What is Good Matcha? (Part 2)

 

 

 

Ryan  and Zongjun
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, this is my co -host Zongjun. Hello, hello!

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're going to talk about part two, what is good matcha again?

Just to give a quick recap and part one, you know, what is good matcha? We talked about how the fact that the matcha quality and the sense of quality in general is really, is a social construct. And then we also talked about matcha quality with respect to preferences and how preferences and quality can be two different things. But at the end of the day, when someone's asking what's a high quality matcha, really it's in disguise they're asking, am I going to like this?

What will I like? And preferences really can't be ignored or fully separated from quality and how preferences can differ in different cultures, appreciate different things. And last, you know, what is quality matcha from the lens of a product? Right, you can have a blind sensory experience where you can taste matcha, a cup of matcha, and you can say, I like it or dislike it based on the taste for various reasons. But the moment that becomes a product,

you have different sets of expectations. If Coca -Cola tasted different every time you drank it, and you still, you know, it still tasted good, but it was different, right, it's probably would be considered a low quality product. And how consistency really matters, and how that can be different depending on whether or not it's perceived as specialty, like wine, no consumer expects wine to taste the same every year.

Yeah, that's very true. If you really find consumer expectation in the way that they do not expect consistency, then consistency will not be related towards quality at all.

Yeah, exactly. Whereas like, you know, highly formulated products, let's say, you know, your your favorite craft brewers IPA, you know, hops change, the flavors change from year to year based for the same reasons that tea flavors change or grape grapes change and the expression of flavor in wine. But, you know, everyone expects their their, you know, 90 minute IPA to taste the same every year.

How consistency really also has to be considered at the product level form of quality. And we realized a couple hours after this recording that we were missing a couple of things in answering, you know, what is good matcha? What could be considered high quality matcha? And one of the biggest things we realized we overlooked was preparation. Matcha, unlike, let's say a bottle of scotch, can of beer, some wine is not a finished product, unless you're drinking an RTD, which is an industry term for ready to drink, like where you're just opening a bottle and taking a sip, like you go to Japan, there's a big culture of RTD tea. You can get it hot, you can get it cold, right? It's a fully prepared product that really shouldn't vary from person to person. But even if I order a can of matcha, and Zongjun, you order a can of matcha, and a friend in, let's say, New York, or in France, has the same one, we might have very different outcomes. And preparation is really the last mile that you don't want to mess up.

Ryan will probably use a 60 degree Celsius hot water whisk the matcha properly. I will probably do the same but end up adding some milk. And our friend in Paris, my you know adding some sparkling water into it to make it a little bit more crisp. Coming from the same kind of matcha with the different preparation method and different additions into the drink, you really can have drastically different results.

Yeah, and it's really important to quality. And the product doesn't stop with the can of matcha. The product experience can extend all the way to someone's home or in a cafe where they need to be very consistent. And even down to the level of the different tools that are available to some cafes, and the concept of a matcha product extends beyond just a can of matcha, right? It's in someone's home when they make it and the final drink is about what they're going to consume. Or it's at your local cafe where they might be representing a particular matcha brand, a particular matcha blend, or even a region. Blue Bottle recently has what they call Kraft Matcha that's from Uji Japan. And they're representing Uji Japan and the flavor profiles and expectations that come along with that when you're in New York City and they're charging $8 for a matcha latte.

And that last mile, it's really important that it's not only consistent, but well -prepared. And actually, one of the things that makes it even more difficult is that the standard coffee equipment doesn't always make it super easy to have a decent dose, for example. So a lot of coffee scales are not sensitive enough when you tear them to just register two grams. And a lot of them, and in particular one that's very frustrating is the Hario scale that's used for pour over coffees. When you put a tea bowl on it and click tear, it doesn't start registering anything until two grams, which is particularly awful because it's really easy to overshoot your dose.

So even like if you take the random set of equipment, that's available to cafes, the tools that are available to cafes. They might not be actually very suitable for making matcha in a very consistent way, where you're not drifting on dosage. And when you're only dosing two grams or three grams, or maybe in some places four grams, when you go over by a tenth of a gram, that's not only a big cost difference, but could yield a big taste difference.

Yeah, there are a lot of strange things happening in contemporary matcha right now. It's like not only we have all these retrofitting utensils coming from all of the chanoyu ceremony, like tea bowls, like chasen, all of these were built for chanoyu ceremony. And we also have all these cross fitting of coffee gears that being repurposed to prepare matcha.

So we are really lacking some equipment and utensils with the intentionality for contemporary matcha consumption and making. Yeah, where it's really just dead simple with those existing tools to produce a very consistent and high quality product. So, you know, what is good matcha and the products that we order from a menu matter just as much.

And, you know, let alone the freshness, you know, it's some high velocity cafes that are selling 50, 100, 150, sometimes even more matcha drinks a day, you can be reasonably confident that they're moving through them. And you have even really radically new concepts. Like Ooika has a shop in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. They mill matcha fresh every day. You know exactly how old that matcha is. They're serving some of the freshest matcha in the world. They might be serving the freshest matcha in the world. This concept doesn't even exist in Japan, which is really cool to see. And you also see there's one other tea shop in British Columbia. I believe they're doing the same thing. They're milling everyday fresh. Not necessarily on Ishi usus, a more industrial type of mill, but it's still very similar concept, where you walk into a random cafe in California or New York that might not be as high volume, a little more boutique. They're not serving any drinks, maybe matcha is less popular. And they pull out this can of matcha in this clear jar and that looks a little bit yellow. Like the person serving it to you probably doesn't even know how old it is. And you know, they're representing that brand, they're representing that product that they're serving. And you know, what is good matcha? You can have the world's best matcha and completely fumble the ball in the last mile because it's too old, because it wasn't whisked properly, because it wasn't dosed correctly, because of a lack of adequate tools. And these are all really real problems that the industry faces, especially in North America and Europe in particular.

Yeah, I mean, so far, you know, we have a lot of the discussion or even arguments over whether or not we can classify or define quality or preferences. But I think we can agree that there is this universal preference or desire for freshness in matcha across different countries, across different consumer cohorts. So this is really something that we should really pay attention to because we should treat matcha as a fresh food. It's not something that can turn better by aging, unlike a lot of other teas.

In very rare cases. I mean, there are some cases apparently where it mellows out and can become more balanced. But for most of the matcha, I mean, that's at the highest end. And it's just like in wine, not every wine is destined to be aged that way. And I think in matcha, it's really 0.01 percent maybe even less.

Yeah, and also it's more for like kind of to have it be less abrasive and that open up Kind of aging you don't really aged it for like longer period of time.

Yeah. I think it's on the order of a few years Yeah, and on a lot of cases, it's usually around six months There's a famous tea holiday in chanoyu, both in Omotesenke and Urasenke and I assume in others Tea ceremony schools as well called Robiraki which is the new year, which is in November. And they have a special jar, if I get the name of the jar, where they store the tencha. And there's a whole ceremony around grinding those tea leaves after having six months to kind of settle down. But even in that case, you know, it's part of the traditional ceremony, it's being fresh ground. And the guests can hear the sound of it being fresh ground and they can smell it. It's, you know, part of the sensory experience.

So yeah, doesn't really benefit from aging and shortening that time certainly is gonna drastically increase quality. And we've said this before many times in this podcast, but that was one of the defining features of the third wave coffee movement, specially coffee movement. In the early 2000s, people like James Freeman, founder and former CEO of Blue Bottle really advocated that coffee should be treated like a fresh food. And he noticed at the time that nowhere where he lived in California, anyone offered a roast date on the bag. So he had no idea how, no way of knowing when he was purchasing coffee, how freshly it was roasted. So, you know, that becomes very important. Just knowing in general is very important, that transparency and labeling.

Now, back then, it was considered the fresher, the better. The industry has actually evolved a little bit now. Now, really on the highest end of coffee appreciation circles, specialty cafes, they actually don't want it too fresh. The optimized window has actually shifted. A lot of the nicest cafes, and one that we used to frequent a lot, Zongjun was suited, in the financial district in New York, they actually, they buy, they're a multi -roaster cafe, so they buy from coffee roasteries all over the world. They actually age their coffee slightly. They serve it at about one month. And they've done a lot of testing that after one month, it's really peaked and ready for flavor. But again, if you don't have roast dates on the bag, you still have no way of knowing. And right now, the matcha industry is no better than the potato chip industry. All that you get is a best buy date.

Yeah, that's right. And also, it would be interesting to see the effect of some slight aging or mellow down process for such a matcha for all of these matcha drinks out there. Because a lot of these matchas, they were made not for the goal of making a matcha latte or making a matcha specialty drink. That's not the goal. The goal is to consume that matcha fresh and on its own. But it might be quite interesting to see if there's some kind of process that can tweak or optimize the matcha to be more suitable for other ingredients, which is now becoming more of a common way of consuming matcha in the West.

Yeah, and it's a great way into the next segment of this episode that we wanted to talk about. The intention that someone's asking when they ask, what is good matcha? What is high quality matcha? The next question should always be, what are you using it for?

That's right. You know, it's like when you walk into a good wine store, right? A bad experience is saying, you know, I want something good. This is my price range. And they take you to just one bottle and they say, this one, this one's perfect for you. A great experience is they start asking you questions. You know, are you going to eat anything with it? Are you taking it to your friends? Does that group of friends know anything about wine? And then they ask you your price range, and then they show you three different bottles, probably at different price points, saying, this is a fantastic one for these reasons. If you want to splurge, this is another choice, and here's why it's worth splurging on, and here's one more choice. Consumers really want to be empowered to make better decisions.

So when someone's asking, what is good matcha, what is high quality matcha, a similar decision tree structure about what they're using it for, who they're drinking it with, and the type of experience they want is going to be very important. And having that dialogue is very important. Or if a dialogue isn't possible, like not a lot of people buy matcha in a retail setting, or they're actually talking to someone directly, we don't really have the equivalent of tea sommeliers. Like these titles exist, but like where are these tea sommeliers employed?

Like someone please tell me. Maybe it's some of the really highest end restaurants, but like the vast majority of us are not going to experience that type of dialogue when buying tea, especially early on in our consumer journey. So, you know, that becomes very important on the internet when we buy tea to at least give the information to make a highly structured decision about why we're buying things and how to route us to the best product for us.

Yeah, you know, like consumer as they have more experienced in matcha in different scenarios, you know, naturally you would start climbing the consumer journey ladder into wanted to, you know, try more, have more options to explore different cultivar, to explore different regions, to explore different preparation methods with them, they wanted to play around. And you wanted really to offer the information in the first place for people to know which direction to go. And I think that's very important for both ends, for the consumers and also for our retailers, our manufacturers, or even tea farmers to all talk to each other with kind of organic community to built the future of matcha.

So Zongjun, if I want to make a really good matcha cheesecake, like the best matcha cheesecake in the world, what's good matcha?

Great questions, Ryan. I will probably not sacrifice my most expensive asahi into that cheesecake. But you know, like something milder, something plays well with very extensive milky flavors and creamy flavors might be something I wanted to look for. But you know, what are the true options that can make the best pair? Honestly, I don't know. Probably no one has really done that before, but this is probably going to be a serious consumer demand as we are seeing the explosion of matcha in other food and beverage category. So what do you think, Ryan?

Yeah. Well, I think you need to ask more questions there. How sweet are you going to make it? Are you going to make a very low sweet version? A lot of Asian style desserts and pastries usually are not nearly as sweet as their European and Western counterparts? I would probably ask about how strong the cheese flavor is or whether or not it's going to be more mild. And probably, how do you want the matcha flavor to present itself? Do you want it to be a bitter, refreshing element as part of this? Or maybe you actually want some of those umami characteristics, which can maybe halo some of the savoriness of the cream cheese notes and a lower sweetness in it.

So if I were to create like a really high -end cheesecake, very low sweetness, and I wanted to halo the creamy, savory notes of the cream cheese, maybe I would want to use a slightly higher end, what would be marketed as ceremonial grade. I probably care a lot about color. So if I'm using a blend, maybe I have something like Okimodori, just famous for being very vibrant green color, to have it be visually striking as well as, you know, other cultivars in there that are more umami forward and can express those notes. whereas if I were making a more, let's say American style or American preference cheesecake, much sweeter, probably a little more heavy, in, in profile, like a New York style cheesecake, you probably want culinary grade that's strong, bitter. You want something to contrast those elements.

Yeah. Just use a Yabukita, Ryan. Yeah.

So I don't know. I think these type of decision tree structures are interesting. And I think the reason this conversation is important is I think like anyone who knows anything about tea or knows anything about matcha automatically gets put into a position of being an educator because so few people know about tea or know about matcha. So naturally, you know, in conversations with your friends, someone's like, hey, what's the deal with matcha? What's good? What would I like? What should I go try? It's such an early movement that people being able to answer those questions really well to guide new consumers, new potential tea lovers and matcha lovers to the things that they would like most. And perhaps in an order where they could appreciate it and build an appreciation ladder. How do we work someone up from wanting to try matcha in a cheesecake, which by the way is a little weird to most people. This bright neon green cheesecake might turn, you know, that might be very adventurous for some people to move them to a matcha latte, to move them to what would be marketed as a ceremonial great blend, to a single cultivar, to more like interesting high -end specialty flavors. And you know, those journeys are crafted by other people, other influencers. And to it's important not to steer people in the wrong directions so they fall off that journey So and therefore the industry won't grow and be as thriving of an ecosystem.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean like if you For a lot of people like you and I we actually end up, you know starting under traditional Japanese channel your schools which is a very different set of education guideline and for probably, you know, like how 90 % of the consumers nowadays will end up knowing matcha or wanted to drink more matcha. You know, by learning, you know, how to walk a tea house in the set way and appreciate flower arrangement and calligraphy probably is not what someone would expect, you know, for their consumer journey of, you know, drinking more matcha or learning more about matcha. Yeah.

You know, my first tea ceremony class ever, I think I was a freshman at Penn State, the entire thing was in Japanese. The first thing that happened was I got criticized for not bringing white socks. I think I was wearing dark colored socks. And I learned that I need to take three steps across the tatami mat. And the whole lesson was just about how to walk in the tea room, which is a very humbling experience. It's actually kind of a good way to start an educational journey.

But at the same time, not a whole lot of people that are willing to go through that. And that's certainly not where future, the majority of the future in matcha appreciators and consumers are going to be coming from.

Yeah, the modernization of matcha is really a modernization of, for the lack of better words, deculturization of matcha. You're trying to remove all of the cultural element from matcha to make it more accessible for people from daily basis.

Or maybe not a complete removal, but a select version, a select different things. You're not overwhelming someone. There's so many, in the past, they've been to so many tea gatherings or tea shops or interacted with tea people, most of whom all are wonderful. But occasionally you come across a lot of educators that are very armchair authority.

This is good. I'm going to teach you what's good. This is really good matcha and you need to appreciate it because of this, this, this, and this. And they're coming from such a top -down positioning that it makes it really hard for most people to approach it. And then they pick really weird fights because sometimes people have non -overlapping knowledge structures where they might disagree on certain topics.

and like a really common one on the internet, especially when it comes to matcha, is whether or not matcha is from Japan or if it's from China. And there is no right answer to this question. It is a very complex issue that you can have. We could debate both sides and not come to a real resolution.

Yeah, I think most of the time people just talking over each other by their own unique interpretation or definitions. I mean, like matcha, the word matcha is written in Japanese language. Of course, you can argue that matcha is from Japan, but the format of powder green tea is definitely originated from Song dynasty in China. And at the time it was called Mocha. Which are the same characters as matcha. Yeah. Well, the kanji can be written slightly different, but the idea is the same.

But however, all of the culture elements associating with this very thing is fundamentally different from both sides. With Mocha, you have the Song dynasty style tea competition and with matcha, you have Japanese traditional chanoyu. These are completely different culture that had no association with each other. So when it comes to matcha versus Mocha, which one's better? What is high quality Mocha? Yeah, let's fight off, Ryan.

I'm gonna win. Wait, which side am I? You're Chinese. Yeah, I don't know. I'm half Korean and Koreans definitely don't like the Japanese. That's my personal feeling. It's just cultural baggage. So I don't know where to place myself.

Yeah. Yeah, so you know people with different interpretation, different definition of different terms, they are fundamentally just talking over each other. There's no common ground to establish any meaningful conversation. Yeah.

So I think it will be really beneficial moving forward for the entire matcha community is to have some sort of maybe call it a education system is too early, but some sort of guideline to guide beginners to want to learn matcha, to want to know more about matcha, to want to appreciate the extreme variety of matcha out there in the world.

I think that's very important and to really have wanted to set up a sense of authority in definition, I don't think it will be very beneficial at this stage.

Yeah, I mean, I really think it needs to be sort of more organically grown. There's a lot of reasons why people get into tea and throughout their tea journey, what their motivations are. I mean, they're really a non -negligible percentage of consumers who got into matcha because of watching Avatar the Last Airbender and seeing one of the characters always be brewing tea. From being at the Tea Institute at Penn State when I was there at the time, I would say maybe there were 20 % was a non -negligible reason why they wanted to come to learn about tea in the first place was that curiosity spark, that curiosity gap.

And perhaps we can learn more from the data that we're seeing on social media. What are the curiosity gaps that lead to more views on a topic, lead to more discussions on a topic, and kind of use those as ramps to bring new consumers into the category. So they can discover for themselves what is good matcha, what is high quality matcha to them to enrich their journey of drinking it.

Yeah. And for us as a provider of matcha, we should really start to think about having more options for people to explore. We should not be overcasting our own preference or our own definition of quality onto consumers, but to offer them the freedom to explore and choose.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think we can take a lot of that guidance from a lot of the tradition in Japan. That absolutely cannot be ignored when you have hundreds of years of history of continuous improvement, getting better and better and better.

The best matcha is always going to start at the farm. It's always going to start at the producer. And all out of that human capital and that cultural capital and that knowledge is concentrated in Japan. There can be innovations that happen elsewhere. And whether or not, you know, matcha or quote unquote matcha that's produced in China can ever reach a quality standard and preferences, I think it can. There's no fundamental reason why it can't. Maybe we shouldn't call it matcha then, because matcha is so associated with Japan. Maybe that label should be mocha, just the Chinese way of saying matcha.

And the question of what is good matcha and what is high quality matcha will forever be in flux and there will never be actually any true agreement.

Yeah, totally agree this is a you know, just like consumers preference in the market You know Ryan and I we've been both in you know consumer trying to R &D for consumer facing product in our past life and one thing that we know for sure is that consumers' preference is ever -changing. There's really not a fixed answer for what is a good product or what is a high quality product for a consumer. There is a answer. There will be answers for that questions maybe at the moment, but you know, who knows what's going to happen in the future. Consumer journey, consumer preference shifts happens all the time.

And as we work with consumers together, we need to be able to recognize that and be able to do innovations and adjustments alongside with our consumers and grow together.

And in parallel with tradition. I hope in the next 10 years, we see companies solely dedicated to heritage matcha to the way it's always been done by those producers using traditional methods. And that is something that the market is always going to want, is always going to have, and there's already an existing sub -segment of consumers and the matcha community that love those flavors, love that rich tradition, and that will not always be for everybody, and there'll be other segments that will grow as matcha moves into the mainstream, where there'll be other preference segments, preference clusters that exist, where there'll be more innovative methods.

You know, maybe hojicha powder is what everyone's going to love in the next 10 years. And there's going to be a whole connoisseurship around hojicha powder and different roast levels and different origins. Like we just don't know exactly what this landscape of powdered tea, macho -like beverages is going to be into the future. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or as you know, quality start rising in China and we start to have the technology and the market ready for mocha maybe one day.

And, you know, like we don't have to really just mill tencha. There's the definition for Mocha is even vaguer than Matcha. And I think in a good way, it's leaving a lot of space for innovation and for, you know, new format of possibility that we can do about it.

Yeah. I've had an unbelievable experience in Miao Li County in Taiwan, visiting the Global Tea Hut Center and they have a really old school traditional stone mill and they ran through roasted Taiwanese oolong and it was fruitwood longyan which is almost like a litchi charcoal fruitwood roasted and then it was aged and typically what happens when you roast and age a Taiwanese oolong like that it gets extremely fruity very sweet caramel notes bright red fruitsnand they milled it into a powder and whisked it like matcha. It is unlike any drink I've ever consumed in my life, even still to this day. It was so interesting. It, like the nose and the aroma, it brings me straight back just thinking about it and how mouthwatering it was. It was actually very bitter and very astringent, but there was just so much complexity and time intensity and the way flavors presented themselves. It was so interesting. It'd be really cool to see what I call very radical matcha like powdered tea like beverages out there. and you know, something like that could really stand up to milk. Like if we're talking about powdered tea being primarily consumed in lattes, something like that. with some milk and maybe a slight caramel sugar or honey. Wow. It's going to taste great. So, the future is very exciting. What is good? Matcha, will never be agreed upon.

It's extremely complex whether or not you view it sort of at the blind sensory experience level, at the product level, at the way you're consuming it at home or in a cafe, different use case applications, really complex topic. And the reason that it matters is because we want more people to love matcha. And being able to accurately answer this question is important for the future of our industry.

So that's all we have time for today. Thanks for listening to part two of What is Good Matcha? There might be a part three in the future. If you'd like us to expand on this topic in any way, please let us know. It'd be really cool to explore this in even more dimensions. So if you like this podcast, please give us five stars, share it with a friend, and thanks for listening.

All right, I'll see you in the next episode. Take care.