Notes at Origin: Yame vs Uji Matcha

 

 

Ryan And Sam (00:00)
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my cohost Zongjun Hello, hello. And we're the co -founders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha, share our startup stories and interview experts. And today we're sitting in our tiny apartment in Tokyo. Can't even open your suitcase. I'm getting squeezed in the little corner of this room.

Ryan And Sam (00:24)
we just came back from Yame. Yeah. So we would title the series like Matcha Sourcing, Tencha Sourcing,

like travel diary, but that sounds way too cringe. journal. So this is going to be a little bit less structured and a little more conversational than our usual content. But we bought a bunch of samples. We met a bunch of people. We did a bunch of factory tours. And it's just kind of interesting to contrast Yame with Uji and having talked to all these different people, getting our impressions and...

We just did some sensory analysis on four different teas from Yame that we wanted to share. Again, these won't be like a review, so to speak. We'll give you the name and the producer and what we know about them. In some cases, we were able to get even the blend component, which is kind of cool. Usually these budge companies don't do that. And then, yeah, just share our thoughts traveling and what it's like to source tea now that this trip has basically come to an end, now that we're in Tokyo.

no. no. But we'll be back. And we have some friends to visit in Tokyo before we head on. So, Zongjun, what were your overall impressions of Yame now that that portion of the trip is over? Yeah, Yame is actually pretty interesting. You see a lot of traditional practice like natural plantation and even honzu shading in some of these areas.

But they don't necessarily have a lot of these historical baggage as people in Uji does. They're more, I would say, flexible and open -minded. Not necessarily open -minded, but maybe more pragmatic when it comes to making tea or making productions. So it's almost, I would say, an interesting fusion of Uji and Izumo.

Yeah, no, it's an interesting point in Izumo is an even newer tea producing region. And something I realized on that trip when we were talking to a tea farmer is that when you hear about these companies being multi -generational, like being on their 12th, 14th or 16th generation, they actually weren't always tea farms. Sometimes they were doing other crops or other activities. And I think I forget the exact case, but in one of the cases, someone we met, I think was eighth generation.

but they had only been cultivating tea for like 80 years. Still a very long time. But from beginning to end, it wasn't actually all tea, which is also interesting. Well, usually when they switch to tea, they stick with tea. But when they start, it's sometimes other crops. Yeah. The other thing that was very interesting is that for just sheer dumb luck, we got to meet the 14th generation of a very small

producer in Yame, which we'll talk about a little bit later. And we were walking into the retail store, like really just to get an experience, retail experience in Yame. You know, we had no meeting set up that day, just kind of wandering around and we're asking tons of questions to the retail salesperson, who I feel very bad for. Cause we were like, what cultivar was this? How do you do processing and using Google Translate and your language skills? And she was like,

I have no idea. Sorry. I need to ask the president. And there we go. We're standing there. The president is a pretty young guy, walks in the door. It was super hot. He was like very sweaty. like a towel like over his head. And I'm sure he was like, who are these people in his own head? Clearly he was just came back from his tea garden. Yes. And as he walked in and I was like...

sweat, swimming in sweat and dived into his warehouse, did a little bit of change and then came right back. And with his notebook and he's like, yes, this Let me tell you everything about this tea. Yeah, it was one of the most transparent retail experiences we've ever had in Japan, where we walk into a place, a store that sells tea and this store has been around for a very long time. they've won awards, architectural awards for their tea evaluation table.

and how they built this kind of sun well that I guess has existed for about hundred years and it floods light onto the tea evaluation table. Really stunning. Yeah, yeah. There's a very interesting book called In Praise of Shadow that talks about Japanese design aesthetic and that was just a perfect example of that.

In Praise of Shadow. Yeah, that realization. It's really a plate of light and shadow. Yes, it is. Most of the areas are finished with this matte dark wood and you have this light bulb shining a beam of light into each section of the little table which people use to evaluate tea.

Sadly not anymore, but that was very cool to see. Yeah. And that place has been around for like a hundred years. Yeah. That building. I think the company's been around even longer. Yeah. That was very cool to see. And they had some packaging that they used to export tea a hundred years ago to San Francisco. Yeah. That was cool. American written packaging of Japanese tea that they had produced. was wild. Very cool to see.

So anyway, you can go and visit this place, which is what we did. We actually went into a random tea shop in Yame that we very quickly learned didn't sell matcha after a 30 minute walk. was like, whoops. the very nice people there showed us this map. And maybe we'll link this or if you're interested in this map, we'll send you some photos. There is a tea tourism map, I think of Fukuoka and of all the major cities and the select retailers that they have.

So we went to one of these places on this map and it happened to be this place. So sometimes sourcing tea is easier than you think. Some very interesting serendipity happened along the way. Almost cinematic. Almost cinematic. And the gentleman there, the 14th or 16th generation tea master was so nice to us. Between his English and Sam's Japanese, we learned quite a bit. We had a whole factory tour.

They had some old setups where they used to do pan -fried tea, kind of in a wok like they do for Sha Qing in Chinese tea, like Chinese green tea and other types of tea. Yeah, what we learned very interestingly is that Yame used to only do Kamairi finish, so pan -fried finish for the tea in the region for a couple hundred years. And then it was quite recently, like a hundred years ago, that they switched to a steamed finish.

I think they're a new -ish matcha producer as well. At least definitely not nearly as old as Uji, the history of matcha production in Yame, as far as I'm aware. And these people start doing honzu Yes, that was the most interesting thing we learned. They're a new honzu shading producer.

They just started three years ago. Three years ago doing honzu. Here we are. And it's so funny, we had conversations with some farmers in Uji and we're like, are other people going to do honzu? Do you think demand grows for this honzu rice straw shaded like completely natural canopies to shade the matcha? Is anyone going to do this? And they were like, I doubt it. And here we go.

Ryan And Sam (07:34)
stop.

Ryan And Sam (07:34)
Yeah, so there's these different knowledge pockets across the tea industry where someone might not know what someone else is doing. it's really, I'm quite optimistic now that someone would choose to do a production method that is so labor intensive, completely from scratch with no history of having done this. It's wild. Yeah. It's pretty interesting to see how people adopt new technology or

revive old technology as purely experimental. They are willing to take the risk and be innovative. I'm quite optimistic about the future of Japanese matcha. Apparently, it's quite difficult to do. You'd think that Japan is a major rice producing country. It should be pretty easy to enough rice straw in honzu shade. But apparently, not all rice straw is created equal.

And what happens is, is what we've learned when it rains, the honzu, the rainwater can extract stuff from the rice straw. And the rice straw can also filter some things that come down from the rainwater. And then that rains down on the plants, which is one of the things that makes it a little bit better. And what we have learned is that a lot of the rice straw either has too many chemicals or is sprayed with too much stuff.

that it's actually not suitable for honzu shading. And I've heard, I believe from Mark from Ooika, works with a producer that has his own rice field specifically so he can grow his own straw so that he can shade his matcha, which is really wild. And we were learning that not all rice straws create equal. Yeah, yeah. And we also learned from one of the farmers in Izumo that does

Like in the recent few years, rice straw has the quality of rice straw across Japan has declined. So, you know, like people are getting more cautious about, you know, using this practice because the quality is not as good as before. Yeah. So something when it comes to taste and one of the more, I'd say difficult questions that we've asked producers when we've met with tea farmers are around flavor and expressing flavor.

And

we asked what is the flavor difference between let's say Asahi that is honzu rice straw shaded natural shaded natural canopy versus the synthetic canopy. I always forget the technical name for this. Kanreisha. That's why. Kaleisha? Kanreisha. It's like a temperature or coldness cloth. Coldness cloth. Okay. So...

This which is basically some form of black plastic And usually they put two layers of this at the very end. So I believe it's 98 % of the sun that's blocked versus the honzu rice straw which they can just put on more straw to block more and more sunlight and I remember asking one of the farmers we met like what is the taste difference between the synthetic cloth and the honzu rice shade and

he said that the difference in color and taste at the stage of tensha is actually very big, very noticeable, especially if you know what you're tasting for. He didn't describe what the flavor difference was, other than that there was one, but apparently then once it's milled into matcha, the difference is not so huge when it just comes to flavor. So the demand for this rice honzu straw shading

I think will not necessarily be flavor driven, but it's more about garden management and how people like people using natural techniques, older techniques for garden management. And you like, it's probably making the tea plants healthier. It's a little bit more of a, I don't know if regenerative agriculture is quite the right phrase to use, but it's using, know, waste ingredients from a different industry and using them to make.

canopy and the straw's life doesn't stop when it's shading the tea and put on these canopies. It then gets dropped to the soil. And actually all of these natural gardens that we're meeting are more natural gardens that have been in. Even the ones that have that synthetic shade raised canopy cover, they still take straw and put it between the different tea plants, which helps retain moisture in the soil. And then that breaks down and helps contribute to the soil as well. Yeah.

really nice full life circle of these materials. The sheer idea of doing that practice I think is really complies with the idea of sustainability and regenerative agriculture. And also, it's kind of the difference too between let's say like a handmade t -shirt and an industrial t -shirt. Let's say you have a very high -end industrial t -shirt.

where

it's automatic weaving machines and automatic sewing machines, it could be objectively better or similar. Perfect stitching, right? Or let's say carpet making, a lot of carpets. If you go to like Türkiye or like Egypt and go get, have a carpet salesman try to sell you or upsell you on a carpet, right? One of the biggest thing they tell you for is to look for the imperfections and, because something handmade is always a little bit imperfect.

where in the case of like a, at least at the lower end of carpets, the machine -made ones are probably objectively higher quality if they're using the same base materials as something that's handmade. But something that's handmade has a life and has soul and took a lot more labor, a lot more work, is giving more people jobs, is maybe more full circle. So like a similar thing with these different types of luxury products, whether or not it's

carpets or clothing or let's say like leather handbags even. There's a reason why people pay so much beyond just vanity or rarity for an Hermes bag. It's because Hermes bags are 100 % handmade by people who have been doing it for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years.

least that's my take. I don't know if you agree with me, Zongjun Yeah, I mean, you know, like, it's really like after learning how hard and how labor -intensive honzu shading can be, you know, like, other than the flavor that, you know, the tea that you are drinking by the end of the day, really a big respect to people who continue and, you know, revive this practice. But also on the other hand, you know, like, kanreisha is

so much of an easier technology or innovation in the modern days, it really decreased the labor that's required into going into farming matcha. And resources. And resources. And whereas, you know, it retains quite a bit of, you know, the effect, the final effect, like the final delivery of the matcha.

is pretty good. According to one of the farmers we talked to in Uji, really only very experienced tea drinkers would be able to tell the difference between a kanreisha -shaded matcha versus a honzu -shaded matcha. And we didn't even learn what the difference was. No flavor descriptors were given. We tried to ask for a flavor description and they were, I think they were themselves having trouble articulating the difference too.

or in English, maybe there is a language barrier. And with all of these in consideration, the tea industry in Japan is aging. Young people are leaving the industry because it's so labor intensive. Anything that can ease the labor, make farmers' life easier, while retaining the quality of matcha, I think is great technology.

And

I don't think that one thing is superior than another needs to make such a strong comparison because they really have their own benefits. Yeah, if anything, I think purchasing it is a reflection of your own values and that you value this type of cultivation, this type of tradition, and that's why you're doing it. It's a reflection of yourself. Because to be honest, I was really disappointed in this answer.

that there's not a very large taste difference, especially as matcha. I'm like, word, really? With all these efforts? This is not the answer that I wanted to hear. And then I was thinking, why do I still want it? And I'm trying to deconstruct or reverse engineer my own desire for this thing, even if someone who grows it says that there's not a huge difference. On the other hand, they were being very honest to us. Very honest.

which is pretty surprising. Usually after all these efforts, you probably would want to make up some stories. Yeah. They're like, yeah, difference is not that large. Only very experienced tasters can sometimes taste the difference. no, it's. That was wild. That was a special learning experience. So apologies for that tangent. Back to Uji. But to circle, back to Yame.

We got to tour, I think it was two tea factories in Yame of completely different size and scale. One, majority of, other than like the metal equipment, but the majority of the material seemed to be wood. Even the tubes that helped to move tea from one section to another. And the other was very, very modern industrial. had computer optical scanners to sort color.

a really completely wonderful contrast to see. Yeah, very interesting. And the wood -structured factory that we visited was clearly from the past days. Yes. Very, very well -kept, but very, very old. And one thing that I noticed, very interesting, I mean, I have no context about all of these tea equipment industry.

But it seems like all of these equipments, even the very old ones, are all made in Shizuoka. And they are all custom made to fit the exact dimension of the factory, or the workflow, which are very, very interesting. It is interesting. All these factory tours we get is this wonderful little plaque that's on a lot of these pieces of metal. It's just Shizuoka something, something.

Yeah, it's interesting. It must be an interesting business to be in as well, with these different layers. But it seems to be even within any one set of equipment, the ability to make different parameter process changes seems to be pretty easy. The industrial ones were like, yeah, we can do anything you want. You want it like this, that's fine. We process it that way. And even on the small scale. So that was interesting. They have a lot of control over the process of manufacturing. They are old

Man, like people I feel like frequently forgot that how early Japan industrialized. Yes. One of the first industrialized country in Asia. And you know, you can clearly see the legacy or the historical footprint of how these machinery is evolved from different factories. yeah. Even from what we've seen. Yeah. Where like, you know, in that place, I think the newest piece of equipment was 50 years old.

You know, in the other hand, we have some AI optical recognition thing that sorts things by color. what it does is the tea is kind of like a waterfall and falls down in a near mono layer. And there's a camera that watches this tea that falls off into a mono layer. They have this for coffee and wheat, pretty common in those industries too. And for beer, I think they do this for some malt, to do some malt sorting.

And

actually in coffee, it's extremely important because in some of the defects that can happen at the farm in processing or in storage one bean out of a thousand Will ruin the entire batch. That's how strong in taste that defect is. It's not the same case in tea But anyway, this is a pretty well developed technology. That's now you see in a lot of different manufacturing I had no idea it was being done in tea seeing that was cool. And what happens is you have a grid

of jets, air jets. So it falls over, it's immediately recognized that this is not the right level of green or this is too brown. And this little jet shoots out this little amount of air that knocks it out of the stream and it gets sorted out into a different bucket. And they were saying that they can run it through multiple times to refine the tea by color and to do some sorting. That was really interesting and sophisticated. I mean, this place was talking about quality, quality, quality, but

from a very industrial, I don't know, scientific basis. This would have had to have been process where someone went through and hand -sorted this back in the day. So seeing this new technology, I have nothing against it. That was very cool that people are embracing this because why not? I mean, by the end of the day, these factories versus all of these artisanal farmers, they have very different objectives.

for these larger factories, it's all about quality and consistency. It's about selling as much tea as possible in as much of a consistent way as possible. Whereas these tea farmers, individual tea farmers are constantly battling with nature, trying to produce as high quality of the tea as possible with the resources they have.

And they essentially have very different objectives to feed the entire market, to feed different segments in the entire market. So something we also got to see a lot of was ball milling, or I think I also call it bead milling.

in different factories. And talking to producers that do a lot of white label for other brands where people buy their matcha and repackage it or do custom blends for them from a lot of brands that we had heard of. Obviously, we won't share anyone's private sourcing information. But what was very interesting takeaway for me was the degree to which these ball and bead mills were being used. And I would not assume if you're buying from a Western brand

that anything is Ishiusu stone ground unless it says it in the description. A shocking number of very high quality single origin, single cultivar matcha gets bead milled. And we got to taste some on site at Yame. the flavor was great, the texture was great, but we were chit chatting and I let my Usucha sit for two minutes and a lot of it sank to the bottom.

So, as we say, these bead mills and ball mills produce very spherical particle shapes. And because matcha is a suspension, and because if you have a spherical particle shape, it's going to be more likely to fall out of suspension faster because it has less surface area and therefore less surface energy. And whereas, Ishiusu stone milled is going to float around and be suspended and hold that suspension much, much, much longer.

But that was shocking to me. Learning the prevalence of this and if it doesn't say it, it's probably not ishi-usu stone milled. Yeah, I think that that really should be part of the notification in the future for transparent label. What exactly is the milling mechanism really makes a big impact on the final result. But I mean it tasted good, so no judgment. Flavor wise, it's...

It's fine. It's fine. And actually for most contexts, maybe it's actually completely fine if you're dumping that in a latte. Any liquid that you're dumping that in that has high viscosity, the suspension qualities will be much better. Right? So in a lot of cases, it is probably better because it makes the product cheaper. But people who put a huge markup on that stuff, you know, it's a very convenient, non -transparent label. Especially when you make some assumptions about some brands.

that it's ishi-usu stone milled and the result it's actually not. So I was a little disappointed seeing that. But everyone says it generates tons of heat. And what we learned is a lot of them are water -cooled and we got to touch one while it was on and it was cold to the touch. So this technology is actually pretty good. Without ball and bead mills, most people cannot afford to buy matcha. ishiusus don't scale. That's true. That's true.

But they also say that if you have the ball mill continuously to run for 20x hours, it will eventually get hot. So what they do is that they will blend the tea powder from end to end so that it will maintain a more homogeneous That's right. The flavor changes. It does have an impact on the flavor at the end. But what they do is that, very interesting, they keep all of the ball mills in

all

of these cold warehouse to where they store tea. So this like industrial cooling system really acts as a huge heat sink for these ball mills. So which is very interesting to see because like the powder management of the ball mill is far easier than ishi-usu No, for sure. Although it still gets very powderous, but you know, like you don't necessarily have a lot of fine powders everywhere.

Also, one thing for anyone who works there, stuff, matcha not only forms a suspension in water, definitely forms a brief suspension in air. The air quality in that room was, I feel like I needed a respirator. Like I walked out and was coughing and you look up at like the air conditioner and it's like, it looks like it's 50 years old, but apparently it was almost brand new. It was interesting to see.

It actually maybe poses a little bit of a risk if you don't wear a mask. it's a messy business. Let's put it that way. Yeah. But it was very interesting. I'm very happy to get to see them. And actually I have much fewer judgments against them now having seen them in person. Cause I had never seen one. And I feel like in previous episodes of the podcast, we'd love to make the comparison difference between ball mill or bead mill, which can do hundreds of kilograms a day.

versus an ishi-usu which can do about a half a kilogram a day, maybe a little bit more if you're running it quickly. And I actually think they're really important now. There's not enough ishiusus. It just would be such a dumb way to do anything. I mean, imagine having a bunch of little teeny tiny little coffee grinders, like a big plant like Nestle and like they just had a room.

full of these little tiny coffee grinders that someone had to refill all the time and take out the little baskets. The idea of ishi-usu scaling is just, it's not possible. Especially the fact that they're nearly all pseudo handmade or handmade completely by very few traditional craftsmen with huge waiting lists. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what the actual flavor profile difference can be.

Because right now, very few people, I would say, will actually label the matcha bead milled unless you really know the source and know how the matcha is getting milled. Very You have no idea how your matcha is getting milled by the end of the day.

But Ryan, since Uji and to Izumo and all the way to Yame, we've been keep asking people the question about, what's the flavor difference between ball mill or ishi-usu and how exactly ishi-usu is better than the other milling mechanisms. And we have heard a lot of these...

these statements about the difference, like suspension is one. And also in Uji, we learned that ishi-usu would generate a less homogeneous powder formation. Which is about the particle size distribution. Yeah, whereas ball mill creates a much more homogeneous particle sizes. And we learned that the

unhomogeneous particle distribution actually creates a more dynamic flavor profile. So it'll be very interesting to actually validate all of these claims. It's interesting because the exact same thing is true in coffee and the way coffee extracts. And one of the things that you're paying for, like basically the thing that you're paying for when you're going from, let's say like a $10 kitchen spice blender coffee grinder thing.

let's say like a fellow conical burr or flat burr grinder all the way through like EK43 and then at the really industrial scale the best grinding technology for coffee is called a roller mill and Cometeer who does those little concentrated frozen coffee pucks is famous for having invested in one of these roller mills apparently gives you insanely good particle distribution but what you're paying for is particle size distribution

and how different particle size distributions can give you different flavor profile outcomes in a really radical way in coffee. That is true. Something that you really want to avoid is what they call the superfine in coffee, which will really over -extract and generate a ton of bitterness. Or fines and boulders, where you have these huge gigantic pieces that hardly extract because they're way too big and water can't permeate in and get stuff out of those beans.

and then all of these little tiny fines where the extraction happens super, super efficiently and they result in a liquid that doesn't taste as good. So it's interesting that that's true for matcha. I've never heard of anyone study it. I'm assuming the person who told us this read it in some papers and there's been some research studies, but I've never heard of anyone talk about this in English. So it's something we need to dig into further. Yeah, yeah. And what's interesting too is...

So diving into the taste, one of the biggest contrasts that people talk about when they talk about matcha from Uji versus matcha from Yame is the flavor profile difference. And I'd say that the generalization is that matcha from Uji is generally rich, umami, sometimes can be very creamy if it especially comes from cultivars like Uji Hikari or from Asahi.

And

then Yame is super famous for what they call hika aroma, more roasty, toasty profiles, and sometimes a lot more chocolate. So we did a tasting of tea that we bought from Uji that was Uji Cha, and we shared on a previous podcast episode. And now we did the same thing for Yame. So we have two different producers, and we bought one of the cheaper selections and the most expensive selection that we could buy retail.

We just did a tasting, so it's really fresh in our minds. So I thought we would share some notes. Again, not a review. We're going to tell you what these teas are and how much we paid and what we know about them. We don't want to be a review channel. And we just want to give our sensory impressions and we will share our preference, but our preferences are just that. And we'll also share how our preferences have changed even over the course of this trip.

We both, having done a lot of sensory work this trip, very diligently tasting and comparing things, have changed and evolved our ideas a little bit. So just to give a little bit of background, Zongjun and I used to work in product development, AI, and sensory. Sensory analysis is the science of taste. So we used to do this, what, almost every day We're pretty experienced tasters when it comes to

what we'd call quote unquote objective tasting. We were using a very specialized system back then, which now we don't have access to necessarily. using a very specialized system back then that required a lot of extra data analysis. In our case, this trip, I'd say it's much more analog in spirit of the ishi-usu, less technology driven. So we come in with the tasting skills and

experience but we're just doing handwritten notes and not doing any like intensity scales of attributes or anything like that. take everything as a grain of salt. Yeah with a grain of salt. So starting off the first tea that we got from the 14th generation Yame producer who just started to do honzu shading and we don't know actually if any honzu shaded

ended up into this matcha that was not shared with us. But the first one, Sam would you want to introduce the first tea because your Japanese pronunciation is not like mine.

Yeah, so the producer of this tea is Konomi and this very tea is called Suikyoku, basically means virgin jade. And the cost of this tea is 1328 yen for 30 grams. And the main cultivar that went into making this matcha is Okumidori Yabukita Gokou okay. And I would say when we tasted this, we definitely got the characteristic hika aroma.

That was the very first thing. We've been tasting tons of Uji Matcha and just like jumping into this, it was like, wow, wow, hard right turn. Yeah. Completely different. Yeah. The pungency of Hika and just the taste of like this like verdant, like it's almost like tasting a mountain of green, like grass and vegetation covers. It's like this really kind of almost wilderness.

kind of flavor that you don't necessarily get it in the very delicate Uji tea. Yeah, absolutely. Some of my tasting notes were chocolate, burnt butter, creamy, toasty, roasted almonds, a bit earthy, a little bitter, some cocoa powder, and we use a seven -point hedonic scale. So hedonic means preference, basically. It's how much you like it. And we're very used to our seven -point scale. I apologize. We don't do anything on five.

point scales. It can be a topic of a different podcast. But we do seven point scale and I gave it a four out of seven. And Zongjun, you said that it was nutty, creamy, milky, hint of nori, bitter, fresh cut grass, pine resin, and roasted seaweed. And you gave it a three out of seven. Yep. It's a little bit too pungent for me. I thought this would be very good with milk. And they serve a drink at MTCH. It's a blended Frappuccino style

matcha latte. And this with the milk, I can totally see it's like when I tasted that as this tasted like the base material for that drink and it tastes so chocolatey. It's insane. It's so good. I think there's a lot of Americans, especially people who are new to matcha. Like this, it's much, I don't want to say it's more coffee, like because I don't think people need coffee as a crutch to get into matcha, but this tastes

tasted less foreign to me in the same way that genmai cha tasted less foreign to me when I first started getting into tea than sencha did. Sencha was too grassy, too umami, too weird for me when I first started drinking tea when I was like 13, 14. But genmai cha, these toasted rice notes, I get this. This is very tasty. I never had these roasted profiles before. And it just brought me back to that sensory memory. And I think it'd be very approachable.

For a lot of people because the flavors are a little more familiar, you know when people talk about like I don't know like champagne having brioche notes or Having like very yeasty beer tastes like bread. It's familiar. Yeah Something that you like and you know it. Yeah It's easy to appreciate. Yeah. Yeah, it's a it's interesting like we review and prepare all of these teas as a usucha, but you know for

a matcha latte or something that you want to blend with matcha together, you probably want something that's more pungent to kind of cut through the base material and to, you know, offer a flavor diversity. Whereas, you know, if I, you know, put in a very delicate honzu shaded uji that made from asahi into a milk, you probably would only taste.

like milk notes. yeah. Like a lot of these nuanced tea notes will probably just get shadowed away. Or a lot of these very like mass market, very industrial high volume like Kagoshima matcha. Like for example in Paris, most of the single origin matcha is Kagoshima And it's not good. I don't know. It doesn't make good lattes. It's just the whole thing just feels imbalanced to me.

And this profile in general, what we just described, which I would say is very characteristic, Yame, is very underrepresented. You go around to New York and you try different matches, you're not really going to find... It would be very hard to find something that tastes like this. It doesn't get represented. Everyone either does uji or some very, you know, mass market, who knows what it is, Kagoshima, Shizuoka, high volume stuff.

Single origin doesn't necessarily mean it's good. Yes. You can have single origin from very, very industrial mass -produced area. Are you telling me you don't like Pennsylvania wine that's not from the Finger Lakes area? I'm telling you that. I'm from central Pennsylvania and all the wine in the surrounding area is disgusting. this just encapsulates this so well. I went to a talk.

of East Coast wine producers seven or eight years ago. It was an industry conference when we were trying to sell into the wine industry, sensory tools or tasting tools at the time. And someone walked up from, I forget where, but it's somewhere in Pennsylvania that was not a famous area. And their best selling wine was the cotton candy flavor. my God. It was like, wow, don't know who your customers are. I didn't have necessarily a judgment on them, but I mean like,

You're really venturing into the realm of a formulated product than I consider what wine to be. That's pretty much a wine flavored juice. And that could be single origin. You know, single origin is really a confusing term, like if you really think about it. Because within a origin, like how do you define a origin? like There's really no such thing as single origin. Yeah.

I mean, it's like Zeno's paradox. Like for example, halfway there, you go halfway there, you go halfway there and you never actually arrive at a destination. But it's the same thing, right? Anything more than one tea leaf is a blend, technically. Yeah, yeah. And you know, within a well -defined region, you can have like really bad product and really superior product coexist at the same time too. Like for example, like the famous ceramic town in China, Jingdezhen.

Like you can have super high -end artisanal product made by generations of craftsmanship. And you can have factories right next door producing like 10 million pieces a year and get sell into the world and can also be marked as Jingdezhen. Like I bet same thing goes into Kagoshima tea. Like I bet there are artisanal tea farmers exist in Kagoshima, but you also have all these...

automatic GPS guided harvesters harvesting thousands of miles of square miles of a year. So it's true yes and no because some it depends on your level of consumer education. So single origin can tell you a lot if you know a lot about the region. So for example matcha from Uji like Uji city there is no industrial tea in Uji city right so that

as a single origin product to an educated consumer who knows these things, that you can be very sure is a pretty pure product. I don't know, Ryan. A lot of these Uji teas don't necessarily come from Uji. No, no, no, I'm talking about matcha that is actually from Uji. Matcha actually from Uji, okay. Not Uji matcha. mean, that's a different topic, right? Because that could be Shizuoka or whatever. It can be anything that gets shipped into Uji and gets processed there, labeled as Uji.

But you know different areas have different expectations and we were even being told of these different sub -regions within Kyoto Prefecture, within Yame, where it's pretty safe to assume that you're not getting very industrial tea. Whereas you go to somewhere like Wazuka, Wazuka is much more industrial, right? They do much higher volumes of tea than they do in, you just, I don't know, what is it, 20, 40 kilometers away?

I

mean, not that far, hour driving distance. Pretty close. Right? So like, depends on how specific you are. But in some case, single origin can be a good thing. Like single origin, different wine producing areas, there's like rules within these origins. You can't do certain things. You just know that it's not happening. So I agree that single origin on its face isn't, but it can give reliable information if you can pattern match against it.

and there is the pattern of quality because there is no industrial produced tea in those areas. Yeah, well, really takes, because like that kind of policy in wine doesn't necessarily exist yet in Japan. And it's kind of a consumer journey and a lot of tuitions to pay to be able to construct that structure by yourself. I feel like that's a criticism of the current Japanese tea industry.

You have to be in a very privileged position to actually understand everything that is going on from the mislabeling to the tasting ability to understanding Which areas are good which areas are industrial or not industrial? I think that's exactly what's going on in Paris to be honest so like I recently or I'm about to I sort of I lived in Paris the summer and about to move there my girlfriend found a job there and

they're marketing this matcha as single origin. And like, French people don't know any different. It's like, okay, these beautiful tea fields. So the problem with single origin is it gets abused so easily. It's so easy to mislead someone who has the knowledge structures that wants to learn and wants to know where their food comes from. French really want to know where their food comes from.

There are different chicken cultivars, or cultivars, chicken varieties when you go into the grocery store and they have different names and very different prices. People really care about that sort of stuff there. Anyway, it's interesting. We're also not completely hating on Kagoshima or Shizuoka.

We just think that the very industrial products are exactly that. And there might be tons of great little artisanal producers, but it gets washed out by the perception of these people abusing this term. Yeah, like our, I guess, really eventually lands on all of these, I would say, retailers or marketing strategy. Because like for all these farmers that we have met, are like very honest people. they tell you exactly what they did.

and they're not really hiding anything. And do you have any questions? Any more questions we can answer for you? Yeah. They're so nice. Yeah, they're super nice. And like they show us everything, us everything. And their tea goes into all these obscure plants that were actually really packaged at the end by the retailers. And the story was told by the retailers. Like these farmers don't tell any stories and their voice can be hardly heard. Weird industry. Very weird.

Like you see very segmented group of people, like you have the farmers, you have the retailers, you have the tea drinkers, and they don't necessarily talk to each other and they have a very separate perspective on viewing this reality as matcha. Yeah, that's totally right. And the more we talk about our mill idea of fresh -milled matcha using technology, everyone's very open to this.

It's

really these people who are building these brands that we've talked to that don't have a great understanding and are not on the ground that are like ultra reverent and respectful of this culture and not willing to have an open and flexible mind about how industries can change with the fear of I guess the right fear of like being a outside change agent like has been done for so many cultures for hundreds of years.

sometimes in colonial context, sometimes in very commercial capitalistic industrial context. The people are hyper aware of this, like people on the ground, they're like, yeah, that's cool. I just saw the Iemoto of Urasenke make an usucha using sparkling water. Here's a video. It was like so innovative, not traditional. This tasted so good. It's like, wow, interesting. Very interesting. And I'm sure you go to some tea workshop in some country that there's not

high appreciation of matcha and like someone wants to make a sparkling matcha some sensei there or some quote unquote sensei there says, no, not traditional. They would never do it this way. Yeah. I mean, to add some color, Urasenke is one of the major and one of the oldest tea ceremony school. It's not part of the sensei, I think, or it's an old branch. It's smaller than the sensei, but it's still very, very old.

And Iemoto is the head of the house, basically. And he was using sparkling water, making a usucha and posted on Instagram. So very, very cool. Very cool to see how innovative people are. All right. So going back to the tasting, we're going to save you the names and the exact notes. If you're interested, just DM us on Instagram or send us an email. We'll send you these products and what we paid for them on our tasting notes.

But we bought another one from the same producer that was around 15 US dollars, so 50 % more. We went from about just under 10 dollars to just to 15 dollars for another can that was a blend of Okumodori, Samidori, Tsuyuhikari. Tsuyuhikari. Wow, it's embarrassing. And Yabukita. And by the way, both of these products were shaded for three weeks. This one was noticeably richer. Creamy, full body, milk chocolate, a little bitter, some roasty, bready notes. I wrote umami.

nutty, toasty, and I gave it a 4 out of 7 on how much I liked it. Yeah, I gave it a 4 out of 7 too. It's significantly more smooth than the last tea. And the intensity and complexity was overall higher. Yeah, yeah. So it's better as a usucha. But you know, if you blend this into a milk, I don't think you would perform as well as the previous tea, honestly. Yeah. It's a more delicate flavor.

you have more nuance. Quite a bit more nuance. Some of that complexity I think would be lost. And then you gave it a 4 So what's interesting is between these two, I gave them both 4s out of 7s on how much I like them, even though there's a 50 % price increase. So we tasted everything, and everything that we taste is sequential monadic, which basically means we taste one tea at a time, we write our notes, and then we...

Refresh our minds, pretend we didn't just taste that tea and taste a new tea because comparative tasting is a horrible, horrible, horrible way to form objective opinions about something because the differences magnify when you're doing comparative tasting. And your notes become very distorted because if we were to compare this to an Uji matcha while drinking a Yame matcha, our notes on the differences would be so radically different.

So that's the way that we taste and it's the way we've tasted professionally in the past. Which is a very difficult skill to develop, but anyone who does matcha reviews, and especially who posts matcha reviews, we beg you, please don't do comparative tasting. Don't taste two things at one time. Unless you specifically want to magnify the differences between products. But if you want to form an objective opinion, one product at a time, this is the industry standard.

for doing this type of sensory evaluation. The next tea that we tasted, and we'll do this one pretty fast because we know that this podcast is running a little long, Sam, do you want to introduce the producer? This is one we kept hearing, one of the most well -known producers in Yame. Yeah, and it's also one of the furthest away tea garden from Yame You need a car to travel there. But this producer is called Hoshino En.

And the owner of Hoshino and Yamaguchi -san apparently is a very reputable man in the Japanese tea industry and inspire a lot of younger tea farmers like one of the tea farmers we ended up meeting in Izumo city. And the first tea we are tasting is also one of their cheapest product and then we will be moving to the more expensive product. Six dollars versus twelve. Yeah, double the price.

And the first one is Hoshino Tsuyu. For 20 grams. And we don't necessarily know what exactly went into this can of matcha. Yeah, we don't know the blend components. We tried asking, but no one knew. It didn't sound like anyone we talked to knew. And we prepared these two teas also as usucha. And what did you taste, Ryan? Yeah. So I got cream, bitterness. This is for the cheaper one. A lot of cream, bitterness, chocolate.

some praline, some toasted nori. I found it very clean, smooth, silky, some hika aroma of this nice toasty profile. And I also gave it a four out of seven on how much I liked it. It was really good. We put a big star next to this flavor profile. We think that this would perform so well in a latte. Like you really would kind of taste like milk chocolate. It really is very tasty. And the intensity was very high. I'd say the complexity is low -ish.

but the intensity was very high and it had a very, it didn't have an aftertaste, but I mean that in a good way. It just kind of fell off. It was very clean. Yeah, totally agree. Creamy, smooth, a lot of hika notes that's not necessarily very burnt, but it's like a really well roasted, like caramelized almost kind of hika. And quite nutty too, pecan, peanuts.

very, very delicious cup of tea. Yeah, for $6, 20 -gram can retail. Yeah. What a great deal. This is a good product. That's insane. you liked it even more. I like it even more. I gave it a score of 5. I like it even more. Wow. Even more. Yeah, crazy. And the one that's a little more expensive or double the price, I said umami. I tasted more umami from this one.

unsalted butter, very sweet aftertaste. So this one did have a very pleasant sweet aftertaste. I to me, tasted objectively higher quality. I got a canale note, like the pastry from Bordeaux, some walnuts. It made me thirsty. I wanted to drink more. It had that effect for me. It had a little bit of bitterness that kind of supported the whole flavor. And I gave it a five or six out of seven in terms of how much I liked it. Yeah.

Gave it a four initially, still kind of debating because it's pretty delicious. I agree with all of the tasting notes you just said, Ryan. But I get a little bit hint of like green pepper, bell pepper note at the end, which kind of reminds me of like a less mature Grenache in wine.

Ryan And Sam (50:18)
that's kind of a put off for me. So I'm still debating whether or not I should give it a four or five. That's totally influenced by my own preference.

Green bell pepper. It's not a note you hear very often in matcha. Yeah, no. Especially something that has a roasty, toasty profile. They're weird. Yeah. So I don't know if you taste that, but... A little bit. I see it, to me it's a little more grassy than green bell pepper, but I get a sense of where that's coming from. Yeah. So both pretty good tea. I have a much stronger preference of the previous tea, which is half of the price of this one.

Yeah, it is crazy. Yeah, me too. Actually the price and my preference were not correlated at all for any of these teas that we've tasted. The extreme between price and quality that we had in Uji tasted much larger than this extreme. And I think part of it's the hika aroma, the roasting and the processing of tea and Yame is a little bit more of an equalizer where it really is good at making

like lower quality base material tastes great because you're adding in other flavors through process. Yeah, this is very similar to how you treat coffee too. Yeah, for like more medium style roast coffee. Yeah, we increase the roastiness and you can really mask a lot of the off flavor from the base material. Yeah, absolutely. So how have your preferences changed now that we've done all these tastings between Yamecha and Ujicha? You know, before coming to Japan,

definitely had a slight higher preference towards Yame tea. The hika notes is great and it's just the sheer taste of wilderness kind of reminds me of a lot of Yunnan tea Chinese Yunnan tea that I had a pretty big preference towards. So I love Yame tea in the past and for me Uji tea, you know,

before

was really very umami strong. All the examples you had. Yeah, for all of the Uji teas I have tried before was very umami driven. And it wasn't really until this trip after meeting with all these artisanal farmers in Uji city that I

started to learn what Uji tea really is. Or could taste like. Or could taste like. You know, honestly, probably a lot of the Uji tea that I tried in past is not really from Uji. gets processed. Very possible. It gets processed in Uji. It's just how little tea is actually from Uji just blows my mind. the really the highest quality of like some of the higher quality tea in Uji are not really umami driven.

They're actually very light or creamy or nutty, unroasted nuts. lot of nuances. it's almost like drinking a Burgundy wine for the first time. You know, I did not really taste a lot of things when I first drink Burgundy wine. It's really until later that I have more formative experience and really learn like what wine could be or should be.

that I start to be able to pick up all these flavors. Similar things happen to my experience with Uji tea. It's so interesting because a lot of the blends that get labeled as Uji matcha from these large blend houses, probably all of which doesn't come from Uji city, it's like a fiction. It's like this made -up story flavor profile of Uji matcha and tasting real Uji matcha from Uji producers in Uji city.

The variation was huge between the different cultivars and the different gardens that we got to taste. And it's so different than all of these blends. My mental picture was so inaccurate, but it's this weird collective fantasy of all these blend houses of what Uji matcha is and tastes like. It's very painful. I almost need to unlearn what I have learned in the past and relearn with...

all these new data points. And you really have to go to the source or source from someone who really has some transparent sourcing. And you can trust that they're getting it or they can show who the producers are. Yeah, so quite a friction or almost you really have to pay a lot of tuition and effort outside of Japan to be able to learn a lot of these things. Yeah, but it's actually in Japan, it's surprisingly cheap. The infrastructure is good. I mean, we got to a lot of places by just the

public bus system and paid like $2 to take an hour ride to show up and then walk a mile. Like, I mean, we were doing this on a shoestring budget and like shockingly inexpensive to do sourcing, especially when you're outside of the big cities and the food's cheap. The lodging was cheap. Like on a per person basis when we were just outside of Yame is 16 bucks a night. It was clean. It was nice. It's totally fine. Yeah. Wasn't luxury. Totally fine. Very comfortable.

any

place to be scrappy in the entire world, Japan's probably the best country. Yes, indeed. So clean. Yeah. I was actually flying to Malaysia right during COVID and Japan hadn't opened yet and my flight got delayed and I had a flight from Tokyo to Kuala Lumpur that I missed because the incoming aircraft is late. So there's a group of 50 people stranded in the airport who literally had to stay in no man's land. Because the hotel...

It was outside of immigration and immigration was closed to foreigners and non -residents. So we all slept on the floor of the Narita airport and they gave us blankets and pillows. And I remember sleeping between two rows of benches, you know, the normal waiting seats area. And I was looking up at the seats from the floor that I was sleeping on, spotless. It's so clean. There is literally no better.

place that I could have possibly been stranded where I had to sleep on the floor. But same thing for a lot of these travel accommodations. They're not perfectly spotless, but it's a great place to be scrappy traveling. Yeah, you can definitely see some ages, know, like when everything's well treated, lot of these tatami definitely have seen better days, but they're very nicely kept. Like you can see the age, but they are like nice. Yeah.

Very interesting. I mean, it's essentially how a lot of people here start forming these preference towards older objects, like older trains, cars, or the record players, like older cars, like everything. Like they are very nicely kept and, you know, it's very easy to also source a lot of these things in Japan. So really it's not just about tea too. Like for all of these places we end up traveling to.

You have great food, have great people. People outside of Tokyo are just great. Much more friendly. Much more friendly. It's really like Tokyo and the rest of Japan. People are easygoing, friendly, and lot of these places are very accessible. It's inspiring, and we need to see more of Japan. We saw three tea producing areas.

In the future, we want to go to sub -regions, like in Kyoto Prefecture, outside of Uji and like Wazuka. And we want to go to Kagoshima, Shizuoka, maybe Gifu, couple other places as well. And a lot of these interesting regions around Uji too, like places like Ide, people keep telling us that there's good tea there. You know, like Japan is pretty large. Like Japan looks small, like because it's sitting right next to China, but it's...

actually

a very large country. lots of terroirs to discover and explore. Very exciting future. I had probably decades worth of work to really have a deep understanding because I feel like we're just at the very top of the surface in our understanding. But can't wait to do that and to explore. This is a specialty product outside of the context of a blend. It feels very exciting and kind of almost on the edge of knowledge a little bit because no one's done this.

or very few people, like just a handful of people are like understanding matcha as a specialty product and the different flavors that each of these places produce. It feels like we're discovering a lot of things, maybe for the first time in such a public way in the way that we're talking about it. Yeah, very hopeful journey. Not to over fluff what we're doing, but you really get that sense that like the stuff that you see in wine where people talk about these different regions and can do deductive tasting and stuff.

Right? Like that is such a protected craft that is abstracted so far away from the consumer in the matcha industry or in the Japanese tea industry in general. yeah, it's not only abstract, almost distorted. Yeah. Abstracted and distorted away from the consumer. so we can't wait to do this in the spirit of knowing where every our food comes from and what the flavor variety is for this leaf.

whether or not it's the place it's grown, the processing, the cultivar, and all the other things that we haven't discovered yet. So very exciting future. if anyone wants to source their own tea, their own matcha, or anything in Japan, we'd be happy to share our experiences. Even from as practical to getting around and how we communicate with people, or how we discover farmers, we'd be happy to share sort of what we've done.

We're not experts by far, especially when you compare us to some of the other Western vendors who've been coming for decade plus to Japan. But we don't think that sourcing should be the core competency of a tea company anymore. It should be storytelling. It should be doing things in a new, interesting way. But just getting to the source should be the barrier should be lower. So we can have a much more interesting, thriving specialty.

matcha industry.

All right. I think that's all we have time for today. This was a very unstructured conversation. Our opinions that we shared will probably change as we have new experiences and learn new information. So this is very much more of a travel diary than digested opinions that we're ready to defend and stand by. So if you disagreed with anything and you want to add to the conversation, please reach out to us. We'd happy to have you on the show. And thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast,

Please share it with a friend. Give us five stars. Or comment, if you're able to comment on a platform you're listening to. Really helps our visibility in the rankings for search. And we'll see you in the future. See you in the future.