Interview with Jeff Fuchs, Tea Explorer

Ryan · 0:07

Hello, and welcome to Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is Zongjun Li, who also goes by Sam. We've had some Internet issues, unfortunately, so he's on WeChat, on my phone and we're the cofounders of Sanko Matcha Products.

Zongjun · 0:20

Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey, Matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And today we have Jeff Fuchs, who should need no introduction in the tea world. But I'll give a brief introduction. Who is Jeff has documented both in film and his book and in many different ways actually the Tea Horse Road, which is an ancient trade route and has walked, I think all of it or most of it. And helped document a lot of the living stories that were there as it kind of fell out of use as we moved into the the 20th 21st century and has been a tea explorer more generally across many different countries and

Ryan · 0:58

cultural contexts. And I met Jeff for the first time at the Berlin Tea Festival last year. We had some very brief e-mail exchanges 10 years ago. It's a little crazy full circle. But you mentioned some very interesting things about Japanese tea and some perspective of as someone who has spent so much time in Yunnan and seeing what is going on in those ancient forests, I was like, I have to go up and talk to you about this.

Jeff · 1:22

But I guess I'll turn it back over to you and to briefly introduce yourself and we can jump in from there. Sure, you did a you did a nice job, nice little bit of work describing the journey. I guess the, I had a friend say this the other day and I guess where I'm at now with the tea world is, I mean, after selling tea, writing about tea, talking tea, I guess I'm a bit of a tea advocate in whatever story shape, whatever human shape it comes, comes in as I feel a lot of the informal tales and stories and narratives are somehow the most vital. We're, we're, we're in a time where there's an awful lot of knowledge.

Jeff · 2:09

There's a lot of great information, There's a lot of rehashed misinformation, deliberate mystification, and, and, and there's a lot of beautifully simple knowledge that still exists about tea at Ground Zero, where it's, it's grown, where the farmers worry about it every year.

Jeff · 2:29

So where I'm at right now and where this discussion is, I guess some sort of a tea advocacy and maybe trying to bring to light some of the, I guess, lesser aspects of tea that I feel still have a huge role to play. And every time I see you, every time we've chatted, even over a decade ago, I think I said this before we started this chat, we've been close to going down rabbit holes, you and I.

Ryan · 2:56

It's been like the sprinkling of bait. Then there's these big chasms of where we want to go with a conversation and then one of us gets whisked away. But so this is a pleasure. Yeah, it's a pleasure, a real pleasure for us. It's I'm and also just personally just so curious to hear your perspective because you know, we, Sam and I started our journey in Chinese tea and came in with very particular ideas.

Ryan · 3:22

But we're actually probably shaped a lot by you over our learning journey because I feel like you're a center of gravity, especially in the West, for understanding and transmitting what's actually going on in the ground and the ancient tea forests of Yunnan and the living culture that exists there.

Ryan · 3:40

And, you know, I think there's a long chain that largely goes flows back to you and then your primary experience about the way people talk about it and appreciate it in the West. And, you know, we're, you know, beneficiaries of that perspective having gone back, you know, knowing of your work for so long. And then walking into Japan, it just feels so different in the way that they talk about the agriculture, the way they talk about the trees, the way they talk about the fertilization practices.

Ryan · 4:09

And this is I was listening to your talk in Berlin last year and you were talking about, oh, wow. You know, you know, most of you, you were addressing the audience, but essentially saying, you know, most people don't realize the intense fertilization practices that the Japanese do. And you were talking about bringing some of these marine umami expressions of flavor inland and but also, you know, some of the downsides of over fertilization. So I know that you spent a lot of time recently in Kyoto Prefecture, in particular Kyotanabe, but also in places like Uji.

Jeff · 4:44

Would love to learn some of your sort of fresh perspective after coming off of a lot of Japanese travel, comparing it to your tea experiences other places. Yes, and it's important to mention and you you did, but it's important to mention that I'm a relative novice in the the Japanese tea vernacular.

Jeff · 5:07

My wife grew up in Japan, She was born in Japan. She's Japanese. So there's there's been infusions from her over the course of our relationship and she refers to things very offhand, but her mother's family background is actually in agriculture.

Jeff · 5:26

They were, they were Peach growers. Momo, my wife, has a sort of a casually eloquent way of speaking about agriculture. When I have been in Japan in the last couple of years, it's been working on this film project and working with one specific tea producer.

Jeff · 5:43

And it's one of those beautiful little gateways into one person's life that as soon as you walk through that gate into their world, all of a sudden there's this huge horizon of information, a bit of foggy information at times into the world, the, the, the revered world of the shaded teas, which are gyokuro, the kabusecha, the tencha or the matcha.

Jeff · 6:09

And of course, there's this massive wave of matcha lunacy, interest, knowledge spread. I mean, in part of this is good too, because we were talking about trends earlier. With trends, a lot of important information and learnings take place. And sometimes somebody starts with a trend and that's the segue into going into a deeper sphere of know about something. So the world of trends, but the world of trends sometimes fixates upon one or two highlight reels without going into the depth of what creates umami. As an example, you referred to fertilizer. And I think one of the the big learnings has been and it continues to be for me how exact

Jeff · 6:54

and how precise this tradition is of using specific fertilizers for specific soils. And I'll, I'll give an example, just something that I can speak to with a bit of clarity. In Kyotanabe, their gyokuro is known as a soft, a softer gyokuro. It's known as very rounded flavors, very subtle, nuanced umami.

Jeff · 7:18

The region was covered in bamboo forests, which contributes to a high magnesium count in the soils around Kyotanabe. The soils also have a higher an oxide content, not higher, higher than a lot of the regions, but surrounded.

Jeff · 7:36

So the fertilizing ratio of specifics and I'll get into what they use that I that I've seen them use is very different to another prefecture. What I found particularly interesting, and I guess this goes into the umami discussion, which is another could probably do several days worth of, of, of discussions, is that a lot of the fertilizer is herring mulch or meal. And what was amazing, fascinating, but not really surprising, I guess, given Japan's obsession with details and precision, is that certain farmers have certain suppliers of certain mackerel herring meal that they import from the north of Japan around Hokkaido.

Jeff · 8:28

They then use that meal to mix in with other components like sugar cane husk, cornmeal to create these very specific ratios of a fertilizer with all three components or maybe 2 components to play with the levels that they'd like to extract of umami. So there's the shading aspect, which is vital. We, I guess, generally know about shade, but it's not just the shading.

Jeff · 8:55

The shading has a very specific relationship to the fertilizer that's used. And fertilizers often been given a bad rap because it's not natural. I won't get into that, that discussion yet, although you may, you may provoke me. But the idea that there's a curating of the elements that they desire to extract in the cup of a gyokuro or a high level matcha or a kabusecha, I find fascinating. I mean, it's a rabbit hole.

Jeff · 9:27

It's a magnificent rabbit hole to go down. But there is a very specific culture, a very imbued culture of mastery of fertilization. And part of that I think has to do with almost the type of alchemy that the, the a lot of Japanese tea growers have been very good at is observing, taking the elements, measuring the elements and being able to adapt and pivot very quickly to still extract the flavor profiles that they're looking to extract.

Jeff · 9:58

Which is, I would say on the opposite end of a lot of the teas that I grew up drinking living in Yunnan, they every year, every harvest, every spring would be different. Caffeine levels would be totally unpredictable, theanine levels completely unpredictable. And that's because the elements played such a role that we're and and there was no manipulation going on in the ancient forests of it was more of the art of restraint. Whereas in Japan there is a very specific art of curation, I would say manipulation to extract. Predictable outcomes and I guess the need for control feels very actually Japanese spirited

Ryan · 10:45

almost in a way. Very. It's it's, it's admirable to be able to commit to this. Not, as you say, not surprising. Yeah, and it feels like in in Yunnan and a lot of these other places, the flavors and the tea starts in the forest and it's controlled by nature and like the processing happens after it's harvested or you could argue during harvesting. And a lot of these Japanese teas, especially the shaded ones, I mean, it happened basically the the whole plant's life cycle from the selection of the cultivar to all the garden management, That's where a lot of, if you trace back where these flavors are coming from,

Jeff · 11:23

it's it's pretty different type of agriculture. It is and it it it brings to mind for me a lot of the time this idea of terroir driven teas. So where you can definitely feel, not that I'm an expert because of these flavor wheels and tea, sometimes they befuddle me, but in a, in a raw, explosive young shung puer from old trees, you will get a definitive terroir statement.

Jeff · 11:55

The chi you, you get a it's a beautifully annihilating kind of hit. Whereas again with the Japanese, I find it a great counterpoint. In our household, we have these conversations all the time. Julie and I are we play with teas a lot and the the beautiful predictability of a high level sencha or kabusecha as opposed to a a small village in Yunnan where we've got four or five years worth of spring examples that are completely different, not at all similar.

12:29

In fact, you could argue unless you've purchased in the village, you might suspect they're not from. It's a different it. Could be from a different province, but the idea being that one is terroir driven and sort of complicit and one is as you said, it's it's post post pic curated to formulate, to come up with this, this beautifully tangible visceral ratio in the mouth.

12:55

Yeah. So it's, it's interesting because it's, I feel like the marketing language of these covered Tees is very terroir centric. The matchas, the gyokuros, you see it in the specialty marketing, you see it in the traditional marketing with these traditional blend houses and the reverence of places like Uji and the surrounding regions of Uji. And like, the more we dig into it, the more we're convinced that it's not terroir driven at all. It's like the most processed tea. You're, you're more like literally tasting someone else's crap.

13:30

It's you're tasting people actually, instead of people's decision, people's preference, people's understanding instead of, you know, terroir or nature. But that's like you, you could also argue that it could be theoretically grown anywhere.

13:45

And like, I think this is the best defense for the Chinese matcha producers is that if it's not a very terroir driven tea and China is a country that's perfectly capable of producing high quality tea, why couldn't high quality matcha be made in China? And the reality is it's getting better and better and better, but the best Chinese matcha doesn't hold a candle to the best Japanese matcha that I've ever had. And like, I think this skill gap represents, I don't have a good word for it, like secondary terroir, like the people, the culture, the processing decisions and sort of everything that you've been steeped in the

14:23

last couple of months in your time in Japan. How would you is that a fair characterization? And like how, how do you feel that from interacting with these, all of these farmers in Japan for so long? One of the things that stays with me during a recent visit was a very well regarded matcha maker who I think you're familiar with. Tsuji San.

14:47

Oh yes, and Shirakawa. Yes, he said this. I don't even think it was provoked by a question. He was, he was talking and the, of course this was being translated, but he made mention that there's a proper way to make matcha and there's an improper way to make matcha.

15:05

And I remember him going further and I assumed, well, he was, you know, trying to keep this tradition, the regional tradition, the national tradition alive. And he, he actually said, no, I'm not talking about a national tradition. I'm talking about doing matcha correctly and doing it incorrectly.

15:28

And it was, it was interesting because he was very open to the idea that matcha, he, he understood that matcha's origins were in China during the Song dynasty. So he was aware of the history and he wasn't covetous that only he knew how to make matcha or there's only one way to make matcha. He said there's a proper way to do it. And then there's a whole different, you know, there's a whole different segment opening up. There's food grade, organic food grade. It's being put into muffins.

16:00

He's aware of that. And he said that's its own thing. What he was specific about was that when you're making a high grade, even now, the idea of a ceremonial matcha seems to have been usurped because everything's ceremonial. But in the days of old when there was a very, very, very small amount of actual ceremonial matcha, and it wasn't that long ago available for domestic consumption, that there was only one way to make it.

16:29

So for him, it's not necessarily where it's grown and produced. It is how it's produced. OK, what is it called? So he was, he was very traditional, very proud, of course, but he was also very open to the world of matcha.

16:47

And he understood that matcha has become something almost I mean, we had a discussion that was, it was quite entertaining because at one point someone had said, well, matcha is almost separate from tea now because matcha and you have tea, but matcha is everywhere that tea is not plus.

17:09

Oh wow, yeah, that's so true. You know he was. He was making the example of coffee shops. Yeah. They won't carry any tea in Japan usually, but they'll probably have a hojicha matcha latte or they may have a matcha latte. So he found it quite interesting and I think he he realized that matcha is doing its own thing now.

17:35

It's, it's become something bigger than a very regional coveted protected thing. That's reverent, you know, that's, that's, that's got reverence. It's now got another life of its own. It's almost like it's got a secret life beyond beyond the borders that has transformed a lot of the the language used.

17:55

And I mean just the word ceremonial now. He went on a bit of a wonderful rant, quite emotional. He said the amount of times he sees ceremonial used to market matcha, it was driving him insane because of the actual he he says it's just a word now as opposed to in past.

18:16

It had a very, again, a very particular meaning. Yeah, the words been totally hijacked. So it's a shame. So and the ceremonial connotations, I sometimes take offense for the Japanese when all you have all these Western companies calling it ceremonial grade, it's like it hasn't been endorsed by an Omotesenke or the Senke. There's no one with their chime saying anything about this, like it's just totally been hijacked trying to sell, sell to sell more tea, which I guess people are in the business of selling tea, want to try to sell it.

18:53

And it's it's understandable why people use that term and there's demand for that term. So we're stuck in this doom loop. Yeah, especially so when they're trying to sell the mediocre tea, because for higher quality tea, they no one wants to use the term ceremonial grade anymore.

19:11

It's all these mediocre, even bad matcha. That has picked up. Which further stigmatize it. Yes. And to your point, so the point is just made. I think there is an understanding at least in the journeys, the the recent journeys this year and last year's journeys to Japan in the tea growing regions. I think there's an understanding that there are market pressures on medium, large and small farms. All these pressures are are they're hitting all of the farms, small farmers, family farms, big farms. So there is an understanding that there's pressure. I think where a lot of the farmers seem to take a little bit of umbrage and offense is

19:55

with the idea that words are being used without information being provided. In other words, you know, we were speaking earlier about terroir. Well, I'm sure there is a terroir component in the Japanese, you know, and Shizuoka and Kyushu and.

20:12

Kagoshima, I'm sure there is information to relate to the public, relate to drinkers, but that information isn't required by the marketeers. You know, back to the ideas of ceremonial, I think that has been coveted more so than explaining well what makes Kagoshima soil a little bit different, because I think those explanations are things that credit the farmers for their understanding.

20:41

Yeah, actually I totally placed the blame at the traditional practitioners and the original consumption group for matcha who really don't express any interest in the agriculture at all. Like these old school iemoto, Omotesenke, Urasenke people. They don't know anything about the product agriculturally speaking.

21:02

And, you know, Sam and I have tried to source a lot of tencha and matcha in Japan. And like, getting these objective facts that actually will determine quality and flavor are really, it feels like pulling teeth. Like people don't open up about their fertilization practices.

21:19

They like, it's very hard to actually get to the root of why a tea is good and what makes it special. So I feel like a lot of these people entering into Japan just do whatever they can because it's so hard to access this level of information. Like especially when you contrast it to like someone in like China for example, that can be very articulate about what makes a tea good and in objective terms. Yes, and maybe that is one of the problems with the the whole ceremonial aspect has almost become a movement in itself. And I Revere ceremony without question, but I Revere it from those who've got a root system

22:05

devoted to generations of teachings of a particular school and who haven't turned it into a marketing bonanza. To your point earlier about, you know, a lot of these practitioners, these new practitioners, I'd call them, who don't actually know much about the cultivars used, who don't have much interest in explaining why.

22:26

For instance, at zairai, an old cultivar of Japan, they may be one of the old originals, has a more bitter a stringent power to it. Then some of these more Yabukita, Gokou. These new cultivars have a, an almost a cure. They've been curated to provide this umami sweetness. And I always think that information is only dangerous if you're not willing to share.

22:57

When you're trying to covet something, then the lack of information is really troublesome because it's spin. Perhaps. It's maybe just ignorance, not knowing or not caring where you know. The origin points are where the farmers are from.

Ryan · 23:15

I mean, matcha for me in my limited world, we have it at home. It's not my go to, but it's probably the least described terms of flavor profile of any tea that we have in our home. And we probably have 30 or 40 different teas. So I've been told what a good matcha should taste like, but I haven't been given a real.

Ryan · 23:36

And even my wife Julie, she can read a description in kanji. But what defines A matcha flavor profile to a large degree? I, I feel is, is ambiguous at times compared to, you know, a Baochong Oolong or a Shungpur from NACA which is explosive or so yeah, maybe the the commercialization of the ceremonial aesthetic, maybe that has actually detracted a little bit from the knowledge base or the transfer of legitimate knowledge to us on the on the receipt and.

Zongjun · 24:14

Yeah, that that really resonates and it's really up and down in both these newcomers and the old comers, the traditional blend houses, even if like a retail experience you walk into, I won't name anyone particularly, but you walk into their shop, you ask, what is this Gokumukashi?

Jeff · 24:32

So it's, would you know Shiro or whatever poetic name, what's in it? I don't know. It's a blend. Where is it from? It's from Uji, which we've recently come to learn really actually doesn't mean that it's from the town of Uji can come from any one of four prefectures. So there's there's nothing to learn about that tea there's nothing interesting about any of the teas and any of the lineups that has any bearing of reality.

Jeff · 24:58

It's poetic names. It's a price point. Maybe if you're lucky, you get like a two by two grid to say it's more bitter or less bitter are more rich or less rich or refreshing, not refreshing whatever their axis is. And there's nothing to cling on to.

Jeff · 25:14

Someone who wants to let the product speak for itself and like build patterns to OK, why do I like it? What's good about it? How can I replicate this experience? How can I look for a new variety in this product? Positioning.

Jeff · 25:30

It's it's actually no surprise to me that these newcomers cannot position the product. As you go to the old players, you can't learn what's good. And unless you talk to the farmers directly, it's hard to pull out this information from people. And some farmers too have very strong perspectives and they don't always agree with each other. We've we've noticed.

Jeff · 25:51

No. And, and I, I, we had this conversation earlier this year with an old farmer who is a, he is one of the top producers of gyokuro in the Kyotanabe region, old gentleman. And he was very point blank. He said, and I love this statement.

Jeff · 26:10

He said, I know what I like, but the new marketing has told me that what I like in a gyokuro which I've drank, which I've consumed since I was young, is not what should be promoted. So he said, he said, I'm confused for a number of reasons, because my version is what I was told by my master was reflecting great quality. And he said, now I listen to all of this fancy language and he says I don't recognize the tea I love and all that fancy language.

Jeff · 26:45

So, and he's a tea tea producer, tea farmer, simple vernacular. His teas are tremendous. His teas are ranked by a lot of producers of gyokuro on this specific region near a village called Fuganji as being tremendous, and they all say the same thing about his tea. But sometimes these older farmers may actually have had a description that has been erased or weakened by this marketing bonanza of some of the players, the marketeers, the middle people.

Jeff · 27:21

So rather than take the knowledge as it was and simply describe something, it's been taken, thrown about like kites in the wind, and it's settled. So we're using language that sometimes confuses even the growers and the producers.

Jeff · 27:38

I'm sure that's not always the case, but I mean, I've met tea farmers around the world who sadly know how to do one or two things well. They're not marketing specialists, but they can tell you. They can walk into their gardens.

Jeff · 27:52

They can tell you tomorrow it's going to rain. That means I need to do this in in three days we will start the harvest because the Japanese Nightingale, I'm saying so that there I feel sometimes the informal ways of the old traditions, they weren't necessarily wrong.

Jeff · 28:12

They may not be correct either, but maybe they were not transcribed. I'm using that word lightly. They weren't transcribed properly. And so I often feel that a lot of tea farmers feel cut out of the tea journey to the consumers cup.

Zongjun · 28:27

Now all they're expected or wanted to do, grow the tea, provide X amount, this is your quota. And in the middle, a lot of mystifying language sometimes is used. And then by the time it gets the cup we're on, we're not actually acknowledging the information that the farmers know very well. We're not tributing some of what they know. Yeah, I feel like this is not just limited to Japanese tea because while you're looking to China, like people also talk about like the idea of Shingomi, right, the new method. And that's being constantly shut down into farmers motivation practice by sometimes larger

Zongjun · 29:09

companies like IE for example, it's constantly pushing all these like very green kind of processing to farmers that have been doing tea very traditionally in the past. So that's the what do you think about that, Ryan? Like do you see similarities between these two words?

Ryan · 29:27

I do. I've seen it in Sri Lanka, I've seen it in India. And it's a, it's a good point because in some ways it may be, it points to a wider framework of the marketing efforts of some of the bigger players in T to sell more quantity. And, and you know, your, your comment is, I think a very good one that this isn't restricted to a region or a nation. It it it might be something much more global and certainly there are tea trading interests at work that would like to keep the stock of tea at certain prices.

Ryan · 30:02

And with those efforts comes I think certain language to gussy up average teas and give very, very, very simple basic bits of information. This is a classic black this is, but we're not actually passing on the vital information that I think a lot of young people especially, we're information driven now. And when we don't pass on, I think some of the grass roots information, when it's all being sieved through massive companies who are coming up with, you know, blueprints for how to market a new oolong, a lightly oxidized oolong or or a heavily roasted yancha like a stone oolong. I think what happens then is we

Jeff · 30:50

disconnect from the origin point to the consumer. And I think the consumer knows a lot more now, certainly in the tea world than they used to. Yeah. When I last saw you, Ryan, we were in Paris few weeks ago at the Paris Tea Festival. I can never get over how many young and I'm talking youthful 20 somethings, tea participants, tea lovers, tea heads are willing to commit so much time, financial resources, traveling resources to learn more about tea. And I'm it's it's so impressive to me. It's so humbling to see a reverence to go to the source. I have friends who are now in Yunnan who spent three weeks finding a translator because

Jeff · 31:41

they don't want to get more information about poor from a distance. They want to go to the source, they want to go to the farmers, They want a translation. They're doing Google Translate. They're struggling. But their effort is so admirable because I feel like they're, they represent a growing interest amongst youth.

Jeff · 32:00

Youth that tells you something about my age. But this idea that no, we want to get information that's closer to the source. We want verifiable information. We don't want all this jargon. Yeah. Having having said that, back to your point, Sam, I do feel that there is an an abundance, as always, of misinformation deliberately rehashed, sometimes clandestine, more clandestinely trying to hide, processing ridiculously tight quotas for struggling tea farmers. Wow, such a.

Zongjun · 32:35

Unique perspective, I guess, on tea because you you have exposed and talked to so many people like farmers, tea consumers, tea makers, and we have been talking about, you know, all these differences between tea making countries and regions.

Zongjun · 32:50

And I guess that's what we most shocked at because, you know, after learning so many years about Chinese tea, our first exposure to Japanese tea would like, wow, this is just so different, so counterintuitive. It is. I guess on the other hand, like where where do you do you see any similarities between I guess Japanese tea and Chinese tea and maybe other regions? I'm curious to hear your perspective. There's definitely, I mean, I'm going to make a social commentary.

Jeff · 33:23

I definitely see a similarity in the tea farmers struggles. I see tea farmers now in Japan really struggling to provide tencha. I see a lot of matcha in Kagoshima that's not even been shaded. There's there's such a demand now from matcha.

Jeff · 33:43

So the struggling tea farmers, I've seen them in China. Having lived in Yunnan, I was very close with a number of families who would constantly point out that the, the, they'd asked me how much is this tea in the West, in Europe and North America. And I, and I would tell them how much sort of the mean average price was.

Jeff · 34:03

And they would explain that in, let's say a decade, what they could sell the middle men, the tea per kilo hadn't changed more than a, and I'm talking less than a, less than a euro, less than a US dollar. But the middle men were charging much more over the course of this decade.

Jeff · 34:23

So I, I see a yes, there's a lot of great tea projects out there that are very small, very curated, high price margins, which I sometimes support. Because I think it's important that if we're going to talk about coffee being sold at some of the exorbitant amounts per pound wines will spend an inordinate amount of money on a bottle of wine that we down in a day a meal. I've done it, but we're not yet willing to pay slightly higher premiums for great tea with a great narrative from the source. So I see a parallel with a lot of the tea farmers throughout, Sri Lankan tea farmers.

Jeff · 35:09

This was happening 15 years ago when I was there. Darjeeling is suffering a lot as well. So I see that as that's more of a socio economic similarity. Japan has got this. I mean, we've gone on about it, but what? Let's maybe go down to Taiwan briefly. That's in the late 90s and early 2000s. That's where my first mentorship began with a with Mr. Lee, who was from China, who had settled in Taiwan, who made dampi oolong.

Jeff · 35:37

So he'd do these very specific roasts using different woods to smoke and enhance oolongs. Very complex. He was neurotic, beautifully unsmiling, didn't didn't give credit very often, but like most masters, doesn't, you know, didn't feel the need to to be a marketing genius.

Jeff · 35:59

He was just really good at what he was doing. But he always used to say Taiwanese teas for him were marvelous because they took a bit of the Japanese structure and rigidity when Japan occupied Taiwan. But they had a real tradition that was rooted in Fujian type ulos because of the first waves of Fujian immigrants that came to Taiwan. And he he always said that there are similarities, but they're the differences.

Jeff · 36:32

When the differences of the Chinese and the Japanese styles fuse, that's where the genius moment happens. A bit of the rigidity, but also knowing your tea, you know, the gong fu style is all about a bit of cowboy because there's interpretations to gong fu style, which I love.

Jeff · 36:49

You can, you can go on a beautiful journey with somebody whose precision is almost demonic. And then the very next gong fu session, somebody's interpreting it. It's a cowboy session. Liquids flying cigarettes are going all over the place.

Jeff · 37:04

But he always emphasized, Mr. Lee always emphasized this Yao Jun, the sort of standard, if you can make the standard mix between the rigid of the Japanese with a little bit of that messy brilliance of the Chinese Fujian style.

Jeff · 37:21

That was happy ground. And I've for for me at least, that's where I still see the similarities in their divergent approaches. They're both brilliant. And maybe that's the reason I don't drink so many Taiwanese Zulongs. But there's something about a Taiwanese along when you drink classic one with the right water and the right ambiance, with the right people, and that plays a role in what we taste. I think there's something for me at least, that that hits a high point because you it's almost recognizing the genius of chaos and the genius of rigidity in one session. It's interesting.

Zongjun · 38:00

It's actually really, I, I've, I've made that comparison before, especially within tea setups. Like you can really tell a Taiwanese tea setup like pretty distinctly from a mainland Chinese one. But then I sometimes compare it to the opposite and look at sencha though, which to me is just incredibly weird mix.

Zongjun · 38:21

Except it's more if if we compare it like 8020 and like the Taiwanese style is like 80% Chinese and 20% Japanese. And then it feels like that flips in the sencha though, where you have all this like Chaozhou looking stuff being performed in a very Japanese way.

Jeff · 38:39

It's a really weird comparison of these mixing of Chinese and Japanese culture. And the way the Japanese do that mixing is so different than what manifests in Taiwan. Yes, and I'm, I was recently reading something where the, you know, during the tea of the the time of tea evolving in Japan, a lot of the merchant classes played a huge role in tea spreading into the culture of Japan because of a lot of the imported ceramics styles of serving from Korea, from China, which played a role in the whole movement of wabi sabi.

Jeff · 39:20

And and again, that's a huge topic. But you know, some of the most coveted matcha bowls right now in the old schools in Japan are actually based on old Korean super simple stoic rice bowls. And some of the more glamorous glitzy, you know, side handle ornamental styles of Japan, the Kutani style. Some of that was influenced by the the Chinese that there was a huge fad of, of Chinese styles in Japan at a, at a time. So, you know, so much of what is seemingly fixed, for me at least, is incredibly nuanced rather than fixed. There's so many influences that we don't acknowledge. You know, maybe that runs

Jeff · 40:07

parallel to the conversation we had earlier about not acknowledging or not understanding enough about the baseline of where our tea comes from, who's growing it, What are the cultivars? What are the soil? PH, acidity, relationships. So maybe all of this very rigid information. I tend to subscribe to chaos theory again and again because it the chaos theory is about accepting nuance. That was unexpected.

Zongjun · 40:33

And yeah, I might have, I might have digressed there, but. One of the things that you know, we were talking about before this recording was this old tree idea, and I currently was. I'm currently writing an article and I sent you a copy where I discovered some primary sources from old tea quality manuals from like the early 1900s and I found a couple sources saying that old trees are better. Some people said you cannot make good matcha or good gyokuro unless your trees were at least 100 years old and you I found I found various numbers but the quality distinction much like we see in pu-erh has a lot to do with

Zongjun · 41:17

TH. And now you never hear anyone talk about TH. Like occasionally maybe there's some strange farmer in like Ujitawara or Wazuka that happens to have revived an abandoned tea plot that happens to have some seed propagated tea that has now reached 100 years old.

Zongjun · 41:35

And maybe they're making sencha out of it, or maybe they're making tencha out of it, but you don't hear about it. And I've had the opportunity to taste some of this tea and it's just not classically good. And it really resonated your story in Kyoto Nabe, where these old masters have this idea of quality and it just doesn't match with what is considered high quality now. In the same way that I know in my heart that that 100 year old zairai tencha that was milled into matcha would never win a competition.

Zongjun · 42:08

It is just too flawed and how our ideas of quality have drifted. And it's like has a real impact on on like these farming practices. Like, is this evolution or have we lost something? And I kind of go back and forth on that.

Jeff · 42:25

Certainly it resonates with me specifically to do with the poor world just because of and again, there is a lot of hyperbole and deliberate. Well, it's, it's, it's lying. It's fake teas about the age of of tea trees and tea bushes in, in in Yunnan. It's funny, your story in your article, which which I really enjoyed it made me remember traveling to Darjeeling to a garden near a very good garden called Jungpana. They make first flush.

Jeff · 43:01

Darjeeling's tremendous, and I was speaking with one of the people who is the manager of the factory there, and he said he went on this long discourse about a cultivar called what they called China. I kept hearing China, that the best Darjeelings were made from a China cultivar.

Jeff · 43:20

Well, what they were saying, I found out these were China cultivars. Oh, OK. These were original mother seeds that were stolen, kidnapped. Robert Fortune Seeds. And that a lot of the the best Darjeelings and there are some tremendous Darjeelings are made from what they call China, which is an original cultivar.

Jeff · 43:46

And of course they're seed based rather than cuttings. So, you know, app roots have been going down and we saw a couple of plants that were close to 200 years old. Wow. So we were there for a month going to different places. Only once did I hear about a reverence or an A reverential reference to an old tree.

Jeff · 44:11

And it was at this one garden, which I think the tree was 100 and it wasn't that old, but it was over a century old. But, you know, to your point, I also am surprised that there isn't more information, more references in the description of AT to the age of the original Bush or tree.

Jeff · 44:32

Or, you know, in China, there's very specific taidi sentai kusu laosu. And of course we can lie about these things, but at least there's an acknowledgement of this because each age group gives you a different profile in the mouth, a little more astringency.

Jeff · 44:49

But yes, it's, it's like a, a sea of calm when you ask in certain countries about the age of a Bush. And in Sri Lanka, I think there's a practice, it's quite common where they have to uproot every three decades, every 30 years. They uproot everything completely because they've, in some cases they've overharvested and in some cases they've just, the soils are not as rich mineral wise as they once were. So they have to plants and replants. They harvest like four or five times a year there, don't they? Or sometimes even more.

Jeff · 45:22

Right you. Do and, and in some cases there isn't even really a time of the year where they're not harvesting. So there's so right. And and you know, there's sensational teas in Sri Lanka, but it's, it's again, it's a very different model of, let's say, revering the older trees, the older bushes, creating a storyline around some of that sumptuous information.

Jeff · 45:49

And in fact, you're the article you sent me that you're working on. I'd never heard of any of this except from our mutual friend Tsuji San, who OK mentioned at one point, there's a time in the not so distant past when there was the idea of gushu. He didn't use those words because I served him poor. Every time I go to, I bring my stock of teas and oolongs. And I mean, I've got a, my cakes of puer and I serve them because I, I think it's nice to, for me, it's nice to share and to serve them.

Jeff · 46:24

So much of what they do is providing me joy. So I try to serve. And I explained this one particular tea that was really enjoyed in the village, and it was a gushu from an area called Naka, which is known for very strong flavor profile, a lot of chi.

Jeff · 46:44

And I explained the idea while these are and I showed him pictures of these old trees and he was fascinated. And he said, well, you know, we had this to a degree, but it's part of the past. Interesting, how did he find the tea? I've always been super curious if you took the best teas of a region and serve them to a different sort of tea master in a different region, like what would they think? And I've actually I had this idea for like a fun video project is to record people's reactions like a gushu pour to a famous matcha producer, which is exactly what she did. And then like the top umami bomb

Jeff · 47:23

matcha to someone doing gushu in in China. I'm really curious what his his impression was. He enjoyed it and we we serve. I served it to the film, the subject of the film, and he found it fascinating. And he talked about, I don't remember exact words, but he talked about it in ways I've I wouldn't describe.

Jeff · 47:46

I thought they'd find it very astringent because the power of a, of a young fresh, even if it's an old tree, a young explosive, 2, three-year old, you know, Sean Poor, they didn't, they said they could taste flowers. They could taste, I don't know exactly the, the descriptions, but they talked about flowers, they talked about soil, that they could taste soil. So they were able to determine that in my way of thinking, at least my memory is that they understood that what they were tasting wasn't manufactured, that it was the source material from the, the environment that they were tapping into. Because some of the Shong pores,

Jeff · 48:29

people will say that there's, you know, if you, if you taste it at a cooler temperature or by your 5th infusion, you're starting to get something different. That's very subjective. I don't get into that. But they didn't dislike it. And in fact, one of the gentlemen kept quietly coming and I'd say which are the TS and he'd point at my pot. So he enjoyed it and he said the energy that the translation was. OK.

Jeff · 48:57

So he was feeling not hyper. He said it wasn't hyper, but it had a lot of what I described as chi or the Japanese called Ki. But it had the energy, the power of. So he, he quite enjoyed it. And of course the teas that he makes with the shading, he's almost diminishing those very qualities that make a tea astringent, the catechins, everything else. So I I found it interesting that he wanted the energy component and I didn't hear anyone say it was astringent, which I was expecting.

Jeff · 49:33

For a young. Yes, they love oolongs. I have to say I've I've shown up with a couple of Taiwanese oolongs from friends of mine. They they love oolongs. And they point out that there's a huge industry in Japan to bottle cold hojicha, cold oolongs and sip.

Jeff · 49:53

But something about the oolong flavor for a lot of Japanese I know they love the oolongs, but they're familiar. The sheng puer is not so much. Interesting. It's very cool. I did something almost sacrilegious a couple months ago.

Ryan · 50:09

We are constantly sampling matcha and I had a what was classically good Uji Hikari matcha but I thought it was a little boring. So I had some Danju that we got from a producer in Jing Mai from old trees and just took 1g of it and I crushed it up, put it in the Yixing teapot, brewed it super, super light, really just a touch of fragrance and to extract some minerality from it. When I prepared in Usucha with that water, with that tea, and I have never seen a more beautiful expression of matcha. I think it was like because it was the texture and the fragrance of the sheng and the minerality of it without the flavor characteristics as much

Jeff · 50:51

and the way that those two things blended together. I was like oh wow maybe this is kind of close to what these old tree like 100 year olds Uji bushes might have tasted like that had could have this deep taproot and were shaded and could have a much more interesting expression of minerality. I mean, what you're doing, I mean, it may be sacrilegious and 10 years ago I would have probably shut the screen off at this point, but I think what I think what you're doing is actually part of how T moves forward. I, I just had, we just hosted 21 students from all over North America, Mexico.

Jeff · 51:31

And I have something I do called tea time. We have a nonprofit here and I serve them tea and every time I serve them tea, let's say one or two out of each group of let's say 2025 people will have had decent tea. The rest, no. But every time I serve a decent tea and I, I don't serve plank, I learned something from them about their interpretation of what they're tasting or feeling.

Jeff · 51:59

And I think one of the great learnings I've maybe that that I've taken in in the last years is to never refute how somebody wants to progress with something or experiment with something. Because it is often in those little tweaks and sacrilegious moments that we take this beautiful leaf that we all adore. We take it forward somehow.

Jeff · 52:23

And you know what you did there is a bit of alchemy. You decided to there's, there's, there's a, it wasn't a barista, it was a bartender. He was a mixologist. He wasn't working in Hong Kong, a Polish gentleman. He was mixing high end teas with, you know, gin with martinis. And I said there's no way I'm drinking because at that point in my life I was going to drink tea. I would do a martini, but I was not doing them in the same setting.

Jeff · 52:51

And in the end I did. And some of what he was doing was breathtaking. And you know, to your point about throwing a bit of Qing Mayan with a little Uji Hikari matcha, maybe that's also where we should be encouraging people is to, you know, throw away the book of rules.

Jeff · 53:13

And because ultimately I think this is what disappoints me sometimes about people who are trying to put this rigid structure on tea, I think it's important to understand how to take a pure tea and, you know, proper temperature, proper reverence for the cultivar, understanding it's like chefs talk about an omelette before you go creative, make sure you base omelette done right. So understanding what a great baseline, you know, semi lightly roasted oolong should be.

Jeff · 53:50

But after that, I think this idea of a sense of play, a sense of taking another journey with something, I, I think there's something quite positive and and exciting about the results and they won't always work. No, I've since replicated this experience with some other experiment with some other T and somehow I on the first try I stumbled upon 1 + 1 = 4.

Jeff · 54:18

Honestly, it wasn't even three. It was so magical what that did, because I felt like the deficit of that, what I felt is a little bit of a deficit, was just so perfectly balanced. But then I tried replicating it with some other TS and it's like yeah, doesn't work so. Well, and it's like that old idea of sometimes the best tee times aren't actually a tee time with the best tee. I think a lot of these moments of exploration are subjective and that we have a different palette to someone sitting across the table from us.

Jeff · 54:50

We have a different enzymes, different blood type, different acidity levels. So sometimes a sense of play is just that. It's it's not. It takes away this rigid notion of overly formulated rules that have been come up with by people who are maybe merchants and trying to sell us something. So good for you.

Jeff · 55:14

Thanks. Is there anything that we didn't touch on that? You would like to know about No, just maybe a little something. And it's maybe it's simply because I know a little less about this part of the world. We're talking about the whole fertilizer question in Japan.

Jeff · 55:30

And through some research, through a friend of mine, doing some research in Japanese literature, there is this idea that I think what's interesting about the whole umami flavor profile, this sea sort of this tribute to salt and sweetness.

Jeff · 55:46

Throughout the, the research I've been doing and, and a friend has been doing for me, there is this idea that the Japanese identity has, has always been tied to the sea, even in inland regions. So this idea of importing a sea flavor, a sea essence with their kombu, with their seaweed, this has always been present in the Japanese literature and culture.

Jeff · 56:14

And this there's a song in fact, that sort of pays tribute to the sea. It's Ware wa Umi no Ko. Basically, it's a, it's a patriotic song, but it pays tribute to the pride the people feel in the ocean and for the bounties of the ocean. And when Kyoto was a hub in Japan, you know, back this is all tying into fertilizer and bringing in herring from Hokkaido in the north of Japan into fertilizer. When Kyoto was one of the great hubs, they had something called the Mackerel Road or the Saba Kaido. It was an actual trade route that brought mackerel in from the Wakasa Bay, I think, to Kyoto. It also brought salt because

Jeff · 57:05

of these flavor profiles that were so revered and and desired and sorry, it kind of ties into the mystery of fertilizer and this umami. There is a bigger story there and and your article touched on it and and maybe some of this history in literature making reference to the sea.

Jeff · 57:25

Maybe that is in and answers some of the questions that these are nuanced questions, but maybe it ties into these flavor profiles that are coveted and and are sought out in the creation of these teas. Yeah. Well, with, with our own research, you know, like back in the days, Matcha was fertilized with the human manure that was collected in Fuji City and and the manure especially coming from richer families that consumes more fish in their diet. From Digested mackerel.

Ryan · 58:00

Yeah, to fertilize tea, that's. It's the original regenerative permaculture model maybe. Yeah, yeah. That's a sustainability model right there. Yeah, very circular food economy in the best way. The Japanese had it figured out all along.

Zongjun · 58:19

So now we just pump the soil full of ammonium nitrate. At least in the agriculture, the the, you know, the less artisanal side to the little SAD. Did they? Start using like actual fish and seafood as fertilizers in Japan. Yeah, it's interesting.

Jeff · 58:35

I think it's probably in literature. I have asked the question about Wendy's because it's such a specific science to me that you get a simple tea farmer, but he's got an amazingly detailed log book of the ratio of, in this part of it in the garden that's in that prefecture, there's a ratio of herring, cornmeal, sugar husk, sugar cane husk in that, in that prefecture, it's totally, well, it's not totally different, but it is very demonstrably different. And when I asked him about this I I got a very vague answer and I'm not sure he was sure.

Ryan · 59:13

But just think. It it would be fascinating to to detail the evolution of this very complex and sustainable or or not method of fertilizing. I guess it's, I guess it's one last question. I'm curious, what are your biggest discovered curiosity gaps or knowledge gaps that you've discovered that you have after spending all this time in Japan and talking to people, learning about shaded cultivation in Katanabe and also Uji in the surrounding regions?

Jeff · 59:48

Like what? What makes you the most curious now with all the contacts that you've learned in preparing for and shooting this film? Two, I think two things come back to me again and again. One is we've, we've talked about it during this this quite wonderful chat.

Jeff · 1:00:06

One of them What is the the detailed approach to creating eliciting? The flavor profile within a plant using and being able to adapt the soil, the shade, the curation, manipulation, the steam to create something so very specific. Again, it doesn't surprise me that the Japanese do this because they have, you know, methods of cooking puffer fish. They have used seaweed in so many different ways, spectacular, subtle, I.

Jeff · 1:00:40

So I'd say it's the dedication to eliciting a very specific and desired sensation. And I guess another one is that this goes back to the farmers and maybe this idea of chaos that I cling to is that within all this detail and within all of this curation within the Japanese tea farmers and the Japanese psyche, I think there is such a sense of the pending power of nature. There's all these references with the earthquakes to the tsunamis, to typhoons.

Jeff · 1:01:17

They've been inundated by natural disasters, but they've managed to always. So I found this and I find it a wonderful counterpoint to being inflicted with all of these things from the outside and yet being relentless in refining a structure and a technique to elicit something very specific.

Ryan · 1:01:40

It's kind of like you've got the chaos of Typhoon Alley, earthquakes, tsunamis, and on the other hand you have this ability to cling to some sort of sense of detail and reverence. Like exercising the agency within the domain they control.

Jeff · 1:01:57

It's like almost kind of. It's almost stoic. It's. Very much. In fact, I almost used the word stoic. It's it's an understanding that there's so much that's uncontrollable. So it almost has pushed people to the opposite of what you'd expect.

Jeff · 1:02:14

They're not giving up the traditions. I mean, they are, we all are. We're giving, we're giving a lot of ourselves away to fast and easy. And, and I'm that's another discussion. But I think those two things, this idea of eliciting something so specific and this commitment to adapting and pivoting very quickly in a world that's shown them very little mercy at times in terms of natural disasters. Yeah, that's interesting.

Jeff · 1:02:45

I've never thought about that. My my mentor, Mr. Lee, though, gave me the best mantra. It'll it'll be with me until my son will have it. He after two years of studying with him, he said very unceremoniously. I found it very cold. But he just said, now that you know all this, forget it and go drink some tea.

Ryan · 1:03:07

It's been fun. Yeah, thank you so much. And to our audience, thank you so much for listening. And if you enjoyed this, please consider sharing with the friend and we'll see you in the next one. Take care. Bye.