand? 40 grams, 40 grams.

And so it's what about 28 -29 US dollars depending on the exchange rate. This one visually looked very similar. I actually thought it was slightly less green. But the foam is definitely finer. Way and more. It foamed much faster.

and the foam was kind of more fine. And as we dumped the matcha from the can into the bowl, we discovered much more clumps. Much clumpier. So our suspicion is that it was milled finer or maybe milled more slowly, so therefore it was milled more finely. At least when you're talking about an Ishi -Usu and you know smaller particles have stronger cohesive forces and they're more likely to clump. Whereas the first one was a little more dry sand.

Definitely, you could feel some particles. felt slightly, maybe it was, they were really speeding up that ishi usu But this one felt much more silky and tastes silkier in mouth too. So yeah, absolutely. So it was very sweet. had this very localized sweetness.

For anyone who has the reference, there's a candy in the States called a Smarty. It's basically a crushed up sugar cube of powdered sugar. And I think there's some acid, it's either citric acid or maybe it's tartaric acid that's very localized, but it gives this very localized sweetness. Kind of like a monk fruit, like you really feel it in one part of your mouth. So this one had a very similar vibe going on where you just got these very local pockets on your tongue of sweetness.

And it's also not only like synthetic sweetness, it's mixed with this very fresh, very lively, like 粋, like people in Japan would say. It's almost like the smell, for me, it's like the smell of sweetness from like a fresh cut grass or fresh cut lawn.

It's not necessarily a plus for me, but that's a reference that I get. Weirdly enough, I didn't like this sweetness either. It was very off -putting to me. It did have umami, which was a completely separate tasting note to the sweetness that we were referring to. Creamy. I got an edamame note. Zongjun, you mentioned soy milk. I think it was a pretty similar...

note we're talking about. a nutty, rich kind of flavor. And the umami for me is not nor... like it doesn't have that kind of like aquatic, know, oceanic kind of flavor. Absolutely. Yeah, it's very just like a pure, savory umami kind of feeling. We found it much more complex. It did have some bitterness and you got a light white flower aroma, which I didn't write down in my notes, but in retrospect, I...

definitely see that. So that was it as usucha and then it was very interesting we made it into a koicha and had a completely different experience. The sweetness really intensified. And the umami really intensified and all of a sudden out of nowhere for I got a nori note but not the fishy marini nori note. I got like a like when you come to Japan and you have onigiri with the really high quality seaweed

When you take that first bite, I get this pure nori taste that's not like directly linked to this fishy like lower quality seaweed, but this pure I Don't have a better word than like high quality nori. Yeah, I I actually I have a very different Feeling about that poicha in terms of its remind me this I I think it's for me It tastes like a very thick miso soup like it's the

Umami -ness from miso. this is so weird. I actually have it. didn't share this with you during the tasting, but I wrote it in my notes. It had a slight, almost cheesy chevre or goat cheese, fresh goat cheese savoriness with a little bit of funk. It wasn't like as funky or barnyard -y as like some chevre or goat cheese can be, but there was this fresh goat cheese.

savory, creamy something, but with the aroma of it too that I tasted in this. Yeah, yeah. Very interesting. I actually like the koicha more. me too. For the first usucha it's definitely not of this preference. And for this one, as a usucha, I would say it's neutral. But for koicha I actually like it. One thing that I noted was that the complexity didn't change.

So the intensity changed between the usucha and the Koicha, but the complexity was just different. They were completely different profiles in a way that I can describe as non -linear. It's not like by making it, Koicha is four times more concentrated, but it didn't concentrate the flavor four times. It was more intense, but it expressed completely different flavors.

All right. So we tasted one more that we want to share and we hope that this tasting isn't too boring. Please let us know in the comments or reach out directly if you like or dislike this.

Anyway, so we got a recommendation from Cole from My Match Addiction who recently traveled to Japan to try a tea called Tenju. So Sam, do you want to introduce this tea a little bit? So this is from one of the foremost blends, blending houses that everyone knows, one of the largest.

I think they do about $50 million a year in revenue from what we've been able to research online. Yeah, so the tea house is called Marukyu Koyamaen. And from all the kanji that I'm able to read from the little tag. Of this tea specifically? Of this tea specifically. It's very highly praised and awarded tea by the Bureau of Agriculture and Aquatics.

use. And it specifically noted that it has a very unique flavor of ooika that's written in this text. usually people don't like write that as one of the description. Very rare. Very rare to actually see that. In our experience at least. ooika means like the fragrance coming from the shade. So like

for almost all of the matcha, they are all shaded one way or another. But this one, as humble as Japanese people can be, they actually had the intention or the willingness to actually write that down on a piece of paper. I think they're very proud of this tea being very ooika. So, very looking forward to the...

taste this tea. This is the second most expensive matcha I've ever purchased. think the most was from Mark from the company Ooika in New Jersey who mills matcha fresh in Lawrenceville which is a fantastic Uji Hikari but this is the second most expensive and this is the most expensive tea that you can purchase I think that's non -competition grade they might have competitions that are way more expensive but it's the most expensive normal, normal quote -unquote tea.

that they sell. it was, did I write down the price?

No. It was around 50 US dollars, just under 7 ,000 yen. Did you learn about the cultivar of this tea? No, no information. No information. So this is a mystery black box blend, most likely. Maybe it's single cultivar, maybe it's not. I don't know what the harvest was. So in the spirit,

of these blending houses, we will just enjoy it. let's just enjoy it. Very interestingly, a lot of these people don't tell you what exactly goes into these camps. Although some tea houses did end up telling us. we were in Uji with Kanbayashi I think. No, no, Horii Shichimeien that's true. They told us the cultivars. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one of their very poetically described matcha was actually single cultivars.

But only for this year. It's not always single cultivar, which is very interesting. I said this year, this is just Saemidori but sometimes it's a blend. then we actually got to meet the head blender there, the tea master that they had who came down very briefly. So that was really cool to get to meet the artist, the master himself, who makes these decisions and puts these blends together. Yeah, that was very cool.

Anyways, let's describe the tea, I guess. Yeah. So this was by far one of the most unique matcha's I have ever had in my life. And Cole made a similar observation when he reviewed this tea. We both got the same note at the same time from the smell. Yeah. It's just straight up olive oil. Incredibly high quality olive oil. Yeah. Like the very like tingly almost spicy kind of a smell and taste.

very, very good. It was so subtle, so soft when it entered the mouth. It entered the mouth like water. It kind of just gently and gracefully kind of came in and melted away. And then it blossomed and developed. something Cole mentioned, and we totally agree with, it is effervescent. It almost pops. You get this sparkly, tingly sensation. And I've never heard about this in Japanese tea.

but they actually talk about it quite a lot in Chinese tea and Taiwanese tea. So I know for the highest tea producing region in Taiwan is a mountain range called Dayuling And in Dayuling, one of the ways that you can taste the altitude when you're really deep in the weeds of high mountain Taiwanese oolong is it starts to develop an effervescence. Deep minerality, but also a deep effervescence.

It wasn't an umami bomb.

which was surprising to us. So this ooika smell is almost the spicy, high quality olive oil. Oily, rich, very wholesome. Very wholesome and integrated. It wasn't the separate component flavor. It was very integrated into the profile. And I don't know if anyone's ever had that reference of all of these new olive oil lattes, the Olietto's. I think you can find them at Starbucks around the world. I had one when it was released in Milan. I just happened to be there.

and got to try it and it works so well. So sort of the same way that olive oil interacts with fat. If anyone's ever had an olive oil gelato and olive oil ice cream or even put, there's a tradition of putting, I think that's an Austrian thing. You put pumpkin seed oil on ice cream. This fat, plant fat mixed with ice cream or cream.

has this very distinct textural sensation and it's very similar to what's going on in this tea. Yeah, and I think that sensation really magnifies after we turn that into a koicha. Yes, so that was all of it is usucha and in koicha completely non -linear again. The Nori note magnified, I swear, ten times. It was so beautifully pronounced and it's not the seaweed note.

Like you hear someone in the US or in Europe talk about it was this high quality seaweed note. It wasn't marine fishy weird. It had this purity to it. Yeah, it's very, very beautiful. It's like almost like kind of like you will get from some very high quality fresh oyster. Yes, beautiful, like light salinity.

but it's also very intense at the same time. Oyster is a great note, like a great oyster. Interesting. I totally get that. The Ever Vessens completely also magnified, I wouldn't say 10 times, but it was more sparkly, it kind of popped. There was some bitterness to this. Not bad. But I think I would have enjoyed it less without that bitterness. It needed to be supported by something.

Yeah, it's almost like, you know, in Italian wines, you need that bitterness to construct the structure, offer a skeleton of the flavor profile. Absolutely. Without it, it would have been overwhelming, I think. And it had a beautiful, long aftertaste. I would say one, Mark from Ooika talked about this a lot, that aftertaste is one of the most difficult things to achieve. And that is something we've noticed in this little experiment that we've done.

is that the aftertaste and price are highly correlated. At least a pleasant aftertaste, should say. The cheapest one did have an aftertaste. Actually, it is very bitter and then just fell off. But something very interesting so far is that we only revealed 3 teas today, but we have tried other matcha too in this journey. And some of the highest price, highest quality matcha

they do not necessarily taste that umami. It's like the lower end product that are really the umami bomb. Or like just pure burst of umami -ness straight up into your face, pungent. Or a lot of these like more expensive mainstream blends from these large blending houses. And I think it's a reflection of average Japanese preference.

These blending houses are trying to go after the largest domestic market they can probably. like not every most Japanese people are not educated in the appreciation of matcha. And I would say that's a very old preference. Yes. Like something very interesting that... Or older generation. Older generation. It's modern if you really zoom out. Like something we saw very interesting in in in New Orleans, in Kyoto.

is that as we were sitting in the tea store, the demographic of consumers entering the store were largely just two groups of people. Clueless tourists and foreigners like us, and very, very old Japanese gentlemen that probably had decades of experience in drinking matcha and just straight up went there to the counter, point at the exact tea that

he wants, interestingly, no female, no female consumers. Just point at the tea that he wants and then take the tea and left. And all of the tourists just wandering around the shop and probably, what kind of tea is this? What is that? And I have matcha, what is sencha? And asking all these questions. And the retail staff is...

There's not a criticism, but very few of them speak English. That's a lot of Google Translate that we saw going on, or some limited language skills from people on both sides. But I was surprised that there wasn't more knowledge transfer to get anyone to appreciate anything. Honestly, if I was super into matcha and was coming to Japan and trying to learn, this is the wrong place to do that.

Japanese consumer retail for matcha is not the place to learn. Yeah, the information is very not transparent. It's the opposite of transparency. It's top -down positioning. This is good. This is bad. This is the best. And then at one of these conversations, we purposely tried to experience what it would be like if you tried to learn at these stores. And I was asking a bunch of questions and Sam was helping me translate. I was like, what makes this so good?

what makes this high quality. And she's like, we use better Tencha. What makes the Tencha better? I don't know, better Tencha. Like they don't know. Yeah. And I think that our question actually made that guy very uncomfortable. He was like very like trying to divert answering some of the questions. Yeah.

So it's even the training that goes on at a lot of these places. And I'm gonna bring this full circle actually. It's very interesting. All of the good places in New York, for example, the training obviously is like one of the biggest barriers to hiring staff to provide retail experiences or tea experiences for people because they need to be able to hold a conversation to tell someone what's special. The best way I've seen that is that it's a conversation.

to dialogue and everyone kind of feels out where your knowledge is and then they kind of meet you where you're at. The worst implementations I've seen of it, this is super rare. This is some of the best matcha that's ever been imported to the United States. You should appreciate it. We fly this in all the time and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it feels like you're being lectured at and it's very condescending. Hate that. And then where you really see the top,

best way to learn about any of this, honestly, I think is in Bangkok. It's when you walk into a place like MTCH, they will not only meet you where you're at, but everyone is trained and we got to see some of the training that was being done at MTCH. have like everyone that goes through and works and is able to interact with the customer. They have these booklets, they have these quizzes, everyone is so well educated.

And everyone is trained, kind of like at the highest levels of like nice hotel luxury that you can go to, right? Like there's so much training.

that goes into meeting someone where they're at to make them feel comfortable,

And I think that's what makes Bangkok so special is that they're just so much better at holding these conversations in a way that makes it approachable

I think that's the ultimately a cultural difference right like like people in Bangkok I think the very intention of the methodology that they're applying here to the customer I would say it's identical to

how they learned matcha in the first place. They want to help people enjoy matcha the same way as they approach matcha and end up learning and knowing and liking matcha.

all of these information are so gated in Japan is that matcha, to be honest, was not for the common people in the past. It's very much a luxury.

for the nobles, for the literati, for people that can afford the luxury of having people carrying their Tensha jar all the way from the store to their home and hand grind them at their house.

with all the equipment and the bowls and the whisks. Yeah, it's really the modern technology invention, the innovation that made matcha so accessible today.

Your average Joe is not drinking this stuff. It takes hundreds of people literally to make a can of matcha back in the days. They were importing special jars to age the Tencha from China. Like this is not something... And this is back in the day when China was making way... can get completely different connotations. China was making the best ceramics in the world.

Yeah, I mean there's a reason why the Ming dynasty emperor banned matcha or mocha. Like he grew up from a peasant family and probably saw, probably even participated in making mocha in China. And it's really just hundreds of people serving one dude that buying that jar.

It's kind of ridiculous. the privilege of writing this very nice poem about this experience for how many people's lives had to bring it to him. Yeah, so once he crowned himself as emperor of China, you know, from day one, he issued a policy to ban Mocha. Let's stop making this. So in many ways, it's actually a modern miracle that we can buy this 36 gram can.

of matcha for six dollars and have it be something that looks beautiful and tastes probably very great when you use it in certain contexts. And for not that much more, you get something that is really a work of art. Yeah, that's true. Sorry, gokumukashi. Sorry for shitting on you. You're great. even over the course of this conversation, it's like, you know,

It's just different perspectives. There's a totally rational argument and I can evangelize this matcha or I can completely give it a hard time. And it's just different perspectives. So to have this go full circle, it's not about truth seeking about what's good, what's bad, what's authentic or traditional or blah, blah, blah. You know, it's really just perspective searching, perspective seeking. So if we contradict ourselves over the course of this,

over the course of many episodes. Great! We're learning! We don't want to make the judgments. We are sharing our learning journey in matcha. We just want to search for these different perspectives, which is why we find this industry so interesting. So, that's the end of this episode. End of this topic, I should say. We've exhausted... Our journey in Japan continues. Exactly. We are still in Kyoto. We are going to visit more tea farmers in Uji.

coming days and in Yame. And we're going to travel to Izumo and then Yame and then we are going to come back to Japan in the future. Very, very near future for harvest season. Yeah. We've been invited to pick some tea, which is extremely exciting for us. of the very traditional heritage farms that we're beyond honored. For me, I personally had, I think my favorite matcha.

in my life so far, in that farm. So that was great. Crazy moment. We are beyond touched. yeah, so we have many other topics. We have notebooks full of notes that we are going to slowly organize and we'll keep recording and try to share as much as we can. All right. That's I think all the time we have today.

In a full week in Kyoto I still haven't done any sightseeing, Ryan. I'm gonna do some sightseeing. It is a Sunday. Alright, let's go. Alright, let's go. Thank you so much for listening. See you in the next episode. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider giving us 5 stars. We're go get some lunch and we're very grateful for your listenership. Alright. Alright. Bye -bye.