How is Matcha Milled?

Ryan · 0:01

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, This is my cohost, Zongjun. Hello. Hello. Who 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 experts. And today we want to talk about how exactly do you mill matcha? We have all these different mechanisms of milling matcha, right?

Zongjun · 0:26

We have traditionally, you know, ishi-usus, and nowadays we're seeing more industrial innovations on devices like ball mills and jet mills. So there are many, many different ways to mill matcha nowadays. But you know, by the end of the day, they all share one common similarity is that you are trying to make a 4mm by 4mm tencha into small powder. They are.

Zongjun · 0:52

We recently got some emails and some messages from people ever since we kind of announced the beta program for our mill that can mill matcha fresh. That's a, you know, kind of has a countertop level footprint. But a lot of people ask us still, you know, they're still very interested in ishi-usus or potentially ball milling. And we tend to get a lot of questions about like what are the differences?

Ryan · 1:14

So in doing our own research and bringing our machine to life, we had to learn a lot about other milling mechanisms and draw inspiration from them. So we are absolutely biased in this episode, but we also consider ourselves relatively knowledgeable on the mechanisms and how it's built.

Ryan · 1:35

And you know, we're not going to necessarily try to convince you to buy our mill on this podcast, but and we want to give a very honest recounting of what are the mechanisms, advantages and disadvantages as we have heard from other people who have operated them between a ball mill, a cyclone mill and ishi-usu or ishi-usu like. Products, yeah, I mean they, you know, by the end of the day they all kind of powderize tencha into, you know, small powders Frequently they are, you know, in similar size to 5 to 10 microns.

Zongjun · 2:09

But the powder morphology, the the shape of the powder often times are quite different, you know, between different milling devices because of their milling mechanisms. And the amount of heat that gets generated at the interface, that's true as the the milling is actually going on.

Zongjun · 2:26

So it's a pretty interesting diverse landscape that can lead to some very different flavor profile outcomes. And a lot of judgement I feel like gets passed around here. Like people generally say ball mills are worse and that ishi-usus are like the only good way to mill authentic matcha.

Ryan · 2:42

And there's actually quite a bit of nuance when you actually look at the mechanics and the the science behind what is going on and what does and does not make sense for certain applications or for certain consumers or for certain types of tencha.

Ryan · 2:55

And it's actually a very nuanced conversation. And they're actually both of their own arts because, like, you can have very bad ishi-usu milled matcha and quite good ball milled matcha like that. It's not a clear boundary between these two milling mechanisms.

Zongjun · 3:11

Only, you know, there's some sort of a blend between, you know, these two, this two outcomes. Yeah. We try not to bring too much judgement into this and sometimes we do reference, you know, some judgement on some of the past recordings that we've done, probably because we had like just had a really disgustingly ball milled matcha or something or really bad cyclone milled matcha. So, you know, our our experiences are also very much influenced to the tasting references that we've recently had for the case of this recording. We're going to be as objective as possible because it's important that people understand

Ryan · 3:46

what this landscape is and the nuances behind it. So absolutely. Why don't we start with sort of the goals of matcha milling. You know, as you said, you're turning this 4 by 4mm tencha particle, which is the standard size for a tencha particle that's been de stemmed and deveined and pulverizing it enough times to get between 5 to 15 microns, 5 to 10 Micron particles and what you really want is under 20. Anything over 20 is begin to really notice some texture difference and we've actually heard the finer is not always better.

Ryan · 4:20

We were talking with some people who said if they have the ability to mill below 4 microns and apparently it gets so gummy and so sticky. Something that is very important to know about matcha and matcha milling is that as you go smaller and smaller in particle size, you're changing the physics in the way that those particles interact with each other. So if you have 50 Micron particles, it's basically going to act like dry sand.

Zongjun · 4:48

Those particles are heavy enough that gravity is going to have a larger impact on the force than the static, than the cohesive static forces that those two particles are having with each other. So it's going to be like dry sand. And the finer and finer you mill, the more those particles are going to want to interact with each other because the surface area to volume ratio changes. There's so much more surface area exposed and so much greater ability for those particles to interact with one another that those static forces start to overpower the gravitational forces.

Zongjun · 5:28

And then it starts acting like what we all know matcha to act like, this sticky clumpy substance. And when you go get below 5 microns apparently gets extremely gummy where it's really difficult. It clumps, it will really stop moving like a powder.

Ryan · 5:46

It sticks to itself really well into everything else. It's basically turning into a non Newtonian fluid, right? It's really turning into a gum. You don't want that to happen in your mouth. So there is such a thing as too fine. And as Sam mentioned there particle morphology or particle shape also plays a really large difference in its physical characteristics.

Ryan · 6:10

And what's really important is to understand that matcha is a suspension. So when you mix matcha and water together, you're not actually dissolving the the powder into the liquid. You are doing some extraction and you are dissolving some of the compounds in the matcha which enter the water, which then become flavor active.

Zongjun · 6:30

And that's, you know, really large part of the sensory or taste experience. We have all drinking matcha, but you also have these particles floating around. And there's something called Brownian motion, perhaps you remember from like an intro science class.

Zongjun · 6:43

But liquids have this random movement. So water is moving around in a very random way, kind of like a bunch of smoke in a room. And you have this matcha entered the system. And the higher the surface area it has, the more encounters, the more attractive forces it's going to have with the water. And the water is going to help that particle dance, meaning it's not going to sink to the bottom right away. So if you have very large matcha particles, gravity is going to have a stronger force pulling that matcha down. Then the water is in its random motions, keeping it floating. Like imagine having a bunch of

Ryan · 7:22

little tiny ants helping you stay, you know, lifted up off the ground. Very similar thing is what's happening with the water. And the more surface area that you have, the more those little ants or the more the water is going to help you dance around in that fluid, meaning you have a very high quality suspension. So typically they say that Ishiusu have very high surface area particle morphology, meaning they form higher quality suspensions, which put in another way, they don't sink as fast as ball mill, which tend to be more spherical. And sphere is a geometry or a shape that has the lowest surface area to volume ratio

Ryan · 8:00

that can exist in the universe, I believe. I don't think it gets any more efficient in terms of particles or matter forming a shape that has a very low surface energy. So those are the goals of matcha mill. And you want high surface area particle morphology and particles that are under 20 microns because also the finer you meld, the less the gravitational forces pulling those particles down South. Sam, let's talk about the most historic way of how matcha is milled, the Ishiusu.

Zongjun · 8:30

Can you talk a little bit about the mechanics that are going on that an Ishiusu can do to convert tencha into matcha? Yeah, for sure. So Ishiusu or stone melt is basically you have two piece of very large granite, soft granite usually that gets stacked on top of each other creating a pretty large gravitational force from the top plate onto the bottom plate. And in between the grind surface, you have all these grooves that cuts into a different or a very specific pattern that forms a scissoring effect to the tencha being grinded in between these two very large stones. And depending on different design, you either of you know, feed the tencha from the center

Zongjun · 9:16

of the Ishiusu or sometimes slightly off the center on the sideway in the grind surface. These grooves are not necessarily touching each other. In fact, they kind of form a small slope. And as you getting closer and closer to the edge, the slope gets narrower and narrower.

Zongjun · 9:35

And finally they touch each other along the rim. And that's how you get the tencha smaller and smaller. So you know from each inch the tencha moves towards the rim, they gets cut into finer and finer pieces. And at the end you know the shearing force is so large and they get powderized into very, very small powder.

Zongjun · 9:55

And depending on the shape of the groove patterns, you actually can end up having different shape of the matcha powder or different size of the matcha powder. And also depending on the groove and also depending on the the weight of the stone and also the rotational speed of the stone, sometimes you need to prime the tencha as well.

Zongjun · 10:17

Sometimes if feeding too large piece of tencha into specific Ishiusu. So it would really start in between the grooves. You wanted to be as exact as possible that fits specific Ishiusu with designs. Yeah, the feed rate becomes very important.

Zongjun · 10:31

And we've learned from some people that work very closely with traditional Ishiusu milling operations in Uji that if your tencha is too fine and like it broke up too much, it feeds too much in the mill too fast because the compact efficiency, right? It gets more compact, you have more tencha and a smaller volume.

Ryan · 10:52

And it can actually form a lot of problems because so not only do you have the concavity basically on one of the Ishiusu's faces, like Sam said, the slope, the distance between those scissors, so to speak, gets narrower and narrower and narrower until they're finally touching.

Ryan · 11:07

But you also have matcha powder pushing itself where you have one particle bumping into another, bumping into another. And that's how one of the primary forces of how matcha migrates from the center of the mill all the way to the edges.

Ryan · 11:23

And if you don't have a very consistent feed rate, the particle didn't have enough time or in a frequency to be cut enough to make it all the way to the edges. Yeah, it's not only the the the stones are driven by gravitational force, the tencha too.

Ryan · 11:41

For most of the traditional Ishiusu, there isn't necessarily a feeding mechanism. It's really just, you know, channel for the for the tencha to float into the milling. Chain. Yeah, absolutely. And the rate at which it does it is very important, which largely comes down to the size of the tencha that you put in and something else that's interesting.

Ryan · 12:00

The effect of the concavity or the fact that the scissors are not necessarily touching each other in the very beginning means that these particles are getting dragged instead of perfectly cut. And that dragging really helps to change that particle shape. And when it does eventually get cut at some of those interfaces, right, the angle of that cut also can have a real impact on the particle morphology.

Ryan · 12:26

And we heard that a lot of these curved design needs to used to instead of having them be straight parallel lines, they have curved ones that shape and the angle that that creates generally produces much more spherical particles.

Ryan · 12:41

But it does also mean that it can move through and migrate through the mill at a much faster speed where those that angle of that those two grooves encounter each other also pushes the matcha out laterally from the center all the way to the edges, what will then be collected.

Ryan · 13:00

Yeah, for the more curved Ishiusu pattern designs, it's really less of a cutting by the, you know by by the end of the day. So it's more like kind of like a rolling almost, hence a more spherical particle morphology. And the other interesting thing about Ishiusu too is the heat management.

Ryan · 13:22

So you essentially have two things generating heat. You have the grind surface where the plates are touching each other with some matcha in between as almost like a lubricant but it's generating a lot of heat because of the friction. And the other heat source is the motor and you have usually 2 motor designed pattern in or design types in Ishiusu. You have a top mount motor which the motor is moving further away from the the stones instead of touching them and you have the bottom mounted motor which is directly mounted to the bottom plate and that's touching the mill stones, thus transferring a lot of heat into the grind

Ryan · 14:04

surface. Depending on the two designed and you can generate different shearing force, you can overcome different torques, but also you have to keep in mind that you know the heat generation and heat management is very different from these different designs.

Ryan · 14:19

And frequently in order to save energy and maintain largest efficiency for these macho grinding facilities, the motor is designed to be as weak as possible, just enough to overcome the the torque they need to turn the ishi-usu.

Ryan · 14:36

So if you have like a poorly managed attention structure or you end up getting some stamp to start in between the grind surface, the ishi-usu was stopped and you have to, you know, open it and clean it up. Yeah. So Zhongjun for anyone looking to buy an ishi-usu.

Zongjun · 14:52

So what are some of the operational complexities of owning 1? Well, the first complexity is definitely learn how to use it and how to assemble it ambled it because I would assume that you are trying to use it outside of Japan and you know, the whole thing usually are not really shipped in one piece and and also after usage, you know, ishi-usu really needs to be. We finished with this process process called medate, which means the grooves needs to be re sharpened by Japanese stone Mason because these are soft granites and you know, and when you have them touching each other, mealing in constant speed, the grooves are

Zongjun · 15:32

essentially going to wear down or wear out, you know, after some usage. So that needs to be. Especially if you don't know what you're doing, which would be most first line in ishi-usu? So usually you, you would end up needing to ship the, the plates, which are hugely 50 kilograms per piece or per set back to Japan to have them refinished or, you know, you go to Japan and learn how to do it.

Zongjun · 15:58

That might take, you know, a few years, maybe a one or two decades. Or a lifetime. I don't know if anyone would ever teach you. Yeah. Good luck finding a teacher. Or you instead of shipping the plates, you ship the sensei, the stone Mason to your country. The more interesting or exotic the location, maybe you get better luck.

Zongjun · 16:19

Like if you're trying to buy one in Paris, maybe it's a more attractive vacation destination somewhere else. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Well that's really the most, I would say complicated part and cost costly part of operating an ishi-usu outside of Japan. And but you know, like these machineries are, are large and frequently you need a rewiring of your, of your electricity to, you know, turn it from a two-phase to a three-phase electricity set up in order to power this, this grinding machine. It's quite energy consuming.

Zongjun · 16:57

Indeed, and typically you need to have an air conditioned room where you're maintaining the facilities. Yeah. To have very specific humidity is anything that's too humid is going to tencha loves humidity. By the way, if you leave some tencha out in a hot room or hot in humid room, come back in two hours, it will be almost soft.

Zongjun · 17:19

It's really loves humidity and it will really mess up the the matcha milling operations. The other thing too is that when you have matcha being milled in an ishi-usu, one of the ways that you know that it is working is basically it snows.

Zongjun · 17:34

Matcha comes out of the interface, right? It it doesn't fall out. It like staticky snows out of the mill and it does form a very temporary suspension in air. So if you look at any of the matcha milling facilities in Japan, everyone is wearing a mask.

Zongjun · 17:51

And because long term exposure to any type of particles in the air is really unhealthy long term. I I'm an amateur Potter and there's something called Potter's lung and that it used to be back in the days for people doing pottery, clay actually can be ball milled and clay particles are super fine. So when it dries and gets on the floor and gets everywhere, you know, as you walk or you're moving around the studio, it gets kicked up into the air and really poorly cleans. Studios are actually pretty large health risk for people. And it used to be after working a couple decades as a professional Potter, you get

Zongjun · 18:28

something called Potter's lung from all basically the crap, all the particles in the air collecting in your lungs over time. But it's a very true, a real concern for macho milling operations. So you need to make sure it's very well contained.

Zongjun · 18:42

And we've heard that people installing some air conditioners in those rooms, after one month of usage, the filter within those air conditioners is like basically trashed. And then you can imagine what it's doing to your lungs.

Zongjun · 18:55

Yeah, it's pretty bad. And it's pretty obvious. Everything is covered in grain. Like all of these powders just flied around, you know? And while usually these ishi-usu, these, you know, in those industrial ishi-usu, you stay, you end up buying from Japan, they are kind of contained in a large case like a like a, like a encasing, a glass encasing.

Zongjun · 19:18

So it doesn't necessarily fly out that much. But still, you know, when swapping the plates out, you need to open the encasing, you need to deal with all of the residual powder inside the encasing and those needs to be cleaned occasionally. And that's a that's a lot of work and it's really not a one person job.

Zongjun · 19:38

Like these millstones are very heavy, like it's a very hard for one person to lift them up. So you need at least two people to operate and clean and maintained the operation of ishi-usu. Or one very jacked person like can lift by AGH with confidence. Dwayne Johnson.

Zongjun · 20:01

Yeah, actually there's a really interesting photo if you Google I, I think it's the one of the best photos that encompasses this. If you Google Kettl, like the tea company in New York, matcha Mill, there's a wonderful photo of the matcha collection process where the basically this is ishi-usu covered in matcha everywhere and they're taking a dry paintbrush trying to kind of collect it.

Zongjun · 20:23

So collection is also really a big headache. Typically there is a collection drawer where the matcha will fall and where most of it accumulates, but there's probably a good 20% that doesn't make it in the drawer that is on the side of the stones or, you know, somewhere else where you have to do quite a bit of manual collection and a lot of cleaning. Yeah, to maintain these ishi-usu.

Zongjun · 20:48

Yeah, it's no joke. Or it's really operationally. And not to mention they're really hard to purchase. Yeah. So I think 2022, I was in the market for one. I was at the time thinking of starting a cafe. Thankfully, the stream faded away from all the cafe owners. I've heard it's no joke.

Zongjun · 21:08

It's very difficult endeavor. Thankfully, we moved into matcha hardware. But, you know, one time I was in the market for one. So if you happen to be in the market for one and these operational complexities don't scare you away, there's kind of two ways you can do it.

Zongjun · 21:22

You can go to the broker route. There are a couple different issues with brokers, but what I did is I hired a translator on Upwork who spoke Japanese and I asked them to help me research. So basically just Google searched this in Japanese for the different ishi-usu vendors and he was very kind.

Zongjun · 21:39

He offered to reach out on my behalf for quotes. I think he had to fax one of them saying that, you know, on my behalf, I was interested in buying an ishi-usu. He collected all the materials from me and then all the cost breakdowns.

Zongjun · 21:54

So if you are interested in buying one and that's probably the cheapest way to do it, then avoid the broker route. Just find someone who speaks Japanese and that's able and maybe is located in Japan who can like literally call them or fax them because a lot of them work very old school and you'll get quotes and then then you'll have to deal with shippings and customs and stuff. I was just talking with someone who's importing one to Europe a couple days ago, a couple weeks ago, something like that very recently.

Zongjun · 22:21

And something else that you should be aware of if you're pursuing this is that shipping rates are totally negotiable. So he was quoted €4000 shipping cost for one stone mill. Oh my gosh. And I think it's a bottom motor operated, but he has a very good relationship with a DHL broker, or maybe it was UPS or FedEx, I forget which one.

Zongjun · 22:47

And he was able to get a better rate by going with his own broker because he's importing and exporting tea all the time. So because he's built up the business, he was able to negotiate it down to €2000 and his broker kind of took care of the logistics. So if you do buy one, know that the shipping price is not the final price.

Zongjun · 23:05

And if you already have a relationship with shipping people that they might literally be able to cut it in half and and $2000 is still quite a lot. But those options do exist. If you're looking to pursue it. You can send us a Commission check for this tip. Yeah.

Zongjun · 23:23

But no in all seriousness, they're they're very cool marketing statement like it really there is nothing like an ishi-usu. So in terms of coolness. Yeah. The the footprint, you know, it's very, usually very large system sits in inside your cafe shop. And it's really a statement, you know, it like people who are aware of the operational complexity of operating such device and you are still willing to do so. It's like really a bold statement of, you know, I'm willing to overcome a lot of headaches just to get quality products.

Zongjun · 23:57

Yeah. At 20 to 40 grams of matcha per hour, if you amortize out the cost, it's a it's a bold statement too. It's a big investment. The prices range, you know for the really tiny tiny motorized units we've heard as low as 3 or 4000 sometimes even less.

Zongjun · 24:22

But them could become very skeptical at that point. For any like large scale commercial milling, the price range, not including shipping is going to range anywhere between 6012 thousand depending on the unit, the manufacturer.

Zongjun · 24:37

And that's if you can buy one. There's actually a huge ishi-usu shortage at the moment, which is caused by the matcha shortage and all of these gigantic blending houses and tea companies and tea manufacturers also need them.

Zongjun · 24:49

But they have buying relationships with these ishi-usu makers that go back centuries sometimes. So it makes sense that they're not only the largest accounts, but the oldest. So they'll probably get prioritized first. So we've heard waiting lists that are longer than a year. Maybe you get lucky and buy a used one. It's another path to buy one as well. Yeah, there's a wait list for purchase, and you know, there's also a wait list for medate.

Zongjun · 25:15

So after some usage, you want your stone mill to be resharpened. And yeah, good luck finding a stone Mason to do that. And in Japan and also like you know, we have heard that the wait list can be 6 months to a year for the refination. Too, And those are for some of the more established players, not someone that just bought 1 randomly and who knows if they'll buy more.

Zongjun · 25:37

It's, you know, the repeat customer aspects certainly will prioritize you in the queue in terms of that business relationship that they have going on because they're at capacity. There is so much pressure on this system that you know, it's makes it very hard for new entrants trying to become matcha Millers using these traditional equipments. Even with established players, we've heard they can't find stonemasons to repair half of their milling capacity by December.

Zongjun · 26:07

And there, that's a domestic player. Yeah. It's no joke. And so it's really, and you know, I, I like to say we, we should also mention how sustainable realistically is it that you have coffee shops and tea companies all over the world sending 50 kilograms per pair back to Japan and then shipped back to wherever country they're from?

Zongjun · 26:28

Like this is from an environmental standpoint, we should think twice about decentralizing matcha milling when you're milling in an ishi-usu and the carbon footprint that that can have, especially if you don't know what you're doing, which would be most people buying one for the first time. But they're probably going to need to get it refinished much more frequently than someone who has decades or centuries of experience being the traditional players. And a lot of the traditional players have their own, like in house stone Mason to do these types of repairs and to make sure that everything is working

Zongjun · 27:02

properly. Yeah, very difficult. But, you know, with the current matcha equipment set up, ishi-usu is really the only, so far the only viable option for, you know, cafe commercial milling. Because for the other things we're talking about ball mills and, you know, jet mills, and they have a much, much, much larger footprint in terms of, you know, how much space. They're very loud.

Ryan · 27:28

Yeah. And they're super loud. Ryan, you want to talk about the milling mechanism for a ball mill? Yes. So ball mills are interesting and they're used in a lot of other industries. So the production of them is much more commodified. You have a lot of vendors that make ball mills for a wide range of industries ranging from ceramics manufacturing to all types of food processing and mining and all sorts of things. Pharmaceuticals.

Ryan · 27:55

So they're very common. Cosmetics. Pharmaceuticals. Yeah. And cosmetics to get these super fine powders that get turned into paste. And so the technology is very well developed, much more industrialized, much more commodified, and therefore they're very readily available.

Ryan · 28:12

The ones that we have seen being used for matcha milling are generally quite large and there's two types. Well, first I'll talk about the grinding mechanism. So they're essentially a tumble miller. So you have literally a bunch of balls which kind of bump into each other, and then you have a system where they're rotating.

Ryan · 28:32

So think of a giant drum with some agitation, kind of like a clothing washer or dryer, and where it's spinning around. You have all of these balls bumping into each other. Then when they bump into each other, there's some shearing force and it can subdivide particles.

Zongjun · 28:48

So it's a rotating system. You put in the tea and it rotates, rotates, rotates and depending on how long it can rotate for then you can get different particle sizes. And then what happens is is everything gets dumped out.

Zongjun · 29:02

The balls get cleaned and then it gets put back into the system and you separate out the powder and then maybe you sift the powder later on. There's two types. There's batch based and continuously fed ball mills. So the batch based one is exactly the name implies you have this whole system, it's tumbling around together.

Zongjun · 29:23

We've never seen a batch based system that has an active cooling system, but every batch based ball mill we have seen has been in some kind of walk in refrigerator. So it's a more of a passive cooling system. It's put in a very cold environment, which helps keep the whole system because as you can imagine, a whole lot of friction is being generated. The continuous ones, the migration time and distance. The distance is about two to three meters or you know, between I guess 6 to 10 feet.

Zongjun · 29:51

And we've heard the migration time can range anywhere from 10 minutes to 20 minutes. As that tea is fed in, it gets goes through the ball mill and then it comes out, you know, the other side as a fine powder. Those that we have seen are typically water cooled, so there's an active cooling mechanism making sure the whole system doesn't overheat.

Zongjun · 30:11

And we've touched the sides of these units and they're like actually physically cold to the touch. Not quite cold enough that it would condensate water, but it is like definite really cool to the touch and matcha comes out the other side. Ball mills have a really large range of quality. There's some really well operated ball mills where they're very skillful and they can taste very good and actually can have a very nice texture.

Zongjun · 30:36

The particles do tend to sink faster, but in a latte format the the suspension qualities of a matcha depend on the viscosity of the liquid, how thick that liquid is that it enters, and then something like a latte, it's much more viscous and so the suspension qualities are higher for all particles that enter that system. So ball milled matcha does not necessarily mean bad, but there's a huge quality range and typically no one takes mediocre tencha and runs it through an ishi-usu. So there's also kind of a survivorship bias that we need to think through when comparing ball milled with ishi-usu milled because default it's always

Zongjun · 31:20

going to be better going through an ishi-usu because it's such an inefficient method. Yeah. And also, you know, on the other hand, no one really puts very high quality tencha through a ball mill. So it's very hard to compare or make a very objective comparison of the two milling mechanisms because people just don't do that. Yeah.

Zongjun · 31:41

So typically these units are very loud, they consume a lot of electricity. They almost always need passive or active cooling systems which need to be taken into account for installation. The one great benefit of using a ball mill is that you can mill anything just like you can mill like clay particles you can put in hojicha stems.

Zongjun · 32:04

So basically all hojicha powder that's like, you know, matcha like and consistency are all milled on a ball mill because ishi-usu cannot handle those woody stems, takes too much force to break those particles apart. Yeah, but it's basically impossible to operate one in a cafe shop. It's maybe in the future, yeah.

Zongjun · 32:28

And yeah, so it really is a pretty big investment. And for behind the scenes operations, like for some coffee shops or something like inside your roastery could totally be viable. It requires its own set of unique skills and probably a lot of investment.

Zongjun · 32:43

And the craft of milling it, to our knowledge, is not that accessible. I've never heard someone that casually talk about the differences in the milling parameters that they use that lead to a better outcome gets really deep infrastructure. So the knowledge especially in English to improve and that learning curve that might be significantly more difficult than something like an ishi-usu where there are some Western vendors that have some experience using them. Or maybe not necessarily because, you know, there's definitely a shortage of, you know, public knowledge, but for, but anyone that we have seen

Zongjun · 33:24

that, you know, uses a ball mill in Japan, they are like super practical people. They're not, you know, these very traditional stonemasons in Japan that doesn't necessarily want to talk about, you know what they know. I I bet you can just hire translator and go visit these these factories and they will probably just tell you how to do it. Good point.

Zongjun · 33:46

There's very little cultural baggage. You're not going to offend anyone by ball milling A matcha and asking a bunch of questions in the same way that you would with an ishi-usu. Yeah. And also it's easier to maintain versus a ishi-usu.

Zongjun · 33:59

All you need to do is just to switch the balls depending on your usage, you know, anywhere from one month to three months. And these are usually ceramic balls. So they're not, you know that hard to purchase or very or not very expensive either. Yeah.

Zongjun · 34:14

Absolutely. You want to talk a quick bit about cyclone or jet milling and then we can talk about our mill. Yeah, yeah. So jet milling is a less common but also very widely used milling mechanism for, you know, very large matcha productions. So what it's essentially doing is that it's blowing tencha or whatever that you end up milling with the milling device in a very fast beam of or a jet beam of air. And these errors will blow against each other. You're basically making all these, you know, tencha constantly colliding with each other with, you know, managing the airflow inside the mill air.

Zongjun · 34:54

So you know, you're just, you know, it's just really a accelerator that, you know, accelerates, you know, these tencha particles and make them collect against each other. And after they get collide enough of times, they got turned into smaller and smaller powder. And there's usually a centrifugal kind of powder collection mechanism on the bottom of the the jet Miller to kind of collect the fine powders and then, you know, push them into a large bag.

Zongjun · 35:25

So with these, the outcome is similar to a ball mill. I haven't actually read anything talking about the mythology of these jet mills. Do you know anything about it, Ryan? I think I've seen some paper, but I forget what the outcome was.

Ryan · 35:40

To my knowledge I think they're also spherical, but I don't know. We just haven't had that much experience with them. They seem to be quite a bit less common in the matcha industry. Yeah, yeah. And also with that you can just meld everything.

Zongjun · 35:53

So depending on the the the model or the make of the jet mills, some of the powder collection mechanism is kind of like a vacuum that you suck out of the light enough powder in the collection chamber out and transport it into a bag.

Zongjun · 36:09

So if you're having some, you know, stems which are heavier in the tencha, those won't necessarily be able to, you know, the the air won't be able to carry them in the first place to make them collide. And then after they fall down to the bottom of the milling chamber, they won't be necessarily able to be sucked up, so to speak.

Zongjun · 36:33

So they would just kind of sit there and they need to be cleaned. Once while there's some, there's some self sorting that goes on in those machines. It's super interesting, Yeah. The particle has to meet some very specific specifications before it can even exit the mill, which is a pretty clever way to do it.

Zongjun · 36:49

And something we should say about these. I mean, these are very industrial ways of milling. I think they can do upwards of 10 kilos an hour or something like that. And similar with the ball mills, I've heard everything from like like 2-3 all the way up through 10. Really depends on the size and usage. Yeah, it's a lot faster.

Zongjun · 37:08

These jet mills also generates a lot of heat, so they need to be active actively cool too, usually with the hydro cooler. Yeah. So that's the landscape of matcha milling options and so do the complexity. And obviously the as Sam said, buying a ball mill or a cyclone mill is like really back end food processing infrastructure.

Zongjun · 37:28

So it's the type of investment you should think about if you're interested in getting one to mill matcha and doesn't necessarily mean bad these industrial ways. And actually it's very important that they exist because I've heard about 10% of the matcha produced in the world is ishi-usu stone ground. And I don't know if that's an outdated statistic, but if tomorrow these ball mills and cyclone mills vanished, then you can really complain about matcha shortage. There just would not be enough for the world at an appropriate price point too, for any of that to make sense for the industry to grow.

Zongjun · 38:04

So they're a really, really, really important part of the matcha economy and matcha milling infrastructure. Because I would also not assume that if you're buying from a good Western vendor that your matcha is ishi-usu milled unless it explicitly says that, which really goes to show that you can have some very good quality most of the time coming out of a ball mill. And so there's a lot more complexity, even though that it does in theory produce a lower quality outcome. If you care about suspension quality, which you know, if it's going into a latte, it literally doesn't matter as much because it's entering a more viscous

Ryan · 38:41

fluid. So a lot of complexities here. Yep. So, so if we trying to assess the situation right here. So if you were ever wanted to do fresh milling in your location, ishi-usu is actually really only the viable option, you know, unless you have a larger warehouse behind your facility that can hold a jet mill or a ball mill. So our position really right here is trying to, you know, reduce the operational complexity while maintaining, you know, the powder structure and the quality of the powder and it can be fit in a modern cafe. Yeah, Oh, absolutely.

Ryan · 39:18

So we set out to design A matcha mill that could know much of fresh anywhere and everywhere. So you can consider this portion sort of an ad, but we also want to be very objective about it and we detailed all of this data.

Ryan · 39:32

We sent a lot of matcha off to a lab. We compared it with benchmarks. We have a really in depth analysis comparing the differences between ball mill, ishi-usu to a few other matcha milling mechanisms that are countertop that we didn't talk about here is really just one, but we'll we'll save. We won't mention their name here. We laid it all out on a big table and kind of wrote an essay comparing each one to our matcha mill and what we were doing. It is a link only article.

Ryan · 40:02

If you're interested in it, please e-mail ryan@sanco-chaw.com or message us on our website or Instagram anything and we'd be happy to send you that link if you're interested. But some do you want to do a quick quote UN quote sales pitch of what we have created and the.

Zongjun · 40:18

Features that it has. Yeah. So when designing this machine, we thought through all of the benefits and shortcomings of different milling mechanisms and we took a lot of inspiration from traditional ishi-usus, which de facto produces the best quality form of matcha.

Zongjun · 40:37

But we also thought about the difficulties when operating, the issues, you know, the heat management, the large footprint and how can we overcome all those difficulties and reduce that into a modern machine that's more fitting to a, you know, cafe consumption scenario. So we designed this countertop Miller, we call it the Sanko Usu One that we use AL 95 ceramic.

Zongjun · 41:03

It's basically, you know, powderized sapphire and we centering that into two pieces of very, very dense and hard millstone. And instead of using gravitational force, we use a spring mechanism to increase the pressure between the two millstones in order to powderize the tencha into very, very fine matcha powder.

Zongjun · 41:24

And we installed a active cooling system that's the most challenging, turns out to be the most challenging. An interesting part, we took a lot of inspiration from the computer industry which we use the thermoelectric cooling system to actively cool the machine and to take the heat out from the milling chamber, out from the machine, out from the milling environment. It's like cooling a very hot CPU. So if we ever in the future share the internal some of the internal design, you will be able to see all these interesting electric wirings that is dedicated to the heat management of the machine.

Zongjun · 42:07

So we also thought about the the the powder collection which has been a headache for traditional ishi-usu. So all of the powder is contained in a very small milling chamber and there is actually a difference of air pressure between the milling chamber and the outside environment. So all of the powder kind of gets blown and pushed out from the milling chamber and with additional scrapers that you can actually get a very large percent of the powder out from the mill.

Zongjun · 42:38

The machine actually only would eat about 5 grams of retention when it starts. And after a starts and gets running, there's not much of being sacrificed anymore. So it's not really a percentage retention, it's really just 5g.

Zongjun · 42:55

So that's all of the design consideration that we put into the the machine. And with usage, you can set the RPM of the machine, so you can actually tweak how fast the rotational speed of these grindstones inside the machine to kind of control the fineness and also control the output of your usage. So if you are so mainly milling for matcha latte and you don't necessarily need very, very fine suspension, you can actually increase the speed and you know you can have more output, but you have to think about the heat being generated from the machine too.

Zongjun · 43:33

So if you increase the speed, it's going to definitely increase the heat. The cooling system does have a Max capacity, so up to a certain point it won't be able to necessarily suck out enough heat from the mill. So you are going to have hotter and hotter matcha if you turn the speed really fast. But you know, that's up to your decision to make. So for the current machine, the matcha output is 35 to 80 grams per hour, which is about 3 times faster than the traditional ishi-usu.

Zongjun · 44:11

But you know, we have tested different speed with the same temperature and it does have a impact on the flavor of the matcha doesn't necessarily have the impact on the fineness and the color, which is very interesting. One thing you can do is change the pressure.

Zongjun · 44:25

So if you want to reduce the amount of heat generated but increase the speed at which you're milling matcha, you can decrease the pressure from, let's say Max pressure down slightly, especially for a latte. If you need to go much faster, where you don't care so much about suspension quality, that is an option that does become available to you. Although we're hoping that 80 grams per hour might be fast enough for most cafes, especially slow bars who are making who can mill fresh to order. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Zongjun · 44:59

It's there's a lot of freedom for you to tweak. And we kind of actually see this as a, you know, a very kind of organic culture that we hope to build in the future is that you and us actually will be working together to try to find out the best parameters for different usage for your for your cafe or your facility. Our real goal is to kind of close the gap for people that want to do fresh milling but can't or shouldn't invest in an ishi-usu.

Zongjun · 45:27

So because it's heavy, it's slow, it's operationally complex to collect the matcha and to operate it and to clean it. And you got to spend lots of time, money and risk sending your millstones back to get resharpened if you can find someone to get it. So they're hard to buy, they're very heavy, they're complex to maintain, they take up a lot of space. They require like electricity, rewiring, it's a lot of upfront cost and a lot of upfront risk.

Zongjun · 45:59

And if you drop one of the mill stones, you've lost your capacity to mill unless you have a backup 1. So like our machine, for example, has swappable mill stones. So we're trying to fill the gap for people that really want a fresh ground product and have control over how the matcha is being milled to as close as possible. Standard as an ishi-usu.

Zongjun · 46:19

And we did a bunch of lab testing and I would say we're right around the mark of the average ishi-usu. We don't have the last SIP experience that you would get with a really super high end ishi-usu milled matcha like Tenju from from REQ Kalyan or or in the Reno from Horatio Shuman.

Zongjun · 46:40

Like those have like perfect last ship experiences that are super creamy and smooth, but it shows up in the data. But I'd say we're better than most ball mills that we've ever had. And I'd say about the same as an average ishi-usu where you kind of feel some stuff on the last sip and which shows up in the data that we've also presented on that site. So we're trying to fill that gap. We don't want to be an ishi-usu replacement, but we want to give people an option who want to mill matcha fresh. But like literally based on the economics of their business, it just makes no sense at all to buy an ishi-usu. So because of the labor and the

Zongjun · 47:15

risk and all of the upfront costs. Yeah, our plates are much smaller and and they're actually quite durable. So AL 95 has been used for a lot of different milling purposes in different industries. You see that in the mining industry, in the Pharmaceutical industry, and these things are super hard.

Zongjun · 47:36

They're basically sapphires, and we promise. Yeah, the same material, so. Yeah, we promise. Technically, it's different infrastructure. Yeah, Yep. We promise 12 month, you know, quality guaranteed, but you know it. Depending on the usage, these things usually last for three to five years with very little compromise on the performance.

Zongjun · 47:57

Yeah. But the nice thing about them being swappable is we can design different patterns in the future too. So not, definitely not going to guarantee three to five years, but we you might want to get a different pair to get different outcomes, maybe in efficiency or particle shape or maybe even we can design one that can be well adapted to Hojicha, we don't know.

Zongjun · 48:18

So we're going to do a bunch more experimentation, but this can almost be a platform to mill matcha and when we can give much more control over to the users so they can have a fresh ground product or so many benefits from these perspective and a nutrition perspective. Or if you have your own designed and manufacture capacity, design your own.

Ryan · 48:38

These are totally swapable and it won't, you know, voidable warranty. Absolutely. Well, I think there's a great place to stop. If you're interested, please e-mail us and let us. We'll we'll send you the link. And we're running a beta program. We're only making fifteens for all early access for the first commercially produced batch.

Ryan · 48:57

Just super exciting. And those slots are slowly filling up. We haven't officially opened it, but we have a lot of guesses so far. Please do e-mail us and let us know that you're interested so we can add you to the list. And we're gonna actually start having real finalized signups in September of 2025.

Ryan · 49:15

And yeah, I think that's a great place to stop. Yeah. Hope to talk to you soon all. Right, If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing with the Front and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks. In the future, bye bye.