An Afternoon with a Chashi

Ryan · 0:07

Hello Ryan from the Future here. We're doing a survey. It's only 5 questions I've posted in the show notes, so if you're a regular listener, we would love to learn about what you like about the show, what you don't like about the show, what topics we should cover. If you have a moment, we would love to hear your feedback, good and bad so that we can improve the podcast. Thanks so much.

Ryan · 0:28

Hello, and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan and this is Zongjun Li. Hello. Hello also goes by Sam and we're the cofounders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey, Matcha, share startup stories and interview expert.

Ryan · 0:42

Today we have a very unique episode that we didn't really think we'd have the opportunity to get to talk about. So something we've talked about frequently, especially in the last season, is this very interesting profession called chashi or tea blender or tea purveyors.

Ryan · 0:57

And so these are the people behind the large traditional blend houses. They have people whose job it is to create new blends or to make sure that blends stay consistent. And other than hearing a few like bits and pieces and from people that have met them, we actually knew relatively little about their profession other than that it was very difficult in an art.

Zongjun · 1:17

Yeah. So actually my anticipation or expectation of these people has always been like a very traditional old Japanese grandpa, like with a lot of white hairs in this traditional, you know, Japanese dressing, living in the little Hut, doing some kind of, you know, like the herbal blending in a Miyazaki movie.

Ryan · 1:39

Giant spittoon where he goes up, does his slurping, spits it into the bucket 3 meters away. Yeah. And then whispering to himself like, so, so, so, so. But yeah, so we met this person about a year ago, but at the time we actually didn't know that he is a chashi.

Zongjun · 1:59

Yeah, no idea. And I guess like, I guess partially because he is really not that image that we were imagining and the person was super down to earth, very, very transparent about all the knowledge that he has about tea and tea business and actually very business oriented.

Ryan · 2:19

Yeah, very business oriented talking these, especially compared to a lot of other Japanese tea producers or people in various points in the value chain that we've interacted with. It was actually kind of shocking, especially being in like Kyoto Prefecture and spending a lot of time in Kyoto Prefecture where it's a little more traditional, little more like you need to be a little more culturally sensitive. People don't really say what they mean all the time to a world where it's like, wow, it almost feels like we're in China.

Zongjun · 2:48

Like it's just so direct. Very direct, very straightforward. And it it was really until that we start asking about very like deep questions related to tea, tea blending tea business that he starts to give us some very, very in depth and informative answers that I had the gut to ask him, Are you a chashi? And he said yes.

Zongjun · 3:12

And actually he won the National award for chashi. So he was the number one tea blending master in Japan one year. And he also happens to also be a tea farmer and apparently is one of about 5 or 6, apparently chashis that are also tea farmers and have complete knowledge all the way from agriculture to the finished product, which is apparently pretty uncommon.

Ryan · 3:38

So we, the moment we learned that the poor guy, they probably got bombarded with like 100 questions from us over the course of lunch in the sea, generously drove us to, to the airport. So we took full advantage of every second to, to learn as much as we could.

Ryan · 3:55

Because, you know, it's something that we've talked about on this podcast, especially last season, is that these, this profession within the tea community of these tea blenders and the work that they're doing is just so widely unknown. You know, in other industries you'll hear about like master roaster, master blender at a coffee house, you'll hear about people who do this in chocolate to make sure that chocolate is tasting consistent or unique or different, and a huge history of this in wine or even within the context of tea. It's also very common, you know, all the products that people love, like English breakfast,

Zongjun · 4:30

Earl Grey, all of these types of teas are blended products. And there's people somewhere in the world cupping a whole lot of tea and making sure that this slot makes sense in this blend and creating new blends as well. And so it's a really interesting profession. But in Japan, just like everything else, they kind of take it to a whole new level.

Ryan · 4:48

So before we jump into this, Sam, why don't we talk a little bit about everything we knew about chashi's before we had the opportunity to ask all these questions? Wow. Very little, actually. So they use a Don system. Yeah, it's.

Zongjun · 5:02

But historically, chashi is really a social class in Japan that granted the privilege to use shaded cultivation for the gardens that that they controlled. And historically there were three types of chashi. Each was responsible historically for a specific segment of tencha manufacturing and all the way serve it to the shogunate. So the border between those chashis kind of get fussed, you know, later on in the Japan slowly enter into the major restoration and actually there were chashis outside of the historical region that got the permission to also use shade the cultivation.

Ryan · 5:47

Historical region, of course, being Uji, that's right where during the majority of the Edo era the only place where you could legally have shaded cultivation of tea that could be then turned into matcha. So. But apparently there were other regions probably stretching out into perhaps Wazuka, perhaps Ujitawara that as everything started to loosen up saw some shaded cultivation.

Zongjun · 6:09

But we're having actually a lot of trouble proving that than any records or books that we've read but these. But I guess there was this last class of chashi as everything loosened up that helped from what you've read. Yeah, that's right. But you know, the, the, the role of chashi is really to aggregate all of these crude material that they source from all corners of, you know, Kyoto Prefecture.

Zongjun · 6:32

But at the time, Kyoto Prefecture wasn't well defined yet too. So like any kind of places that they end up sourcing tea from, but they aggregated that into into into a single or a handful of products. Blended products and the idea is that they taste the same year after year after year. I mean, tea is an agricultural product and depending on weather and how much fertilizer you applied and how many days it was shaded, a pretty significant taste variations. So their job is to make sure that like Gokumukashi every year from their brand, from their brand tastes like Gokumukashi should.

Ryan · 7:11

So something that David said, and I believe it was the last season of the podcast, David from Tezumi, the American matcha brand, is that a lot of these chashi's role historically was to understand both the agricultural practices that were going on in the cultivation and processing of matcha and tencha.

Ryan · 7:31

But their job was also to have one foot in high society. All of these nobles and feudal Lords and samurai that were consuming it. And they acted as this bridge or this conduit between farmers and people doing like, agriculture and labor and the people who were consuming the tea in what can be described as very affluent sentence in creating products for them. So their role historically has been that, but it has also slowly changed as Japan has changed. Yeah.

Zongjun · 8:04

But they still kind of still serve that role even till this day, like a very unique form, I would say, of client management. They're still responsible for creating special blends for, you know, different iemoto's from different schools and maintaining that kind of a guanxi or relationship with all these, you know, very high class quote UN quote high class buyers, but within Japan. So you will see a lot of these plans being kind of endorsed by different iemoto's with different names, but frequently they're actually the same product, but or they're slightly different depending on, you know, the iemoto's own preference.

Ryan · 8:47

Yeah, it's very unclear like how much iteration is done on behalf of these iemoto's, whether or not they taste it and say Yep, taste good, I'm going to endorse it or if they're giving feedback. And we also heard from David, from Tezumi from his samurai school of tea ceremony that he practices that their iemoto does really engage back and forth with their schools chashi giving them direct feedback about what they want to change within that blend that have apparently used Narino as one of like I believe 20 different blend components.

Ryan · 9:18

So it actually gets quite complicated. But so there is some definite feedback, but there's also a lot of tea that is the identical blend and that's just given different names depending on who it was endorsed by. And actually it's, we recently learned this an interesting piece of tea industry gossip. A lot of these have names like 1 was endorsed by one school of tea ceremony, let's say Omotesenke, the others by Urasenke. And they have two different names. And then typically that blend also exists, has a different name within the same portfolio.

Ryan · 9:50

It just doesn't have the endorsement. And typically it's much cheaper. It has a cheaper price. You are basically paying for the name essentially. So you have to be in the know to understand what's going on with these poetic naming conventions. So, you know, we talked a lot this about before. If you haven't heard, we recorded an episode called our Poetic Matcha Names Harmful from a consumer perspective. I still believe this is the case because you still don't hear any chashis in any of these large blend houses talking about the relationship between the poetic name. Which you know a poetic name

Ryan · 10:23

should have deep meaning, but otherwise you would just call it an arbitrary name, which is what it basically is to to to most people. But if it's a poetic name, supposedly there is something behind it, some connotations, some reference to something. Maybe it's a fleeting thing, maybe it's a color thing, maybe it's a paste thing, or maybe it's a link to someone's very specific preferences.

Ryan · 10:46

But you know, we just have no idea and people give it these random names, which is quite frustrating as a consumer from trying to learn anything. Well, from what I have been reading from all of those names, I can read some, most of the congies, if they're the names are in country.

Zongjun · 11:01

Sometimes they're not in country. Actually very infrequently that these names has actually have any implication to the product itself. It's usually implying like a like, like like a reference from the Tale of Genji or a reference from a, you know, ancient Japanese literature. And my suspicions is that these references are probably serve the purpose of kind of denoting a theme in the tea ceremony or tea gathering for a kind of attach a meaning to that. But you know, like frequently you know, you would actually learn the very little about the product itself based on the name.

Ryan · 11:40

Yeah, it just doesn't say anything at all. So we've also learned before we learned this, we have asked some people that have interacted with Japanese chashi, like how are they able to bind, identify things like how do they actually work in creating these blends? And what we've learned from Marc, from Ooika is that it's a self referential architecture.

Zongjun · 12:02

So they have this idea of like, let's say an archetypal Okumidori cultivar, for example, or an archetypal Yabukita or Samidori or Asahi or Uji Hikari or same, or any of the common cultivars used. And then based off of that reference point, they say it's more or less this one thing than the other. And then they kind of have that as like little drawers in their brain to stores references when they're evaluating new samples and anchoring to those references to decide how much they'll bid an auction for a particular lot or selecting a pre contracted tencha that they're buying from farmers and then blending into different

Zongjun · 12:46

products. And then supposedly using this framework to to try to make a good, well tasting blend across the attributes that they care about. There's still a little bit of a mystery and probably a question that I should have asked is that how do they keep that flavor memory up to date? Because, you know, all these, all these, you know, cultivars, depending on the weather, depending climate, depending on, you know, people's different usage of fertilizer will probably drift year by year.

Ryan · 13:19

Indeed. But there must be some sort of mechanism. But, you know, like, it's also very interesting because, like, we, we learned about that this whole community inside Japan is actually quite small. Yeah. About 200 people. 200 people and and these 200 people like at least will all gathered once a year and a lot of these regional chashis will have their own community, their own correlation and they're like in constant communication with. So here's an interesting question. How do you make sure that my archetypal Yabukita is the same as yours?

Zongjun · 13:53

Yeah. Across all of these other people, are they creating all like independent cousin systems? Yeah, probably like impossible. It's like for even for their regional access of different teas must be like different too. There's probably less value that these chashi can extract from talking to another chashi that's from the far away region, maybe some blending techniques. But in terms of the tea itself, I don't know. I'll put a question mark on that. Yeah, I mean, it's really hard to say. And the other difficult thing is, like, Sam, if you and I wanted to become a chashi, it'd be almost impossible. And apparently a lot of this is

Ryan · 14:34

passed down from father to son primarily. Or like, you know, their brother's chashi. They're chashi, their father's chashi. And part of the reason why it's almost impossible for anyone to come from the outside to learn the skill is 1.

Zongjun · 14:48

I don't think there's like, really a school where they teach this sort of thing. But also, it's almost impossible to acquire the references, right? So for example, we were just gifted another pair of fertilized and unfertilized tea from the same region, from the same producer, from the same harvest, processed on the same equipment. And unless you have that reference, like you're just not going to really understand what fertilizer does. And now you compound that across everything, the cultivars, the growing regions, the tencha processing steps in particular, like where and how heat treatment is applied and have a huge impact on taste.

Ryan · 15:28

How long it's been aging for, how well the tea was fertilized, the way it was shaded, the way it was picked, how long it was shaded, All of these things, whether or not you were picking a little bit too early or a little bit too late from a cultivar standpoint. Turns out that like most of the tea in Japan is not picked perfectly on the perfect day could possibly do because the tea factory is totally full, right? So there's a lot of like real, like physical, real world infrastructure constraints and they taste for that. Absolutely.

Zongjun · 15:59

And also like depending on the region, like different chashi's must have a very different accessibility to all the processing equipments. So a chashi has direct access to his own machineries to process tencha and does shiage.

Zongjun · 16:15

But for a lot of you know, other chashis, they probably need to work with the existing mechanisms, whether it's a cooperative or a different factory or a different company to to achieve the taste profile. So probably for some chashis they have way less control of the end product than others.

Ryan · 16:36

So yeah, no, absolutely. And especially with access to references, because if you watch any of like the wine documentaries of people becoming like Master of Wine or the court of Master Sommelier, the biggest problem, one of the biggest barriers to entry is just accumulating and actually like being able to afford the references to say this is a California Chardonnay that has never seen oak from this year, probably from this region, right?

Ryan · 17:02

Like you got to compound that across every single thing that matters in wine. And unless you're tied to some sort of institution like a restaurant or someone that has a deep, deep seller or you have your own deep pockets, you just never going to accumulate the references to be able to do this type of like master level tasting and master level work.

Zongjun · 17:22

And that's just talking about identification. And that has nothing to do with actually starting to blend things together and understanding the way flavor interacts. Not only the way flavor interacts as tencha when you blend it, but the way then the flavor is going to then be transformed into matcha.

Ryan · 17:38

This is actually one of the most exciting things about our mill Sanko Usu One. We just launched a beta program for which mills matcha to five microns. It has a cooling system and even the shape of the matcha particles themselves are characteristic of an ishi-usu.

Ryan · 17:56

What's so awesome about this equipment is that the scale can now be people now have access to this infrastructure that are outside Japan and they can taste tencha and then immediately taste what it tastes like as which is so difficult right now because tencha is not even available.

Zongjun · 18:16

But even now, as every new meal we have out into the world is a potential new person who can learn this back-to-back transformation within the value creation and the physical creation of matcha of what it tastes like from one step of processing to the next. That makes me so incredibly excited. Oh, yeah.

Zongjun · 18:35

It really unlocks a lot of possibilities. I mean, essentially, like people can do their own blends theoretically. That's a part of a very important value creation segment that has been so abstracted away historically from from you know, anyone that's outside of the industry because like even to this date, building a milling facility, acquiring all the those mills to get you to create the products, it's incredibly expensive even for people that lives inside of Japan, not to mention about people trying to import ishi usu to their own country.

Ryan · 19:11

Absolutely. So Sam, what were some of the things that oh, actually I wanted to say one more point about things that we knew about Chashi and to shout out Koto tea space and they have a fantastic YouTube video. It's about 45 minutes long talking.

Zongjun · 19:24

I think the main topic was about like what is ceremonial grade matcha? And they're kind of deconstructing that marketing term. But he they referenced a particular book that is written in Japanese also talking about the work of Chashi's way back in the day before cultivars even existed.

Zongjun · 19:42

So to give everyone a little context, almost now everything that is produced is some form of cultivar. Just like we have different grape varieties like Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, same exists within tea. And the reason that we do this or the reason that the industry does this, one, it does create different tastes, but two, the tea is all within that cultivar is ready to be picked at the same time. So typically you have early cultivars like normal cultivars and late cultivars, and you stagger out. What tea, quote UN quote ripens, if you think about it, in the case of fruit, what tea is ready to be picked when so you don't clog your tea factories, it

Zongjun · 20:21

means that you can like be processing a whole lot longer, but still picking everything when it's supposed to be picked. But back in the day, everything was what we call zairai, which are a seed propagated tea. So basically the plants are not genetically identical and they're allowed to have some form of sexual reproduction, which leads to seeds and those seeds have a lot of genetic diversity.

Zongjun · 20:44

It's kind of like apples. If you take like an apple seed from a random apple that you eat, you're not going to get a honey crisp apple tree and you're going to get something else which might taste great or might taste horrible.

Zongjun · 20:55

And so very similar thing with tea. If you go to a zairai field, the shape of the leaves looks different, the glossiness of the leaves look different, the thick and thinness look different, how jagged they are all sorts of thing and and when they're totally ready to be picked.

Zongjun · 21:11

So Chashi's part of their job was actually to know the tea plants quite intimately and go around and they would also exhibit very different colors. And so they would go to some of the lighter plants and label it shiro, which means white.

Zongjun · 21:25

And those were picked and separated and sorted separately to create these pseudo categories. And they would label these different things. And that was part of their job is actually much earlier on the process. Before the the tea was even picked, they were already doing some categorization about what should be picked when and how, how it should be organized into batches during processing. That was arguably one of the origin of why some of the macha is called something something No 0. Yes.

Zongjun · 21:53

Which is very interesting. I have three different reasons why, but that's one of the potential. Theory. That's one of the potential theory. And I believe the book is called Matcha no Subete, which is one of the, I would say, most comprehensive book about, you know, different information of different history and different, you know, matcha making science and also a lot of historical records of how matcha gets produced in different parts of Japan.

Zongjun · 22:24

But the book I think is only available in Japanese and Chinese traditional Chinese. Traditional Chinese. Yeah, so but a very interesting book and also talks about the history of the three types of chashi, which I which I only happens to find two other sources also in Japanese on the Internet that also talks about that part of this.

Ryan · 22:46

So highly recommend anyone to read this book. If you can. So Ryan, that was I guess, most of the things that we learned before we talked to our Chashi friend. So what do we learn after? Yes. So one of my first questions and I felt very embarrassed asking this, but thankfully I think we had built up enough rapport. It's like how accurate are chashis at identifying this? So like if they taste tencha, like how accurate is a normal chashi?

Ryan · 23:17

It's saying, oh, this is from Wazuka conventional agriculture, meaning there was fertilizer and pesticide usage from Okumidori, etcetera, a cultivar. And he didn't fully answer the question, but I will give you what we have gotten is it's talked about level of points. So this is the chashi system uses something called the Dan system or like a belt system.

Ryan · 23:43

Is it the like like in karate? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They use a similar system for like Kendo, like Japanese traditional fencing and you know, other art that has a ranking system. And apparently the lowest level is 1 dan and the highest level is having a 10th level dan.

Ryan · 24:03

So he said for level 1 dan, it's about a 50% accuracy in identification. That's as about accurate as flipping a coin well. Actually it's not. I mean it's about accurate. It's like flipping a die. I think with multiple faces it's a lot.

Ryan · 24:20

I mean there's a lot of different possibilities where tea comes from and different cultivars. Hey, I'd be happy with the percent. Well, I mean the kind of the the entry bar, the kind of is not not as high as I anticipated. Surely it requires some practice and knowledge. Yes, indeed.

Ryan · 24:37

And apparently level 2 is about 55% accuracy, so not a very large jump. But I guess it's pretty difficult to hit a very accurate score because there's just so little standardized training material for anyone to be able to kind of practice and gain knowledge with.

Zongjun · 24:56

And the variation of all these materials are so large year by year. Yeah, and apparently they source a lot of these material from the competition collectively. So like, it's like a potluck, like everyone brings a bunch of references. Which?

Ryan · 25:11

Was kind of an interesting, interesting point. After level 2, we have no idea, but we've heard from Marc from Ooika that after about level 5, you basically commit to doing this for the rest of your life, but you can like just kind of put your foot in the door on earlier levels of of Dan and chashi. I mean, we also know that Level 10 is very, very rare and that they also hold the competition every year to see who's kind of #1 And it's very unclear if the competition has anything to do with the Dan system because we've also heard there's like theoretical exams, but at what point and when and what it gives you access to is also a little

Ryan · 25:49

unclear. Everyone seems to be very confused about how the system actually works, and we've talked to people who've been in the industry for decades and it's still we have a more clear picture, which is why we're recording this, but it's certainly very fuzzy.

Zongjun · 26:02

Yeah. But this, these competitions are held, you know, every year and in different regions too. So the regions kind of rotate from, you know, this year's in Shizuoka, next year is back to Kyoto, and all of the chashis will participate in these events.

Zongjun · 26:18

And apparently the competition is very, very competitive. And it lasts for only a day. And we think that one day you need to do all of these blind tastings and things That is part of the examination criteria. So very, very competitive.

Ryan · 26:34

Our Chashi friend actually described it with a very frowned face. Like if it's something that's hard memory, yeah. Probably hard on. Your stomach, probably. So one of my questions was, so right now we're like really learning about pesticide residue requirements for different countries because if you source outside the standard group of producers and tea farmers within Japan that have experience exporting tea abroad.

Ryan · 27:03

So if you want to expand that circle to people that have more supply, but in exchange they have less, the reason they have more supply is because they have less experience exporting anything from from their stocks. My thought was, oh wow, you know, I wonder because we know within tea blending, you need to maintain flavor, you need to maintain color and you need to maintain cost. And all three of these things are like the things that you're optimizing around every year when you're creating these different blends.

Ryan · 27:32

But then I thought, oh, wow, you also need to maintain compliance for pesticide residue because what's allowed to enter, let's say, like a very low compliance country like Thailand versus a very high compliance region like the European Union?

Ryan · 27:48

I wonder, like these stocks must be differently available. And I wonder if you can take some very like medium level pesticide tea, mix it with a bunch of organic tea and get it to fall just below the threshold requirement.

Ryan · 28:01

So I asked that in a much more simple way, and they said no, that actually this is really not part of a chashi's job. They do not focus much on at all pesticides or any form of compliance beyond knowing that the components they're working with already are compliant or not.

Zongjun · 28:19

Yeah. I mean, the gain of that is probably very low because like for places like EU, for a lot of these criterias, it's like absolute 0, like you cannot have anything related to certain items on the examination sheet. So, yeah, I don't know. And also for like accessibility on you know, testing equipments, you know, doing tea testing and all these chemical residual testing is very, very cumbersome and expensive. So it's probably not worth the gain of trying to do a compliance blending of sneak some of the non compliance things underneath the table.

Zongjun · 28:56

Yeah. It's actually very unfortunate how expensive this is because you know, unless you're doing very large volumes it literally doesn't make any sense economically. Do any form of pesticide residual testing. Apparently the thresholds is at least one to two KG of T. Sacrifice a lot.

Zongjun · 29:15

So and even in China, you know, we're in and out of China because we're developing and manufacturing this mill now. It's like, oh, got to be highly commoditized over here. But even in China costs I think 350 U.S. dollars plus all the sample that you need to part with. $300 yeah, just to test a very basic tencha like if you get it to if you want to test the tea, if if the tea is EU compliant, you need to upgrade to a much more expensive package.

Ryan · 29:45

But apparently too, if you're not, so long as you're not importing metric tons, a lot of the stuff flies under the radar. So everything is just built on trust and that yes, it's EU compliant. No, it's not EU compliant. And we've also heard from some people, not not this chashi, but from someone else, that a lot of producers will just blend together a bunch of material that they're reporting and then send that off for pesticide residue testing to make sure that the average is within compliance.

Ryan · 30:12

If they got audited, it wouldn't pass, but at least they can have some Peace of Mind that there isn't like, you know, something really horrific in that tea. We also asked about color and I like my specific question was like, what is the your vocabulary to talk about the color matcha?

Zongjun · 30:26

Many use two different descriptors. One is brilliant green. And then I clarified, you know, like Samidori, like a very light color called for. He said yes, exactly. And then he said deep green, which is, and I used Okumidori as a clarification.

Zongjun · 30:41

And he said yes, like like Okumidori. Oku actually just means like deep or profound in Japanese language and Sae, like the sae means like bright or like very sharp. So they're descriptive. Very descriptive names actually, so that that that was actually very interesting. And they don't necessarily have the very kind of like a point system to describe the color.

Zongjun · 31:06

It's kind of, you know, arbitrary. Yeah. And from what we understand like because we tried to clarify this too, it's very little objective. Color measurement is done like any form of color imagery or direct like analytical measurement.

Zongjun · 31:22

But I guess that should exist or probably definitely exist at some point because you have all these, like, automated color sweater for tencha. You definitely, you know, someone definitely has the knowledge of how to set the machine to sort the color of, you know, all these tencha leaves. So I guess maybe that specialty is not part of chashi's job. It's unknown, Yeah.

Zongjun · 31:44

Very unknown. Technically, I guess they would help maybe overseas parts of shiage or maybe it's very context dependent whether or not they have any control over the shiage processing. But you know, we don't know. We also asked like, are you friends with other chashi's?

Zongjun · 31:59

Like what is the community like? But he says he talks to them all the time from all over, from different prefectures and that, you know, they're constantly asking questions to each other and sharing references. So there is an internal community as far as we can tell. Probably there is a secret forum you know somewhere that that is some sort of a chashi haven.

Ryan · 32:21

All easy you regulations, they're horrible, so difficult to make anything taste good for this market. That's funny. What's next? Oh, we asked him what his cultivars were that he was most excited about new cultivars when he talked about Kirari 31, which if you haven't had it yet, you absolutely have to go find a matcha or even a sencha or Gyokuro.

Ryan · 32:45

That's Kirari 31. Really worth it to have the reference. Tastes very good, very creamy, very interesting. And the other one is Saemidori, which I know they're doing a lot of growth in the Kagoshima on. Yeah. And we also asked him about what's his opinion about this recently popular new cultivar for matcha. And it's not a new cultivar for tea, but new cultivar for matcha is Sayama Kaori.

Ryan · 33:07

And he said that, you know, it's definitely doesn't carry a lot of the traditional matcha characteristic. It's more bitter and stringent, but the flavor is very complex. So we actually end up procuring a bag of Sayama Kaori tencha.

Ryan · 33:22

So we are going to melt that into matcha powder with our machine and see if it's indeed, you know, good or bad. And something that we are doing in sort of our attempt to help people not necessarily become chashis, but at least start deconstructing and self teaching the skill of learning to taste different tencha on different tencha samples.

Ryan · 33:42

And we're going to be launching something akin to like a tencha library where we're going to unbundle these, these like 1 to 2K reference bags that we have into probably 25 or 50G sample to make available to anyone, not just mill owners.

Ryan · 33:56

And so if you want to try this at some point in the near future, it will be on our website and you'll be able to order it and have that taste reference. One thing that the quite surprised me after talking to our chashi friend, well, after learning that he's a chashi is how like not cagey they are. Like we have this kind of anticipation of these, you know, chashi's being having their own language, their own society, their own culture, But it's it's really not that. Like he's very transparent about all the knowledge that he has. And he's also very open about the idea of, you know, other people doing the blending

Ryan · 34:36

themselves. So I think with our machine, we can really unlock the freedom or the possibility of, you know, everyone to at least be able to try doing blending. Like, you know, not everyone will be a good tea blender or a good chashi, but you know, everyone needs at least needs to have the opportunity to learn and try to become one.

Ryan · 34:57

And I think that's very important and very healthy for, you know, this whole specialty matcha movement. So one of our recent podcast recordings, we talked about the concept of currency of trust. And something that we got to towards the end of the episode is that, you know, Japan has a very unique culture in many, many respects.

Ryan · 35:16

But one of the more important ones is the respect for authority and the respect for like people who are at some level higher status than you because of age or because of some other factor. And that, you know, we were mostly talking think about currency of trust in can I trust you that this is labeled correctly or comes from this particular region, etc. But also the currency of trust sometimes means not asking questions.

Ryan · 35:43

If one of the best clients in Kyoto walks into Leola and comes in and goes to the main manager and asks to know what are the cultivars in this gokumukashi this season, the there could be an implication that he does not trust the judgement or that he is somehow questioning the quality of that land or what went into it or the work that these people are doing.

Ryan · 36:10

So the people who work retail tend to be extremely defensive. If you walk into Ippodo or Marukyu Koyamaen or any of these traditional brand houses, or even go to the live streams that some of these producers have, you'll see in the comments people will ask like, oh, where is this tea from?

Ryan · 36:27

And they'll say, oh, it's proprietary, we can't tell you, blah, blah, blah. But it seems that that is like one level below the chashi. But I think part of this is the culture of asking questions is a culture of being skeptical.

Ryan · 36:40

And in the West we see this is healthy and educational understanding it. But in the East, in particular in Japan, it might be perceived as questioning someone's judgement. Like, who are you to ask me that? But I'm a chashi or I, I, you know, we're a 300 year old company.

Ryan · 36:57

Like, why do you need to know what these cultivars are? I'm not saying that's what they're thinking, but I bet a large part of the reason why this culture has lasted for so long, it's because it would be incredibly culturally inappropriate to start asking so many questions and poking and prodding to learning about matcha as a product.

Zongjun · 37:16

What do you think about that, Sam? Yeah. It's possible. And I think that the intention of asking those questions really matter in communication of intentions is a very important, I would say art of Japanese culture demonstrating tensions and you know, like clarifying your curiosity before asking those questions. I mean, we, we end up getting a lot of honest and informative answers after we show that to a lot of people in Japan that we interact with.

Zongjun · 37:52

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, attention matters. And I think historically, why, you know, this part of their job or the knowledge of tea blending or the knowledge about tea cultivars so marginalized, I think it has really something to do with how farming as a practice or as a social class being perceived in the Japanese society historically.

Zongjun · 38:15

It's never something that is part of the, you know, literati or the higher class people's topic. Like they don't care about what the farmers are doing in the field. You know, they care about, you know, the artistic theme of the tea gathering.

Zongjun · 38:30

They care about, you know, the very interesting Song dynasty or Tang dynasty ceramic they end up procuring. They care about, you know, the, the guests within the same tea gathering and, you know, the information or the decision that that end up getting made on that day.

Zongjun · 38:47

So they they probably don't necessarily care about, you know, if this tea is, you know, being made of a very specific cultivation farming method that, that, that, that, you know, the farmers are doing. Yeah, I certainly agree.

Zongjun · 39:02

And I think maybe that just most Japanese consumers just don't care and in general, and it wasn't until recently that more foreigners got interested in matcha. And when you come in as a foreigner and you start bombarding these salespeople or retail people, more people that you're trying to source from with all of the questions, sometimes intention is incredibly difficult to communicate and it can feel like you're questioning someone's judgement or trying to replicate a blend or who knows what.

Zongjun · 39:29

Yeah, Because, you know, like I feel like there is some, I would say a misalignment of a lot of criteria that people care about in terms of if there are like a quality indicator, like the idea of something being single origin, the idea of something being truly, truly like a local. Like this is tea from Uji, not just Uji tea. I think it's like a very new thing, a new concept, a new thing that people care about and the new thing that people perceive as a quality indicator.

Zongjun · 40:00

Like historically, people who makes matcha in Japan do not care about all these things. And the consumers do know that the consumers do not care about it. Like it's really like all of these concept I would say. Probably is largely driven by people that that that lays outside of Japan. Like all of these single origin, single cultivar, this terroir concept came from wine, came from coffee. Like, yeah.

Zongjun · 40:26

So like when, when you kind of ask if the tea is whether or not just single origin, whether or not a single cultivar, sometimes you can sense a level of frustration from these tea farmers or these, you know, tea, tea tea houses that you know, wow, this guy Jean is trying to use this to kind of access the quality of my tea. But like, you know, like that's that has never been a quality indicator for Japanese matcha historical. That's that's actually an invention from a non Japanese person.

Ryan · 41:00

Indeed, indeed. So actually, I have a very good segue off of this is that, you know, something that we're going to talk about more and more in season 4 is that Uji cha, Uji matcha does not come from Uji. At least most of it does not even though Uji is the historic growing region.

Ryan · 41:16

And like during the Edo period, for example, and there were the only people who are really given the license to do shaded cultivation at all. But anything that comes from Nara, Shiga, or Mie prefectures in Kyoto Prefecture can be called Uji matcha. And so long as the shiage processing is done in anywhere in Kyoto Prefecture, it is allowed to fall under the Uji matcha trademark.

Ryan · 41:40

I apologize for all those words, but this is actually indeed very complicated when you try to work backwards, like what in the world is Uji matcha? So one of our sourcing strategies is this is interesting. Let's just go to Nara, Shiga and Mie, buy the tea before it enters Kyoto Prefecture. Maybe we can get a better price for it because it's not being blended.

Ryan · 42:03

It's no longer than magically turned into Uji matcha. So we were asking him like, is this a good strategy, something that we should be doing? And he told us something very interesting. And Nara, Shiga, and Mie, they don't have a regional auction system, but they can participate in the national auction. But it's a very High Commission auction, unlike these other prefectural auctions that take place, which it's much more economically beneficial.

Ryan · 42:29

So it's actually much more profitable for tea farmers in these regions to have direct contracts with Kyoto based companies, which means that there's almost no leftover material that can be labeled as specifically coming from Nara, MIE or Shiga prefectures. There are some producers that do it and you'll we'll find a few handfuls, but it's not any larger meaningful volume. It literally all just gets turned into ujimacha because it gets sold to the Kyoto pre the Kyoto companies wholesalers. So there's a lot of actual structural barriers here, but there's a very interesting piece of industry gossip that it is basically nearly impossible to

Zongjun · 43:11

source tension at any meaningful volume from those prefectures. Yeah, Ryan, you said something very memorable as we were walking in the city of Wuji. Is that use? He said that this is the place produce the words masha and none of it. Produce all of the world's Uji matcha and almost none of it on Uji Main Street.

Ryan · 43:30

There's only two produce on the direct Main Street, only two of the stalls are from actual tea farmers that actually grow things that are actually grown within Uji or the rest of it, you know who knows big roll of the dice.

Zongjun · 43:43

And then of course, slightly off the street, you have Harishi Shimei and of course they're local as well. So within Uji City, you know, there's there are others, but on the Main Street there's just those two, which is actually a really sad story, very sad. And we also learned from a wuji tea farmer segwayed from the topic of the conversation with our chashi friend. But there's no auction system within Wuji. So all of these Wuji tea, whether or not is truly from Wuji or from all of the other, you know, cities and areas surrounding Wuji, is that they also get contracted away to all of these large tea shops or tea

Ryan · 44:23

brands. Well, not even contracted, just like historically have worked with. Yeah, commissioned, contracted, but there's no actual contract being signed. It's all like very, very shady. Like, like, of course you know, the farmers can say no to these tea shops, but you know the moment they say no, they are getting boycott and blacklist by the entire local agricultural system. Yeah, apparently then if they say no to the wholesalers, then if they try to take it to auction, it's a little unclear what the ramifications were, but it didn't sound like that was a realistic option.

Zongjun · 44:57

They wanted to take it to the Kyoto Prefecture auction because this year there were some very strange dynamics where because the wholesalers, which largely consist of these tashi, set the price for that material, a lot of it's hand picked tazumi tea from Uji city proper was selling for less than machine cut Wazooka tea, you know? Can go through the local auction. System that goes through the auction system because it's a little bit more of a free market and you know, people can can buy it for what it's worth.

Ryan · 45:34

Yeah, but the defense of, you know, the reason why this system exists is that historically, especially when matcha was largely being ignored by the society and is was a indeed dying art. In the past it was all these tea companies who, you know, consistently paying all these farmers. Is a lifeline.

Ryan · 45:56

Yeah, to to get them to survive to these days. And still to this day into the future, like if the whole market slumps and it gets so small, they will have a buyer. Even though we're in a bull market, it's fine and it looks like a horrible injustice. But in a market that's declining, it's actually a pretty interesting saving grace, particularly because these traditional blend houses have such strong tide to the tea ceremony schools and to other very important cultural institutions where they're probably always going to have buyers.

Ryan · 46:29

Even as Japan ages and it's a shrinking population and fewer and fewer tea ceremony practitioners are doing anything active, it's still probably enough to support the traditional, the matcha industry, especially the stuff, the best stuff that's coming out of Uji proper.

Zongjun · 46:45

So that was super interesting. So it's nearly impossible to source anything from Nara or she got not impossible, just like not a whole lot of volume in the same way that you can get out of other places. So we also learned about a relatively untalked about thing we we don't talk much about on this podcast, but Amacha has to come from Tensha, which is shaded, unrolled, deemed green tea.

Ryan · 47:12

It was like the shortest definition and D stemmed and deveined. That's about the shortest definition that I can come up with. But there's also something called moga cha and it's primarily used for green tea powder. But apparently more and more and more moga cha is getting slicked and blended into different bunch of products.

Ryan · 47:29

And it's basically you process tensha the same way you would process sencha with the same equipment. You just turn off the rolling equipment so it heats it, it steams it, it dries it, but it doesn't go through the rolling step where you're breaking open the cell walls, extracting those flavors, getting it ready for loosely fruit tea.

Ryan · 47:48

Instead, all the flavors, quote UN quote, locked inside the cell walls doesn't go through the rolling. And we've heard that Mogacha has increased its production by 5 year on year, both to support the quote UN quote green tea powder, but also some of this moga Moga cha does come from shaded cultivation and gets blended in.

Zongjun · 48:10

We've heard a few percent here, a few percent there into Matcha, different matcha products. Yeah, these are well, I would say indeed inferior products or inferior fillers for for matcha. And you're not not too confused with another tea called Toshi Cha, which are, you know, flavorless or like very uncharacteristic, but actual tension that, you know, historically Tashi uses to increase the volume of a tan cha batch. So we also asked our Tashi friend, so like if you want to indeed blend mogacha with a batch of tan cha but still maintain the quality standard, what is like kind of the portion that you would?

Zongjun · 48:52

Like how much can you get away with or with like medium quality tan cha? Like say you have some like very normal tan cha, it's a really good ones. Like what's the threshold? Yeah. So apparently 30% mortgage, 17% like good Tancha is something that they will consider a safe. Yeah, 3070 or like mediocre Tancha, Yeah and 70% good, which is actually way less than I thought does like you know, it produces can produce a lot more volume, but I actually would have assumed something closer to 5050, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

Ryan · 49:28

So we actually end up being given back of Mogasha from a unnamed donor of such interesting sample and we are going to meld it and see how exactly. It looks and smells good. It does. Doesn't look like tensha but it's very dark and the leaves are slightly folded over on each other and very choppy.

Zongjun · 49:51

But it smells good and it looks good. Yeah, yeah. And it's actually not as veiny as I expect. It looks totally millable on an issue so it's not so woody or full of stems or veins, so it's actually very promising. Very promising.

Zongjun · 50:05

Because it's much easier because you know, if you don't have access to a tensha processing facility, you can make this stuff on a Sencha processing facility, which really decreases the amount of infrastructure and speed and timing that you need to help fulfill this boom. Because if it tastes good, honestly, who cares? Especially in like most consumption scenarios. No, Ryan, it's not true matcha.

Zongjun · 50:32

It's a Gray area, kind of, but a lot of quote UN quote matcha even we've heard from the traditional players uses a lot. They use a lot of aracha as filler. Yeah, well, honestly, like from a color and you know, smell standpoint, it's better than most of the tencha that we saw in China. Like those tea were actually, you know, like even Japanese cultivars and being processed by Japanese machine. But you know, honestly, this aracha looks very promising. But you know, we need to taste it before we make any real judgments.

Ryan · 51:02

Something that I asked about too is steaming time because you hear that like part of the art and the science of making tencha production, steaming is so important. And like the idea of like a deep steamed or Fukamushi tencha, no one really talks about it. I mean, apparently like it's really you have seconds like like a single second can like change the optimization that and the flavor transformation in that leaf. And I asked, like, does anyone do deep? Does anyone like do deep steaming or like slightly more than deep steaming?

Ryan · 51:34

And what happens to the taste? And he said that the taste actually improves to some extent, but it destroys the color. It turns yellow and brown and you don't get that bright green. And he also says that it destroys a lot of like inherent characteristics.

Zongjun · 51:51

Yeah, the complexity of the leaf. Like the the flavors of a, you know, Uji Hikari or an Asahi will kind of all be mellowed out. It's like over roasting coffee, right? It just all starts to taste like roasted coffee after a while.

Ryan · 52:05

Apparently same thing with deep steamed tea to some extent. But he also told us that Yame in general does steam slightly longer and give it a lighter toast. And actually it's pretty interesting. Abby are the matcha scientists did some color imagery on a bunch of Uji samples and a bunch of Yame samples and quantum quantifiably and was able to conclude that the Yame samples are much less green. And this is part of the reason why. But it actually doesn't mean that they're lower quality. This quality thing with color is very complicated because it can be driven by the cultivar because some colors are naturally lighter and darker

Ryan · 52:40

than others, like brilliant green versus deep green. How long it was steamed for, any type of roasty, toasty step that it went through, how old the tea was after it was. I mean, even the water temperature that you can prepare it with can change the color. It's there's a lot of factors.

Zongjun · 52:59

Yeah, and also how fine the powder gets milk. Oh. That too, yeah. Yeah, it's very interesting. And honestly, you know, like if it doesn't impact the taste of the matcha, like I would much rather have a better tasting matcha versus a greener matcha.

Ryan · 53:15

Absolutely. So we have two more points before we conclude this. Actually, this ended up being quite a long episode, much longer than we were anticipating. But we asked him about what he thinks of this matcha boom and the word that he used was nervous, which was a bit of an unexpected answer and an expected answer at the same time.

Zongjun · 53:36

It's better than the other answer that we got scared, like scary. So yeah, I don't know, like from a business standpoint, you can definitely sense there's some level of excitement coming from him because like. If you have money and capital to put to work right now and infrastructure, you really win. Yeah, yeah, Especially for Itashi, like him that's so vertically integrated from production to processing to manufacturing to selling.

Zongjun · 54:08

It's like it really like fuels a lot of his ideas and innovations. And this Tashi is also relatively young, so, you know, it's actually such a refreshing experience talking to him and, you know, like, and meeting him and just knowing his existence. Yes, actually makes us not nervous. It makes us extremely optimistic. But yes.

Ryan · 54:32

Wow, finally. So not only can we learn, but we can start understanding why to a lot of the questions we've had for a long time. But the reason he says he's nervous is that many small tea companies within Japan, a lot of the mom and pop tea companies cannot buy tencha at all.

Ryan · 54:47

So most of the tencha are all silent auctions. And we learned recently that one of the best chashis in Japan, a different one, but one of the best. And I believe there are 10 Don Chashi bid on something like 2 tons of tencha at the auctions. And it's a silent auction.

Ryan · 55:04

So you don't know if you're the highest bid and you can't respond to give a higher bid. And only walked out of that auction with like 200 kilograms. That's the price to quality ratio for the the people who are deep in the industry like it, it's selling for way more than like it's worth, at least in their minds. That's how I interpret that.

Zongjun · 55:25

I think it's a fair interpretation. If you're not well capitalized, good luck. Like from the cash flow consideration, it's a it's, it's not good and it's not cool. And there's a lot of companies going out of business. And actually some of the reason we're able to source tencha at the moment and we're pushing further and further outside of the areas that we're familiar with to people who have much smaller tea companies.

Zongjun · 55:47

It's because there's huge lines for shiage processing. And also for milling. And for milling, so a lot of there's actually, we didn't realize this, there's a lot of tea companies in Japan that service their local communities and they buy tencha at auction or a slightly less refined version of tencha at auction. They send it off for shiage processing to 1 vendor and then they get it back and then they send it off for milling to a different vendor and they sell it to their local community. And that's their part of the value chain. It's the retails, the tea store part of the value chain. I mean, they're able to

Zongjun · 56:23

participate in that auction system to get access to the commodity products, but the transformation is fundamentally being done by other people. The problem is, is that everyone needs those, the capacity of that infrastructure right now.

Zongjun · 56:36

And there's huge lines. So like we've met some people that are just sitting on massive amounts of tencha that they can't sell or do anything with because they have no capacity to mail it. And we've heard about these people, but now that we finally met them, we're hoping that our mill can be a great way for these people to get some cash flow and to purchase their tencha and then mill it locally wherever they are and to serve it fresh.

Zongjun · 57:01

It's better for them, it's better for the consumer, and it's good for anyone who wants to add value on top, such as fresh milling. So we really encourage any listener who has a tea brand to go go deep and try to find these people because it gives them a lifeline to get the cash flow that they need. Because, I mean, you know, when you're buying things at auction, you buy it and then you're sitting in on that inventory. And if you aren't able to do the transformations that you need, such as shiage and milling to sell it, you're stuck. And a lot of places are just declaring bankruptcy more they're retiring early, which is

Ryan · 57:35

very, very sad. And even, like you know, giving them some name recognition too could be very powerful. Yeah, totally. So as long term hold the phone, let's talk about the single most exciting, interesting optimistic thing that we learned about from this Tashi that we did save for the very, very end, which might be a little controversial.

Zongjun · 57:55

Yes, the elephant in the room, Ryan, it's China. China, Chinese matcha, Chinese tencha. Well, it's no secret that all of these Japanese company has, you know, they have been importing materials from China or even doing processing and packaging locally inside China to create, you know, matcha or quote unquote Chinese matcha.

Zongjun · 58:17

But we have learned that, you know, there are some products or some quality of these tencha in China are actually getting good. So we personally haven't really experienced that like we have been, you know, on and off going for sourcings also in China to try to find find out if there are indeed good tencha or matcha being made here. But we haven't had luck of, you know, getting access to those materials.

Zongjun · 58:43

But you know, according to our Tashi friends, those materials actually exist. And they taste good, and they think that the quality is good. And they work with the producers in China continuously and giving their, like, seal of approval before they use it, which is super interesting and way more pragmatic than we ever would have thought.

Zongjun · 59:04

And, you know, they framed it as like, yeah, it's like really good raw material. Like this is like great Yabukita. And the quality is getting pretty good. It's getting better every year. And, you know, it's processed on Japanese processing equipment.

Zongjun · 59:19

And we're working closely with the farmers to make sure that this aracha is good enough for certain types of milling and that there's good color homogeneity and that they're doing all of the practices that they should be doing.

Zongjun · 59:30

And in fact, what he also told us is that some of the gardens that actually pesticides and fertilizer free. So the material coming from those places probably not taste as good as Japanese material, but they are like EU compliant.

Zongjun · 59:45

A lot of it's being done for compliance reasons, yes, very hard to get like true compliant matcha coming out of Japan. So like all of this growth explosion in particularly in the US and the EU needs compliant matcha so.

Zongjun · 1:00:01

So like a lot of these Japanese company over companies over the past 15 years have set up subsidiaries in China. But the majority of the matcha production happening here in China where we're recording this right now is specifically for those export markets. And it is actively taking pressure off of the system in Japan.

Zongjun · 1:00:20

Like just the structural problems that we were just talking about 10 minutes ago where you have people who have had family businesses for decades, who's the local tea house, local matcha guy can't like get access to, you know, shiage equipment and refining equipment, right?

Zongjun · 1:00:38

Like sourcing this in China is actively taking pressure off the system because it can be done in places like in other places. Not just China, like from this Korea trip that we recently have conducted, we also learned that there are great matchas being produced over there too. So like this whole system stress is actually pretty dire because we also learned from our Tashi friend is that a lot of these other tea production in Japan are suffering because a lot of people are switching to making tencha and there is not enough of tea like sencha being made till the point that a lot of these sencha companies and

Zongjun · 1:01:18

sencha beverage companies are having trouble sourcing sencha materials coming from Japan. So like even like if anyone has been to Japan, you'll see all this green tea and PET plastic bottles everywhere and like every vending machine.

Ryan · 1:01:33

Like it's very likely that this matcha shortage is going to cause price increases for these PET teas like Ito En and the ones from Suntory and Asahi and all the companies that do this a Coca-Cola Japan. It's very possible that all of these green teas get more and more expensive because of the matcha shortage. Just a wild secondary implication that you probably wouldn't have thought about.

Zongjun · 1:01:57

IA ¥150, Ito En sencha will be gone from Lawson's. No, it'll just be ¥200 or something. Yeah, the price tag will be different. So it's a lot of secondary and tertiary implications. But, you know, he was saying that, yeah, I think in five years almost all players in Japan will be importing Chinese tencha or Chinese material just because there's not enough to meet demand. Yeah.

Zongjun · 1:02:23

And a lot of active investment. Yeah, this is a very hopeful future. I would say like because from my personal experience, you know, like it's really difficult to source anything that that's quality in China at the moment.

Zongjun · 1:02:36

And part of the reason I think is, you know, there's really very little specialty consumers within China that you know, push the manufacturer of tencha to higher quality. But this outside force might eventually being cascade down back to here and it's very hopeful.

Zongjun · 1:02:54

Yeah. So in the future, we might look to partner with local people or Commission people to start doing some more interesting things and see like what what can be created both as Japanese cultivars or local cultivars, so long as they're processed, you know, on the proper potential processing equipment. There's nothing wrong with doing this in other places. So it really actually all comes down to intention because what I think people are fearful of is that people take like this random green tea grown in Korea or China or even places like India or Sri Lanka and they're or Thailand and trying to pass it off as matcha.

Zongjun · 1:03:29

Or like trying to blend into Japanese material and called a Japanese matcha. But like, if that's not your intention, who cares? Like whether or not we call it matcha, I don't. I personally, I don't really have a stake in this battle, but wouldn't it be cool to see shaded cultivation into something that you could turn into a powder that can be whisked?

Zongjun · 1:03:49

It's delicious. That is basically matcha that you know comes from these other places. Yeah, I think transparency is very important on this topic. You know, like people. I think the stigma really comes from people trying to hide the origin of all these materials.

Zongjun · 1:04:05

Or it's adulteration. Yeah. So you know like in the future we are definitely going to label the origin of everything that we are going to feature. And I think that's like essentially very beneficial like who I would personally want to learn the flavor difference coming from all the. Wouldn't you like to learn a Yabukita from Shizuoka versus Wazuka in Kyoto Prefecture versus Jeju Island versus Jujiang in China?

Zongjun · 1:04:36

Versus Darjeeling. Like talk about like super cool to understand the expressions that that cultivar can give you, right? You'll probably start to learn more than the chashi's you know who are who aren't importing all of this material and they really lead to some very unique and interesting expressions. Some of the Yabukita that we had from Jeju really tastes nothing like we've had in Japan, specifically not in umami bomb type way.

Zongjun · 1:05:03

And, and, and honestly tastes pretty good. It's like not bitter, very low bitterness. I'm a stringency. Very, very interesting floral notes that I have never experienced in, you know, Yabukita being grown in Japan. Yeah, so the the future is bright when it comes to this sort of thing.

Ryan · 1:05:19

And I cannot tell you and express how happy I was to hear how pragmatic both he was and other people were talking to about the ability of other places, other country to contributing to the supply so that this matcha boom doesn't turn into a matcha bust because it gets way, way, way too expensive for the same thing. Quality is not increasing, prices increasing. You're going to have churn of consumers and then you have a dead and dying industry that's literally turning stale because nothing is changing about the products other than the price and which is not a future that anyone wants to see. So I think it's incredibly

Zongjun · 1:05:57

valuable creative for everybody. That makes us very, very optimistic. Yeah, like special. This whole specialty movement is really a discovery journey of people doing interesting things. And I think it's very healthy to give everyone the liberty of making things that you know has good intention. Absolutely.

Ryan · 1:06:17

And make things that are delicious, which really is the most important thing at the end of the day, right? It's the hedonic pleasure you get from this thing. Yeah, delicious will be a very, pretty good outcome. But, you know, all these innovations and experiments might lead to different, you know, degrees of expression based on, you know, the But you know, let's, let's accept and embrace the possibility of all of these, you know, experiments or new developments or innovations.

Ryan · 1:06:43

And there's going to be a lot of crap. There's going to be a lot of failure. Perhaps the first Chinese matcha that you drink is horrible, right? That's OK. That is not representative of what's going on in the entire country. I mean you could easily buy a random matcha powder from Japan and have the same experience.

Zongjun · 1:07:00

But, but I, I think what would be a step forward is that the first Chinese matcha that you drink, whether or not it tastes good or bad, has the label of China or Zhejiang or a specific region with the cultivar on it. It's not something that's Uji Matcha quote UN quote China. Which to add to the Uji drama for some foresight, the Uji Matcha trademark also exists within China that is owned by Japanese which can be licensed out locally. So you can technically have Uji Matcha in mainland Chinese market sold as Uji Matcha and or exported as Uji Matcha because the trademark allows for it at least domestically within mainland China.

Zongjun · 1:07:50

Yeah, it's it's a lot of shenanigans. It really pinning down and understanding the complications of what in the world is Uji Matcha. You think it's a simple question. It's not. It's much more complicated than like what is ceremonial grade, which is, you know, there's one sentence meaningless, but actually a little more complicated. So some form of intention.

Zongjun · 1:08:12

But uji matcha, it really just shows a lot of money to be made. It's like the deeper you dig into that story, not as pure as you might think, despite what the good marketing and framing that a lot of people try to put around it.

Ryan · 1:08:30

But well, tea actually coming from Uji is, you know, like incredible. But very hard to find too. Yes, if you can find actual Uji grown matcha and it's not even to like like to hate on the other regions that participate in tea that gets labeled as Uji matcha, right?

Zongjun · 1:08:48

Like it's, you know, the best case interpretation is that it's a style of processing. But that this is really a concept that we want to break in the future. It's just so dumb. You don't learn anything from calling it that. It's really dumb.

Zongjun · 1:09:01

And also like, honestly, there could be and there will be there. And I really hope there will be like other Ujis in the future popping up in other regions, right? And this is really a concept or a mentality that we want to break in the future.

Zongjun · 1:09:20

There could be literally like 5 or 10 or 15 Uji worthy regions, fantastic producers doing interesting things, absolutely Kyoto, Nara, et cetera. Or even outside of Japan, like we right now kind of seeing Yame gaining the new a kind of like a high quality production status. But you know, it's totally possible that all these other tools in different corners of the world can produce very high quality, very tasty matcha.

Zongjun · 1:09:52

Absolutely. But this whole current system is not setting up in that way to allow this to happen. Like, it's more like setting up a very, very bloodthirsty Leech in the center of this whole system, sucking the blood from all corners to create something that can be sold for a higher price. Yeah, but for the status quo, you know, and also especially after talking to all these farmers. Yeah, both in and out of Uji.

Zongjun · 1:10:20

It's really less pure than you think. Yeah. Despite its staunchest defenders. And Uji should definitely still exist in the future and it should be cherished and should be protected, but just not in this way. Yes, where you can literally like go 10 kilometers over the border, set up a random shiage factory and you instantly have uji matcha so long as it's like your raw materials so much from the four prefectures that gets ridiculous.

Zongjun · 1:10:49

Not to mention all the stuff that really shouldn't be going into it outside of those 4 prefectures, which is also a topic of a later podcast. Which you might ask, why does this all matter? I think part of the specialty movement is understanding where the decisions for a certain flavors get made, where there's culture formation and where everyone skilled person's hands have touched this product in some meaningful way to get it all the way to the consumers.

Ryan · 1:11:16

And just this reductive idea of Ujicha destroys it, which I think is a real shame for those farmers and other places or these producers and other places, these people adding value from all over. Yeah, we actually recorded the episode right after we got out of Uji, and it was.

Zongjun · 1:11:33

So bad and so pessimistic, we're not going to release. But after talking to our Chaseki friend, wow, it's like a fresh of new breeze. It's like it really changed our kind of mentality or anticipation of what's coming next. And right now, we are very hopeful, yeah. Indeed.

Ryan · 1:11:54

Well, I think it's a perfect place to stop. Thank you so much for listening. You enjoyed this. Please consider sharing it with a friend. If you have any interesting perspectives that are other than our own, please do reach out. We'd love to make this like a community discussion and to have you on the show potentially.

Zongjun · 1:12:10

We're always searching for people with new and unique opinions for Season 4 and. We'll see you in the future.