Interview with Maren Fichter, Tea Educator and Writer

Ryan · 0:07

Welcome to Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is Zongjun Li, who also goes by Sam. Hello. Hello and the co-founders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah. We launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey and matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And today's episode, we have Maren Fichter joining us for our discussion.

Maren · 0:24

Welcome, Eric. Welcome. Hello, thank you so much for having me on the podcast. Happy to finally have you on. I feel like we've been an e-mail correspondence for such a long time. And we bumped into each other in Japan, which is crazy.

Ryan · 0:38

Oh yeah. Car park in Tokoname. Yeah, in a parking lot in Tokoname. Very, kind of very crazy. Serendipitous. Yeah, very serendipitous. Well, welcome to the podcast. We'd love if you could share a little bit more about you and your your background and your your tea story.

Maren · 0:57

Yeah. So yes, once again, thank you for having me on. My name is Maren. I'm from Germany originally, have lived in the UK and the US as well. Been around a little bit and been kind of in and out of tea for a while. Kind of surprisingly, something I grew up with.

Maren · 1:12

I grew up with Chinese tea because my dad used to work in China. So kind of like I, it's been part of my life in a way that is fairly rare for folks outside of Asia. And so I feel like it's just been kind of something that was always with me.

Maren · 1:25

But I have been working in tea actually for a while now as well. So at the moment, I'm kind of at the intersection of tea tourism, education, production, agriculture, quite a lot of things coming together, but I've also got a background in a lot of other things academically.

Maren · 1:40

I studied linguistics. I've also had a previous career in Ed tech and UX design. I've also been in food heritage tourism in the UK, teaching matcha for the UK Tea Academy, have had my own tea business. I've worked for other tea businesses kind of doing content websites and things, so a fair amount of different stuff. Currently I'm in Wazuka near Kyoto in Japan. I'm an assistant manager at Obubu Tea Farms. So you have talked about Obubu before on this podcast as well, so your listeners might know a bit about this here, but I'm working in kind of tourism, some tea farming. And then specifically I work on

Maren · 2:14

Obubu's educational programming and I do kind of the long form communications like the website, newsletter, blog, that kind of thing. So Whirlwinds Tour. Wow. Crazy schedule. Do you have like 36 hours a day or something? Gods, you know I need a time Turner.

Ryan · 2:28

Yeah. We all do. That's crazy because like you've really been like up and down the I don't want to. It's not necessarily the tea supply chain, but like all the way from a plant in the ground, in the dirt, all the way through, like consumer perception and branding. Yeah.

Maren · 2:45

I mean, I think of it as like the life cycle of tea. I feel like I've been with tea throughout its full life cycle at various stages of of the past few years. And it gives me a very different perspective, I think than than a lot of folks who like specialize in certain areas.

Ryan · 3:00

Yeah, totally. I'm really curious. I I know that you were in Wazuka before the matcha boom and you're there now. Like what's changed on the ground with, you know, the people that come to visit with the questions they ask, what what their own motivations are like? I'm so curious.

Ryan · 3:19

You get to interact and bump up with so many people who want to learn more about tea. Yes, yeah. So wow, that's, that's an interesting question is when I think a lot about actually, because so much has changed and there's kind of two sides of this, I think for me.

Maren · 3:34

And one side is kind of the on the ground production, like on the ground, on the physical ground in terms of what is being cultivated, they did and harvested and processed And kind of how the the demand has changed. What farmers are making and what farmers feel like they need to make versus what farmers want to make because it's what they have experience and expertise in or like love for in terms of like the craft that they specialize in and have practiced for a long time. And then the other side of it is like the the kinds of things that, yeah, like that that that tourists want and that tourism demands now.

Maren · 4:08

And there's like, no, not an easy intersection between the two a lot of the time. So on the one hand, in terms of like agriculture, tea processing, all of these things, you know, we are seeing a little bit more of a shift towards tencha production, more shaded teas, but like shading specifically for tencha production.

Maren · 4:24

But you know, people who are traditionally producing sencha, like, I mean, Obubu traditionally produces more sencha than tencha. And our lead farmer, Akisan, it is his craft. It is what he loves and it is what he wants to make. And so the pressure to produce more tencha is kind of at odds with with this.

Maren · 4:40

And this is something that is the case for a lot of farmers. But then on the other hand, you know, the money where where the money is, you also have to kind of pay attention to that. But in terms of like tourism infrastructure as well.

Maren · 4:50

And really cool development we've had at Obubu is in the last year, Obubu has been able to open its own matcha grinding facilities. So we have a few grinding stones of our own now. And with this, we're able to offer for tours specifically focused around matcha.

Maren · 5:03

So Obubu is kind of famous for, you know, the, the internship program where like folks from all around the world can come and experience tea farming for a few months. But also, you know, the, the big tourism aspect of like being able to welcome international visitors for a tour of the tea fields, a guided tasting. You know, it's a very incredible educational experience where you get to be on hands or like, I don't know, on the field in a sense, in a way that is like quite rare for a tourism experience.

Maren · 5:29

And now there's a much more focused version of it. And so it's like we get so, so many interested people for this tour. But most of the people that we're getting or that I'm seeing, at least when I, when I run these tours is a lot of people who are wanting to learn about matcha specifically so they can launch their own brand.

Maren · 5:47

And so they're not coming to the tour as like tourists. They're not coming in the sense of this is an exciting, you know, thing for me to experience while I'm in Japan. It's more a business thinking orientation for them.

Ryan · 5:59

And it's like almost like quasi a sourcing trip. Yeah, they're sourcing yet? They haven't gone to the the harsh realization of the realities of trying to source on your own. Yeah, yeah. And so we frequently kind of have this experience of like I'm, I'm taking somebody through this tour and that harsh realization is setting in throughout.

Maren · 6:19

And you kind of people, people go different ways. You know, some people get really daunted and like scared by the complexities of the industry and of the product itself, not just the, the money involved, but like every, anything else, the amount of like education and knowledge that they all inevitably realize that they're going to need if they're to do this properly. But then other people kind of turn that into like that, that really excites them.

Maren · 6:40

And it kind of becomes this kind of navigating that divide and kind of guiding people towards also wanting to ask the right questions and, and wanting to, to develop that excitement as opposed to falling into this despair of, Oh my God, I'm not.

Ryan · 6:56

I now I know how much I don't know. Yeah, I feel like that, you know, like you can never, almost never try to really set up the expectation fully because you would just end up pushing people away. I think this is a wonderful strategy.

Ryan · 7:13

Yeah, it's like, it's very much. Sometimes it feels like guiding someone by the hand around the edge of a chasm and being like, it's OK, like there are. Flowers on the other side, indeed. Something you wrote about recently that I've been thinking a lot about that was on your Substack was this concept of a single origin and being overfitted into the matcha industry, which is kind of unusual because you have places like Obubu who have essentially vertically integrated or nearly vertically.

Maren · 7:41

Maybe some of the equipment for, you know, tencha processing has to be shared. But you know, you can know your own, you grow your own and you're able to have a relationship with the plant and with the customer, which is atypical. And then you have all the famous rock star people and like in Uji like the Furukawas or Horii-san or Hatai-san, who you know, also are farmers that have tea businesses. But like it's just not the reality for most matcha people are sourcing because it's the specialization is so fragmented and people are overlaying this single origin concept into a product that it usually doesn't

Ryan · 8:18

describe, but it's sometime describes. And I first find this tension fascinating because it's almost like 2 narratives competing. There are matcha farmers who also have businesses, but most of it is really fragmented. And like, I feel like these narratives are, I don't want to say at odds, but you can feel some tension in the industry.

Maren · 8:40

Yeah, for sure. It's I think as well like these, these narratives and these terms often exist in isolation in a sense, like they're plucked out of context, like single origin makes sense in some markets and in some contexts.

Maren · 8:53

But here it is. It's it's a term that's been taken out of those other contexts because it feels like probably there are enough similarities that it would apply in this situation without folks realizing that that's not the case. And so it's taken out of its context and the context is put into, it doesn't fit in.

Maren · 9:08

So it's kind of like existing in isolation and it doesn't have anything to like hang on to. And I think like this is where I always start thinking about like, I think in terms of webs, like everything in my brain works as webs and there's nothing, there's no web for that to hang on to here with matcha. And it's the same problem as actually, you know, there there was a previous episode you guys did I think Sam, you said something that like really kind of stayed in my mind. I can't remember if I'm going to get the words right. But you said something about debunking one term won't mean it goes away.

Maren · 9:41

People will just invent another term for the same thing. That really sucks with me. But it's because it's like people are looking to put words to things that they're observing, but and you take one word away, something else is going to come to fill its place. But it's like there's more places to fill. We need to like take these words and hang them on to other related words so that there's like a greater, if we don't have a fitting context, we need to build out a context that makes sense.

Maren · 10:06

And single origin, I think is one of those things in matcha that like needs to like build its build out its web or like we need to build out its web a little bit for consumers to be able to make sense of it. And like, you guys are doing quite a lot of that in terms of like providing the context for what even terms like Uji matcha could mean.

Ryan · 10:25

And kind of like, yeah, like divorcing the concept of single origin from its definition that it would have in like the wine world, for example, or the coffee world. Right. Yeah, I feel like that, you know, like people trying to import or adopt this term in the matcha, but but having the mindset of, you know, wine or coffee because like for example, in wine, you know, grape grows in one region, it gets picked in one region, gets processed, you know, by the same people in one region and it's single origin wine, right? Like everything happens actually in a single location, whereas matcha it's not necessarily the

Maren · 10:59

case. Maybe for a few rare examples that we see that people are very vertically integrated, but for a lot of other matcha, you know, it doesn't. A lot of the processes and cultivation doesn't all happen in one location. Yeah, you know, kind of violates the very idea of single. And it's, it's hard when more when the, the very visible companies or like organizations like something like a Obubu that does have more international visibility is the rarer case in terms of like, you know, as I said, most of all is single origin in the sense that we do have this vertical integration here.

Maren · 11:32

But like this is, this is the outlier in Japan, this is the outlier in matcha. And like, when that is the one that's more internationally visible, that's also a challenge for kind of telling that story very accurately. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like just very conveniently kind of use this term and hide the fact that they're not actually single origin.

Maren · 11:53

I feel like that's something that we, for lack of better words, we find it to have some dishonesty something messages but. Or they don't know. I honestly I think most matcha brand owners have no idea in fact that Uji matcha isn't from Uji.

Ryan · 12:09

People in Japan have no idea, like you have to deepen the industry before anyone knows the truth behind provenance and the way tea gets labeled. Like I think it's ignorance, not I think there's also a lot of shady players that are like genuinely mislabeling or they have an ideological difference.

Maren · 12:27

There's a lot of farmers in Wazuka, but I say we're we make Gu GT and then there's Wazuka farmers that were like, no, this is Wazuka. It's a different place. I'm curious, what is your impression of that on the ground? Do you feel this is Wazuka matcha Uji matcha tension when you look at the landscape of tea producers? There, to be honest, I'm not sure. I sometimes feel like I'm a little bit too enclosed in the Obubu bubble.

Maren · 12:51

My language skills in Japanese are also not well developed enough to like, be having these levels of nuanced conversation with other farmers, unfortunately. That's one thing where like, absolutely. Yeah. I feel like actually, how would be a great person to talk to you about that?

Maren · 13:04

He might have some definite would have some more kind of nuanced thoughts than me just because, yeah, like I, I don't have the, the language skills to kind of access that and the, the, the levels of relationship yet. Maybe who knows down the line. But like I, I think there is more there. I have seen more sort of there have been more like guest houses and like tea experience types of things cropping up in Wazuka since I was last here three years ago as well. And those all kind of position themselves as Wazuka, not as Uji.

Maren · 13:33

And so at least in terms of like the international facing or like more tourism facing types of things, Wazuka is kind of seeing its, its draw as Wazuka as separate from Uji. So that is definitely happening. I mean, it's not like in a big way because that's just not possible because this is a very small town. But for that it is kind of.

Ryan · 13:52

I think there is there is a seeing more here locally of like this being a locale that is important for itself as opposed to being part of a greater thing. That's that's really encouraging to hear. In terms of tencha making philosophy, I guess have you ever heard from Aki-san? Like what?

Maren · 14:11

What is his philosophy of making tencha or his philosophy of like a good matcha? This is I guess pretty new to him, right? Because in the past he has been making predominantly sencha so. I mean, I'm curious that one, it's hard as well because Aki-san is somebody who Sencha is his art, Sencha is his love, he loves to make sencha.

Maren · 14:32

And at Obubu, we're a little bit old style, like traditional style in terms terms of like our factory is still heavily manual. So like we don't kind of automate everything. We have machines, but Aki-san is still kind of guiding the process start to finish. And with tencha, he has to give that control over to a different factory.

Maren · 14:51

And so I don't think he views Tencha as his in the same way that he views Sencha as his, especially because Sencha has been kind of the craft he's specialized in for so long. Again, we see this theme of specialization, right?

Maren · 15:03

And so I think matcha is something where he has to let go of and then let go of a little bit more so that he doesn't then I mean, I don't want to speak for Aki-san. I I actually like haven't asked him this question. This would be an interesting one to ask because he just loves talking about Sencha so much more.

Ryan · 15:19

You know, like conversation naturally flows in that direction. Very interesting. What do you what do you think about the tension of like producers practicing their heritage, making what they want and then like this is 1 philosophy.

Ryan · 15:31

It's like living culture moving forward and being preserved in tension with like we should create what consumers want. As you have like lived this full spectrum, like from like interacting with a bunch of brand owners who want to sell the tea with matcha consumers who want to drink and learn about the tea. Who is the industry in service of like the culture and the producers or of the consumers?

Maren · 15:55

Like how do you take aside that question? Sorry, but you're just so well, it's such a good question. I'm so curious about your perspective. And well, this is not going to be a clean answer in any way, because that is a question you have to kind of pick at.

Maren · 16:08

There isn't there? There isn't going to be an answer. Yeah, man, I mean, in, in a lot of ways, it's like the industry is in service to whoever speaks the loudest and whoever has the most money. I think at the end of the day, that's kind of where my thought process would go. Because at the end of the day, as much as people want to make what they want to make and specialize in the craft that they specialize in, they still have to be able to afford to live.

Maren · 16:33

And if the money is not there, they can't do that. And this is something that like, I mean, personally, I've had experience and just because, you know, like trying to work in tea in countries where tea isn't a big thing, specialty tea isn't a big thing, you know, in the UK, it's hard to make a living in tea. So I kind of, I, I, I also think of it in terms of that of like, at the end of the day, we are people trying to make a living. If there is no money in your industry, you're going to have to go where the money is and that the money currently is with matcha.

Ryan · 16:59

And kind of a difference now with that situation than in the kind of the previous matcha spikes that we've seen, you know, with, with the Starbucks Frappuccino and the ice cream from Haagen Dazs and all of that in like past decades, right?

Maren · 17:11

Like we did have matcha spikes and they didn't kind of stay stick around in the same way. Those were without things like social media where like there are people that just talk like the voices that talk the loudest because they have the most reach. And the kind of virality of matcha as like the cool, healthy green drink.

Maren · 17:30

This is, you know, that the that rhetoric, that aesthetic, that thing is so much louder and more present and more real for a lot of people than anything about what matcha actually is. So what does that mean in terms of who the industry serves when there's a kind of very much a fundamental misunderstanding of what the product even is amongst a lot of people who want to put money into the industry almost. New culture.

Zongjun · 17:56

It's almost new culture creation, this new group of consumers. Yeah. And he's business after all. Yeah, we got a filthy. That's our sound realization. 100 episodes and no business, no tea. Gorgeous business, no tea. We actually did an episode about this.

Zongjun · 18:13

It feels a little bit sad in some ways putting it like that because it's like, oh, we love to talk about like the health benefits, mindfulness, the connection to nature, all of these kinds of elements. They are very, very nice to talk about and they are not untrue. Like they, those are real.

Zongjun · 18:28

Unfortunately, so is money and business. But but, but I feel like we should talk about it right, like especially, I guess Japan is in, in the much better farmers in Japan are in much better position compared to places like, you know, Southeast Asia, India, Sri Lanka or even rural China, China, like you got to make money, help them make money first before we can start talking about preserving culture and all that. Otherwise, you know, there there will be no one there making so. So I feel like, you know, we shouldn't be ashamed of talking about this side of.

Maren · 19:04

Yeah, yeah. So no, and it's true. It's, it's as well, like whenever people talk about the word sustainability, I feel like there's always talk about sustainability in terms of like the planet and like climate change and how this effects tea plants growth and, you know, like unpredictable weather patterns making harvest harder.

Maren · 19:21

This year, we've had incredibly intense typhoon season that has like been really tough on, on us this summer. But the other side of sustainability is like the people side of sustainability. And you know, like there is the kind of the struggle of, you know, like most tea farmers here are getting too old to do the work and the younger generations are not wanting to pick up the work.

Maren · 19:42

That is an element of sustainability as well, and this is where it comes back to money. If there's people willing to pay for this product, then there is demand there. There is like a reason to do the work and that is sustainability for that industry, for that product.

Ryan · 19:58

Yeah, 100% agree. That's the real danger for a lot of these Japanese crafts like you. You hear about like there being like 1 artisan left of making this or that and it's so sad even with the matcha boom. And like seeing like a lot of the really like famed and prized Gokou producers, which in the tencha and like, it's just you can feel the soul being sucked out by this like demands.

Ryan · 20:26

And like, like, it's, it's yeah, it's a weird tension. But at the same time, like, can you force someone to like, you know, you should use a kyusu. Like most people don't want to use a kyusu, right? Like can I blame, you know, a 30 year old office worker in Tokyo that they don't want to go through the rigmarole of doing something they don't even know how to do well and it probably tastes worse than their convenient PET bottle tea. Like if they don't, if they do it poorly, like it's. You can't force consumer behavior either. Absolutely.

Zongjun · 20:58

Yeah, this is the other thing that's so cool about Obubu is that you guys, like bring so many like young people all around the world. So to Japan. This like aging country and doing all these and be so open minded. I feel like it's really an anomaly in Japan to like being, you know, this opened to the outside world. I think it's super rare kind of experience that in a lot of hard ways.

Maren · 21:24

Yeah, and I guess it's it's hard as well because contextually kind of there's for for a Obubu. It's made easier by the fact that here people are coming from all over the world and they're getting very, very deep access into is something that's like quite traditional, quite like closed off in a lot of ways. But they are not doing that from for the perspective necessarily of like, you know, doing business with that away. Like back home, wherever they're from, some of them do, you know, some of some people come to a Obubu and later go away and do their own tea things.

Maren · 21:55

But like while they're here, the purpose of their stay here is to contribute and it is to do the work. And in that sense, I think there is like an element of, of, of like, how do I put this? You yourself become a player, like you yourself become part of the workforce.

Maren · 22:12

I mean, it might just be the result of kind of the attitude of Matsuzan, Hirosan Akisan as the founders of Obubu. But they try and kind of cultivate a feeling of taking folks from outside of Japan and turning them, giving them insider access because those people are doing the work that you would be doing anyway if you had this inside access.

Maren · 22:33

They they are giving them insider access by turning them into insiders. But the expectation is that they will do that work. And this is kind of, this is something that where the internship that we have at Obubu is a little bit intense, like it's a fairly intense program.

Maren · 22:48

The expectations are tough at times, especially this time of year when we're like farming in this heat. But like that is kind of inherent also to like, you know, Japanese work culture and principles like you are just expected to do the work. And I think that's why it works in a sense like it kind of functions based on you leave your context fully and come into the Obubu context.

Maren · 23:12

And the Obubu context is kind of a microcosm of well, many things in the Japanese tea industry, but not all things, of course, it being such an outlier in some ways. But because as well, you know, who has such strong connections across various other places in Japan as well.

Maren · 23:26

In Kyoto, anytime I go somewhere and I mentioned I'm working at Obubu, everyone's like of course we know Obubu and you know, you get access to things because of that because there is kind of this this knowledge as well of like what was doing for Japanese tea abroad also. I can't imagine the impact like it's a would have like 250 interns from like what like 60 something countries? I forget the numbers, the spending very effects of like what is probably a very life changing experience for the people that go intern there.

Ryan · 24:00

Like the secondary effects are like almost immeasurable. Probably like the number of tea companies that get started, the number of consumers that become aware of Japanese tea having tastes like tea from a kyusu for the first time or like go properly whisked matcha for the first time.

Ryan · 24:16

And then they bring them home like it's even the global Japanese Tea Association are. Absolutely, yeah. Members are former Obubu people or current. Actually, it's the implications are crazy. I'd love to. Like document Obubu more thoroughly because it's a really interesting story here because it's the only place that feels friendly to open up.

Ryan · 24:40

Like it's like I feel like Obubu and Obubu, people are not very dogmatic. Like a lot of some of the other matcha education that's going on I can find a little bit dogmatic and I kind of disagree with some of their perspectives.

Zongjun · 24:52

Like they're but I feel like, I don't know, it just feels so balanced. We should apply for an internship, Ryan. This is my application Asian NVIDIA. Write us the recommendation letter, Baron. You know, I would actually about one for next year. Applications are going to open pretty soon. Yeah, I mean, it does it does come from from this kind of thing, from this confluence of like all these different people though.

Maren · 25:14

Like, that's how that's how that balance is achieved is because there are so many different perspectives coming together and so many different experiences coming together. And, you know, like, Obubu feels very different now than it did three years ago. But also there are a lot of underlying things that feel very much the same that are kind of steady here. And I one of those is like, yeah, that sense of openness and like and also awareness of how unique a space that Obubu really is.

25:42

Yeah, it's so unique, it's so cool. And the matcha tour is so cool. Everyone who asked me for Japan a Japan recommendations for tea Who wants to see the farm like this? Like Obubu is just such an easy answer because I don't think they're a tour that exists where you can see a room full of actively working ishi-usu and also the plants on the ground. I don't think any of the tourists are at a place that's that vertically integrated.

26:09

Or if they are, it's like you have to be an industry insider and huge factory, but maybe they just have ball mills or something. It's really cool. Yeah. What I'm curious, what are some of, like, the knowledge gaps that you've seen of people who take the matcha tour and what are their motivations?

26:29

Like, are they wanting to learn the craft of making matcha and maybe like, milling it themselves? And we see like this explosion of build your own matcha. Are they more interested in doing like local workshops? We know it's a pretty common business model in different parts of the world. Or, or opening their own cafes.

Maren · 26:46

Like what's what's the variety of people that you see who want to start their own thing? It's quite a variety, although the largest kind of subset I think is folks who want to do either cafe type thing or just kind of sell matcha as a, as a retail business. And so a lot of that the curiosity and learning that they need to do is literally just what is this product? And a lot of them are starting from like really the basics of assuming also things about matcha, like it must come from Japan.

Maren · 27:16

And then we have to have these very kind of nuanced conversations around whether that is true or not and how that kind of conversation is changing nowadays. And but this also has to be in context of if these people are coming to start their own business.

Maren · 27:32

There is an element of like, whatever I say in this context, whatever Obubu says in, in this context, this is going to be someone else's company taking this information and passing it on to their consumers. And so there's like all these levels of remove happening and all of these levels where things can be interpreted differently or phrased differently or otherwise just like change, like lost in translation or lost in rephrasing. And whenever these questions are asked, answering them has to be kind of this, this, I, I think of it more in terms of training than education of like the, the difference between like training someone to, you know, deliver

Maren · 28:09

knowledge or do a task or like deliver something to like a third party that is not here at the moment versus just giving education to somebody who's curious and who's building their own knowledge. There is that level of remove in these tours most of the time. And most of the time it's for folks who don't have a huge amount of context already.

Maren · 28:27

So we're just sort of starting to build out that web of context for them, and that's like, it's an incredibly delicate thing to do. Yeah. So like, how do you like if someone's like, I only want to source ceremonial grade matcha or like they say matcha only has to be from Japan like you mentioned, How do you like gently steer people towards like, I don't want to say the truth, but like a more nuanced understanding of what they're actually asking if I feel like when that's done poorly, it's incredibly condescending. It's like.

28:59

You're a very. Filthy wine bar and someone's talking down at you. But like, how do you, how do you approach these conversations That can be difficult or like, and you're almost correcting them, but are you really? You're giving them a web of context, as you say.

Maren · 29:12

Yes, yeah. Well, it literally oftentimes I will say that I will be like, OK, this is one question you're asking and the answer is far more complex than you may think. And so I'm going to build out a couple like a couple of other talks, topics that impact the answer, and then I'm going to put the answer there. And so I kind of like I, I will explain to them that their question is very complex and then we'll kind of get into some of the complexities around it.

Maren · 29:38

This is kind of something that comes more from not from my tea background, but from I used to work as a tour guide in the UK. I did food tours. And oftentimes we had like a pairing like we would be talking about a food item and it has some relevance to the history of the city.

Maren · 29:53

And that connection is not clear, but like, kind of hammering it home feels a little bit like a punch to the face of like, OK, why are you telling me all these, like, long historical anecdotes about this little bun that I'm eating?

Maren · 30:04

It's kind of like building out these transitions and turning them into stories rather than info dumps. Yeah. And I think because that's, that's also what sticks with people, like giving them a ton of information and technical things and dates and names.

Maren · 30:20

And these things only stick in people's minds if they have a reason for them, if there if there's an emotional connection or if there's a story linking them all together. And that's that's kind of what I think of with webs.

Maren · 30:32

It's like the building of this story. And so like, I just have to when people ask questions like this, you have to make them aware that that's that that's that's where this question leads. This question is not a simple Q&A. This question is something that opens up a whole network. And then, you know, depending on the situation, you can get into that more or less deeply.

Maren · 30:55

You can take that in various directions because as again, it's a web, it can go in very many directions. Any one of these questions can unlock so many other questions. And usually at the time that people are asking these questions, there's already been a level of conversation.

Maren · 31:08

So you already kind of know like what they're interested in, what's going to to resonate with them and picking up on those things, like what's going to resonate with a particular person or a particular group and being able to hone in on that.

Maren · 31:19

And then kind of tailor the story or focus on the side of the web that already they've shown interest in is going to be kind of the way to not only answer the question, but like help them build context for like what all their other questions are going to be after this that even they might not ask that day. But like it's like illuminating all of the things that you don't know.

Maren · 31:42

When people go into something and they think that they don't know what they don't know, oftentimes my goal is for that interaction. They know what they don't know afterwards. I haven't answered all the questions. They just have a clearer idea of the landscape and where to go next.

31:56

I love that approach. It's really the greatest gift is, you know, it's cultivating curiosity in a sense like, and I love the web analogy. It's, it's, it's really just really fitting. And this is the way tea education should be. And it's so rare and so rare to find this approach. I find so much tea education is so poorly executed. It's so luxury and dogmatic and condescending sometimes. I mean, really for this as well, I have to big time shout out being tea.

Maren · 32:26

I don't know if you know them. They're based in Chicago in the US. They're a tea education educator. So they do a lot of tea education, but they also run a teacher training program. And I completed that a couple of years ago.

Maren · 32:39

And so that is also kind of been hugely formative in terms of how I think about teaching tea and like sharing tea and doing tea education. Oh. Cool, I had no idea that this this existed being tea. Being tea, Yeah, I'll send you. I'll send you the website man.

Maren · 32:53

Cool. We'll link it in the show notes too, yeah. Absolutely. Great name too. Yeah, no. And I mean like the conversation they're often so, so often is about kind of these more felt sense things. There's a lot of kind of stuff in the program about like how our bodies even process tea, how our minds process flavor, you know, like the the the subset you referred to or actually the other one, one of the other ones.

Maren · 33:16

And in terms of like how smell and our sense of taste, like the, the program also talks a lot about this stuff and what it means in terms of teaching tea, because accessing those things is a fairly vulnerable experience.

Maren · 33:29

And kind of leaving space for that, creating space for that can be done very like dogmatically and very like, here's a correct answer, here's a wrong answer, or here's the experience you're supposed to be having. Here's your goal experience. Or it can be done, you know, in a more delicate manner where it's like a container for any experience. And those are very different in terms of also like the impact they can have on how willing you are to experiment on your own going forward.

Zongjun · 33:57

I feel like that's quite common when you interacting with the traditional sensory world scientists and a lot of these development works. Ryan and I was in kind of this realm for a little bit, I guess not for a little bit pretty long time in our past company and it was quite, quite interesting to to deal with that. We have lots of problems with like flavor wheels, which is something you've written about.

Zongjun · 34:20

We have tell you how many like pseudo debates that we've had to have with people about. Flavour and I was responsible for translating the English flavour wheel and a lot of the terms into Chinese because. We start with. Chinese companies and you know, I guess my first challenge back in the days is just to explain to my team members that this word in English doesn't exist in Chinese.

Zongjun · 34:49

Like like the idea of like so many crisp like like you know, like chip can be crisp crispy and also like sparking sparkling water can be crisp right like, but that idea doesn't exist in Chinese and and somehow we have to kind of do some modification on that. I mean which has cascading effect on the data set, you know structure and how the AI understand the data my. Gosh.

Maren · 35:14

It's a whole mess. Yeah, well, and I mean, like I background in linguistics, so like this kind of language stuff is super interesting to me as well. And I mean with translation, there's always going to be this problem of like all of those nuances you there, there's not a one to one translation between those things between languages.

Maren · 35:32

And especially with flavor wheels, like oftentimes they're conflating flavor, like taste, they're conflating aroma, they're completing positive and negative associations of those things, the appropriateness of of things in context or out of context. And like, I can't imagine needing to translate on that level.

Zongjun · 35:50

Man, that would. It's all imperfect, like it's Eugene, the best you can. I think it was. A year long. It was a year long project with 20 other PhDs in the realm and all unhappy about the results. That's the. Only way you can go really isn't it? You know what they say?

Ryan · 36:08

Some models. All models are wrong. Some models are useful. You just got to get close enough that there's some utilities. Well, I'm not something at the end of the day's utility, isn't it? Yeah. Oh, exactly. Actually, I think people get wrong about sensory.

Ryan · 36:22

Like, what are you trying to measure? Are you trying to attribute what someone likes about the product? Are you trying to measure that this tea tastes the same as this batch versus this batch? Are you trying to determine if there's a flaw and identify the like?

Ryan · 36:37

It just so totally depends on the objective. I'm super curious. You had a really cool experience doing sensory training in Hangzhou in China. Just really curious what that experience was like and how you map the way Chinese tea people think about sensory going to the way Japanese tea people think about sensory and flavor language. Yeah, OK.

Maren · 37:01

Different or similarity? I mean, so just one caveat, I had one day of, of training in sensory analysis in Hangzhou. So this is one day's worth of experience that I'm that I'm speaking with here. So it's not a huge amount, but it was, it was very, very cool and very in depth.

Maren · 37:19

Well, 1 1/2 days for that time. The, I mean, it's very different in China or there versus kind of in, in, in Japan because so much of Japanese tea evaluation is tea specific, right? There is like for sencha, for tencha, like the, the, there are differences in how you would evaluate each.

Maren · 37:38

And that's the same in, in China as well. The broadness of kind of like what is almost seen as worth evaluating. It was way more in my experience in China, like the the, the level of detail in guidelines for evaluating green teas, white teas, oolong, black, yellow, or post-fermented teas. There, there were like books on each in terms of like the vocabulary that we use the the different breakdowns of like what categories and how many points each have. These kinds of things were incredibly detailed and extensive for all different types of tea. For aromatized teas, like with flowers in as well, that was its own category and each tea type

Maren · 38:22

has kind of its own method of calculation, like weighting the categories differently. And in my experience here, it's been much more sort of focused around the two categories of sencha and tencha. And to some extent that makes sense because Japan produces mostly sencha and you know, tencha kind of it's interesting to me that that is what's evaluated more so than matcha, where from an industry perspective, like it makes sense.

Maren · 38:49

But then, you know, it's again like what purpose are we doing this for? What's the utility of this from a consumer perspective? It is a different product at the end of the day that you are then actually like consuming. So what is the purpose of doing this evaluation?

Zongjun · 39:04

Because it's not about the final product in a sense. For our audience that haven't had the experience of drinking tencha, the flavor transformation from tencha to matcha is tremendous. It's. Enormous. It's. Different two different products yeah it's the the mental conversion of like tencha like to the the product must have happened in in in their brain like in all these Japanese tea evaluator very curious about how they obtain that kind of knowledge and. Yeah, well, and that's that's one thing that I find really fascinating about like this kind of professional tea evaluation just in general is how much of

Maren · 39:43

this is kind of mental inside evaluators brains. Because this is not this is not evaluation in terms of like brewing a tea in the way that it's going to taste the best or be the best experience of this tea. This is brewing a tea to find the faults.

Maren · 39:56

This is brewing it same tea according to like the same guideline or bring different teas to different guidelines. You know, you'll brew your senchas with boiling water and in order to like make a pleasant cup of sencha, you probably wouldn't do that. And so like this kind of tea evaluation, this sensory evaluation also, it's not really about like evaluating the ideal product that your customer is going to encounter is not. About the final product in that sense and in the way that the person is going to ever consume it. It is about identifying features and disentangling what are variances versus what are

Zongjun · 40:34

faults, and that's not something anyone would do in their own home. That's the way we're. Putting it. There's 2 levels of distortion, you don't typically use boiling water, at least in the case of tencha, and no one drinks the product is tencha.

Zongjun · 40:48

Like it's a really weird thing that's like flaw maximization approach to brewing and evaluation because it's just not the way the consumer experiences the team. And then from there, you know, like it can be taken and milled in different ways and the result, you know, like there's a whole other level where like there could be faults introduced still after that stage. Very non ideal actually.

Zongjun · 41:13

I have a hard time building this mental map between tencha and macho. I've tried. I'm so like I've been into sensory for so long. I am so seduced by this craft, these Japanese people and do moving from boiling water tencha to a delicious bowl of koicha and then. I.

Maren · 41:32

Think what's the point? But I and I suppose again, like utility, right? Why it's probably because I mean like just like historically looking at, you know, how blending kind of developed as a thing and and like the purpose of tasting tencha at this stage is well, OK, like this, the way we can craft like the blend, we can make sure uniformity at the stage before we have milled it into a powder.

Maren · 41:54

That's then a little bit more fragile, you know, like there is a sense of utility for the creation of product, but like that utility is part of the process. It like it gets reinterpreted maybe as has an end stage thing in a way where it's where it doesn't fully make sense.

Zongjun · 42:11

Yeah. And I wonder if some samples that don't taste as good as tencha brewed with boiling water will make better matcha then. Like if they were to rank in terms of sensory quality, if you're using 70° water, ishi-usu mill, normal usucha preparations, if the matcha would change order, and if we're just building for a more resilient cup that has less likely to express certain things, and if the order would be reshuffled.

Maren · 42:41

I think it's definitely a part of the consideration because because actually similar things happened in in Chinese tea to people would taste maocha like or for example, like Yancha like before it gets roasted, they would taste the Unroast tea.

Maren · 42:54

And frequently they would be pointing at teas that I think tastes like really bad and telling me that this will be the highest quality afterwards. And for some, like maocha that I think it tastes, you know, quite enjoyable, they said that this is no good, it's not going to taste good after roasting.

Ryan · 43:13

So I bet similar things happened in matcha too. But I suppose it's, it just goes to show this point of like, what tastes good? Like good. The, the, the value judgment element is something that we do so automatically and so naturally.

Ryan · 43:26

But like there needs to be some sort of separation at work mentally while doing this because what we're, we're not like looking for good here. We're not looking for something that tastes pleasant in the moment. And so that's like that's where this is also its own craft.

Ryan · 43:40

It's having the background and the experience and the having tasted on 10, just know specifically if I'm tasting this thing, that's likely to lead to this other thing once the next process has been applied. And like the same thing with Hojicha, like tasting this flavor or like this kind of bad taste now means that once it is roasted and like there's been some elements of like Maillard reaction or like sugar is caramelizing the leaf, this other effect will have happened.

Ryan · 44:05

And that's the thing we want to look out so like tasting the the pre stage of that, but that is like that is a level of separation and training that like I mean, I do not have. Well the the sad thing is all these people that I have encountered on just so like bad at articulating like what exactly? They're looking for I just.

Ryan · 44:26

Cannot and they use all these jargons that's. The yeah, yeah, yeah. Like social, like, you know, the removal of water, like the shray can mean differently in different tea categories in China. Anyways, it's it's it's own chaos.

Ryan · 44:42

I mean, this was like that. That's something that was where I wish our sensory training in China had. We'd had more time for like in terms of that jargon because we got like these booklets. And it was essentially what you're saying about translating the flavor wheel.

Ryan · 44:53

It was like in Chinese. And like my Chinese is so basic. So like, you know, I could figure out some characters, I could figure out some things, but like the nuances completely lost on me. And then the translations, we just didn't have enough time to like fully understand these very specific reference because they were very, very specific.

Ryan · 45:12

And that's one thing I always get hung up on on things like on on tasting notes a lot of the time. Like you say something like my classic example is mango, like growing up in Europe, right? Like I, my reference for mango is unripe mango. It's not fresh, ripe, like sweet, juicy, like it's not these things.

Ryan · 45:29

It's a little bit more on the tart side. And so like even saying the same word will kind of bring up different things depending on what you're reference for that word is. And so like that, this whole book was like basically a term and then two paragraphs on like specificity and in terms of what that term actually refers to.

Ryan · 45:49

Yeah, filtering perception through language is a messy process and then interpreting it, it's as you wrote, wrote about even fishiness, like what does it mean for a tea to be fishy? And like to Japanese people the perceptions different, but so is the preference because I don't think it's an insult.

Ryan · 46:06

But to a native English speaker, fishing is not a compliment usually. Yeah. But then, you know, you say something like marine or something, and even that has a more positive association in English. Totally, Yeah, yeah. And then those words that have preferences and baggage comes along with each of these terms, so.

Ryan · 46:24

Much baggage. Yeah, yeah. It's, it's crazy that we can even talk to each other across like the different tea communities about what we say, about what we taste. The Chinese gets like even like within Chinese tea vocabulary, you get like, time intensity stuff like returning sweetness huigan.

Ryan · 46:41

Yeah, like all of this more sophisticated, not static notes. It's more, I don't know what to call it. Poetic. More experiential. Oh, and then like tea and things like that. Yeah. And then, yeah, that's a whole other. Yeah, another bucket of worms.

Ryan · 46:59

Yeah. Yeah, I'm curious too because like the across Chinese tea vocabulary, I feel like it's much larger because the flavor profile diversity in Chinese tea in my opinion, is so much higher than the flavor profile diversity that typically exists. And even within a product category like Matcha, the flavor profile variation is a bit lower than in, let's say, Taiwanese oolong, for example, or in like other categories or classes of to think about.

Ryan · 47:32

And I wonder how that gets baked into the vocabulary, if they just need more granularity and specificity to differentiate things in their mind. And I wonder if that like comes through because sometimes I feel like I'm tasting a lot of different matchas and I'm like, wow, yeah, there's some differences. But like, if there's some homogeneous miss to the category, and I wonder how the the Japanese flavor, how much of the vocabulary maps onto what people are actually experiencing if you're not trained to pick apart that level of regularity? So like, if you serve a bunch of different cultivars of matcha into people you know at the tour, how

Maren · 48:10

good are people at articulating the differences and their preferences when they're visiting? I mean, well, interestingly, they're very good at articulating that there are differences and which is the preference, what the differences are.

Maren · 48:23

That is often the challenge. And it's, it's interesting watching also like watching interns go through the process of, of doing this several times throughout three months, starting off kind of where most tour guests are, give or take, depending on how much experience they have with much or with other tea coming in. And then how much of a difference three months of tasting those same cultivars over and over and over again and tasting other things at that same time. How that vocabulary refines in just those three months. It's the kind of the both the specificity and the confidence. Because a lot of the time what

Maren · 48:55

I'm noticing thing is like in on tours, when people have a specific sort of difference that they want to point out between two cultivars, they'll be very tentative about it. They'll be like, I think this one is a little bit sweeter, right? You know, they'll ask for confirmation and I'll be like, if you think so, then yeah, I, I am not in your mouth. Like I, I cannot taste what you're tasting like. I process these things differently than you do because like, there is the experience of, of what the cup is. And yes, we're both drinking the same thing, but we, we have different sensory apparatuses,

Maren · 49:27

we have different brains processing the signals that those senses are giving us. And, and so like what you say is correct for your sensory system. It's just like kind of it trying to get specific vocabulary that that like helps.

Maren · 49:42

And this is kind of how I talk about flavor wheels as well, because we do have one that we supply during the tour. And a lot of people look at it as kind of it must be on this wheel, otherwise it's not right. Or otherwise like nothing outside the wheel exists. But it's, you know, like I set it up as a sort of, you know, like this is a vocabulary list to start from because it can be really hard to taste something and like, just describe it. You would know, starting point.

Maren · 50:06

Whereas if you see the word spinach and you're like, this is absolutely not spinach, you might then your brain might go, oh, but like actually chard, you know, like another leafy green vegetable. So like the, the kind of prompting and priming element can be super helpful, while at the same time, I think like be a little bit constricting.

Maren · 50:24

So it's like, yeah, finding that, that balance, but I don't know. Yeah, I, I think it's what I observe most is kind of the, the level of, of confidence and tentativeness. And then when I feel like I've, I've done a good job is when people get more confident with whatever they say, even if it's something I completely disagree with. But what's also interesting also is like, you know, tasting 3 cultivars back-to-back, it can be a very different experience with each of them, even if they're prepared kind of to the same proportions because we, you know, keep that consistent so that really what you are tasting

Maren · 50:54

is the difference of the cultivars. And then, you know, it's very interesting asking people like which one of these tastes closest to what you've had before or like what 1 is like the most different to you. This is always something I like to do, like in my own business as well. I always try and like ask a specific link it back to Europe that their own experience outside of this specific context, like what has been the most familiar, what has been the most different?

Maren · 51:19

And then when you have something so constrained in terms of the range of flavor profiles and you ask people to connect that to something outside of that that maybe they haven't tasted in the last couple of days or in the last couple of weeks, that's like a little bit not so immediate anymore.

Maren · 51:34

And, you know, then it's in the brain and not in like the felt body either. The way people start thinking about these differences also changes when you prompt them to back up that far. Yeah, it's not exactly priming, but I guess recontextualizing. Exactly.

Ryan · 51:51

Different bigger web. Yeah, that's always web. Analogy actually these contacts, so on the consumer in the business side, I know you had a lot of experience working with matcha brands. It's particularly in the UK. I'm curious like how you know a lot of people who listen to the show or either have their own matcha brand or starting a matcha brand and like how do you think about like getting a collection or portfolio of matchas and then how you're communicating that to the consumer.

Ryan · 52:20

And like, I like to think of this as like a push or pull, like how much of the industry is trying to push ideas on to consumers versus consumers already saying, you know, I want yame matcha, I want uji matcha. I want, I want something I want ceremonial grade matcha, even like this push and pull dynamic with regards to, you know, creating a successful matcha business. Curious about your experiences?

Maren · 52:43

I think the caveat I'd have to start is that I am not great at business. I am interested in education primarily. And so I always struggle to think of things in terms of strictly business and like what would be the business right thing to do.

Maren · 52:59

And so my answer or my my way of thinking about this question is going to come more from that angle of like more the long term development aspect and less the how to make a business work now aspect. I think there is a difference there. Yeah.

Maren · 53:14

Especially because I mean, we've mentioned many times today and like also you guys also constantly talk about how much of like matcha is changing as an industry right now. This, This is why this is such a difference for me, I think.

Maren · 53:27

But like you said, push and pull, I think I think of it more in terms of offering things like, rather than brands pushing terminology onto consumers, it's offering terminology because again, going back to the content of the web, right?

Maren · 53:41

And like terms that exist and isolation without context, ceremonial grade, having no context or having context that is not really appropriate for for the situation because it refers to, you know, like it's ceremonial. We're thinking tea ceremony, we're thinking kimono, we're thinking tatami. We are in a Cafe.

Maren · 53:58

It's an ice drink with milk. Like not the right context, but like, what then what web does that hang on to? And so rather than like pushing terminology on to consumers, I think it's offering various other things to hang that term on to. So, so ceremonial grade, OK, well maybe instead we talk about shading.

Maren · 54:17

Maybe instead we talk about different grinding methods and the effects that those might have. Maybe we talk about, maybe we do talk about region and like provenance and like terroir in a sense. But we also kind of maybe leave that one to the conversations further down the line because it's a bit more complex.

Maren · 54:32

Maybe we talk about harvest season and we kind of introduce those terms, but we don't give only those terms. So I think it's like, yeah, like pairing things like ceremonial grade with the information of spring harvest, 3-4 weeks shading style, like these kinds of information so that the more people start seeing those terms paired together, maybe that association grows. Maybe then what when they see something that says spring harvest, that will associate in their minds to oh, something ceremonial grade was also spring harvest. Maybe that means spring harvest is good. And so like over time, we can

Maren · 55:07

kind of maybe shift away from using those words that have not really much meaning. So with when, when kind of talking to brands about like building out portfolios and talking about their products, I think that's it's hard to kind of provide specific guidance or recommendations.

Maren · 55:23

I really struggle to do that. But that's kind of the context that I try and do it in is like what consumers are you talking to? What language do they already know and how can you offer them more specific language? You know, Like, if all they know is ceremonial grade, you have to use it. Like you have to at least acknowledge it as a term because otherwise you're not having the same conversation. And if that's the term they're looking for, then a way to build trust is to meet them where they're at and like acknowledge the language that they're using and maybe help them to refine it.

Zongjun · 55:58

But again, it's this element of like offering and helping as opposed to enforcing because that can come across again, patronizing and exclusive. Totally, yeah, I, I, I love the approach to I, I think like if you go to the average cafe in the US or Europe and you ask them about their matcha program, even if they have a sophisticated matcha menu, typically I find, and this is not on the knock on the baristas, but they don't care. They don't know and they don't seem very curious. And I have a theory that like these very coffee centric people have very good BS detectors and that a lot one of these bunch of brands trying to sell in B to B

Zongjun · 56:37

like wrap the product in so much opaqueness and fufu fluffy language that they don't have a decent foundation enough and tea maybe to be critical enough to like learn more. And that the industry, the matcha industry just a such a bad job making matcha interesting to that group of people who's actually having that interaction with the consumer.

Zongjun · 57:01

And like, this type of language that you're talking about, I think can Pierce through that interest of some random barista in Chicago or in San Francisco or here in Paris or in, you know, in Berlin. And like the industry's done such a poor job making it interesting to the coffee community. Yeah, yeah.

Maren · 57:20

I also think that Japan has done a really poor job educating these people coming in, trying, desperately trying to learn about this product. Like a lot of the people that like go to Ooika, I'm sure would love to like go go to a bunch of different farms and really get into the dirt and into the cultivars. And it's just so hard to do.

Maren · 57:41

Like there's nowhere to do it and like, go learn what makes that product interesting through those lenses. Yeah, and I feel like it was in in Japan, there is kind of this element of like, why, why do people want to know this?

Maren · 57:54

Like no one's ever wanted to know this before. Why now? You know, like because with with even in Chinese tea ceremony, like it's not really about the matcha. There has never been kind of this element of curiosity about agriculture or like cultivation in the context of tea ceremony.

Maren · 58:09

So like now that interest is coming from elsewhere. There is like a little bit of a, a dubiousness of like like what's the ulterior motive here? Like why and and and the the kind of just like genuine curiosity of how does this work?

Maren · 58:21

Why does it work this way? It, it just like is a little bit too surprising still maybe for that to be something that's easily and easy to engage with for many people in the industry or farmers. And like Ooika has been able to do an amazing job with this because they kind of got into tea with the same spirit of curiosity. And so they're able to work with it. But that's again, a very rare case. And that when as well, that curiosity often comes from the parallels of the coffee world and the coffee industry, which there are some similarities, but there are some differences. And like oftentimes, you know,

Maren · 58:55

questions are asked that make sense in the coffee world, but that just don't make sense in tea. You are in matcha and you know, so it's like also about like navigating where those mismatches are and figuring out like it's, you're not asking the wrong question because you're not interested. You're asking the wrong question because you have the wrong frame of reference.

Maren · 59:11

And like, let me help you build that out. That is also like, it requires a lot of kind of thinking and meeting in the middle and like cultural like transfer that is not easy to do all the time. And that with the sort of ravenous amount of interest in matcha, they're just like isn't infrastructure for yet. And I don't know coffee well enough to actually know if that if there is a parallel like if there was a time when coffee was kind of in a state like this.

Ryan · 59:39

Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question actually. That's a great research topic to see how like other specialty industries navigated this. Where? There was some misapplied framework totally wrong either like let's say origin in terroir, like it's sort of right. And sometimes it is single origin and it's just, it's actually just, it's really complicated, this web of context, except because the exceptions are the most visible companies.

Ryan · 1:00:09

Because they're the ones that actually have to sell tea to consumers who develop a consumer relationship. And then they're coexisting with all of these people, like all these huge blend houses or, you know, someone, some little man somewhere in the supply chain that is aggregating all this tension that they bought at auction and, and like, being a facilitator and like, it's that provenance gets lost.

Maren · 1:00:30

And so, yeah, so hard to navigate. It's even, yeah, even in Japan. They just don't value it. It's they don't value provenance. I think it's a fair statement actually, but they sell them. Yeah, Yeah. Well, but the, it's like the understanding of what provenance is as well in terms of like understanding Uji not as provenance in terms of where the leaf material comes from, but as like the finishing touch that makes the product what it is at the end of the day.

Maren · 1:00:56

And so like it's just a different understanding of what the provenance is because if it weren't finished in Uji to kind of like the standards and style and practices here, it wouldn't be what it is. And. Then under the same rules, you can have a big company, companies set up somewhere in Kyoto Prefecture and Negluji Matcha, which is no longer in that spirit.

Maren · 1:01:15

So it's, yeah, they're just provenance is sort of the same. They're following the same rules, but. It's so hard. Yeah, it's so. Hard. Well, like if we really are trying to make any sense out of the provenance of the location, it will just turn into another ceremonial great, right?

Zongjun · 1:01:35

Like instead, which care about, you know, as Marc said, you know, shading, cultivation methods, cultivars, all these like ground truth that that people touch and and we'll have the impact on the final taste of the product.

Zongjun · 1:01:49

I think that's what people should care. Yeah. And I mean, I suppose once we build out that web of like that, that web of reference there, that opens up further avenues. And then, you know, the incredible amount of complexities of things like what is provenance, what is origin will make more sense already just because some of those frameworks will already be in place just naturally because of conversations around cultivar.

Zongjun · 1:02:12

Like if we normalize kind of those earlier ones first as easier in a sense that they are kind of less complex, you know, like that it will make the the more complex things a little bit more accessible. Totally. And the more predictive terms, right?

Maren · 1:02:26

Knowing something? Yes, yeah. If it's shaded for eight weeks, that's very predictive of higher more than four weeks. And then you can get into interesting stories. Why? Well, you can't do direct covering for eight weeks because you'll kill the plant because it's it's too moist and humid and no airflow. So it's on it actually on a ton of and then like a great opportunity like it's like those are really great ground truth predictors.

Maren · 1:02:49

And then as well like the relationship between those and pricing, you know, like if you shave for that amount, the plant needs time to recover. You can't have multiple harvests in a year. Like you're kind of limiting also productivity in that sense. And then, you know, like that kind of of knock on effect in terms of what the price of the end product is. Because, you know, there's still so many conversations around why the heck is Matcha so expensive?

Maren · 1:03:10

And then trying to find like the cheapest price, ceremonial grade. And then you know, as well, like the, the, the Matcha Cafe that I used to work in, in Bath, the, the number of conversations we had around, should we raise prices? Do we need to like when, when like the supply also the base price of Matcha that we're using changes? Like how do we reflect that in the drinks that we offer in the Cafe and how do we communicate that to customers, especially when every other Matcha brand is or isn't, you know, like there are, there have been specific times in the UK where like every Matcha brand has risen its

Maren · 1:03:43

prices and then other times where no one is changing prices. And then you know, like how do you behave in those contexts and how do you explain those things? If there are these vocabulary kind of and context webs in place, it's going to be a lot easier to navigate those changes also.

Zongjun · 1:03:58

Oh yeah, and justify them if they already have that context. Yeah, as London almost explains itself when you're just like, yeah, makes a lot of sense actually. I also like to briefly Fact Check myself. I was trying to do some quick mental math.

Zongjun · 1:04:13

I don't think anything is shaded for eight weeks. I'll revise my answer to 6 I have heard. Of I have heard of seven actually. Yeah, 7:00 to 8:00. It's called a white leaf tea hakyocha. Like the leaf turned white by the end of the shade. Someone someone did that.

Zongjun · 1:04:31

Yeah, like, yeah, more as an experimental God, will the plant survive kind of situation. You heard of seven weeks within like just normal normal matcha non experimental. I don't think it was, no. I think it was experimental gyokuro. Maybe my brain is telling me that it was how talking about about this.

Ryan · 1:04:47

So again, one to one to follow up, OK. Seven weeks. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, it's too long. Too long. Especially once without taproots. So, yeah, I guess is one last question. Something that you're living and breathing day in, day out in Wazuka is just interacting with a bunch of people who are traveling.

Ryan · 1:05:13

And, you know, we hear about people like, I don't know, the Anthony Bourdain's of the world that like, you know, travel really opens your mind and to seeing a new culture and to learning new experiences. And I guess you perceive the world slightly differently. So it's like in when you're visiting with all the people who are there for tourism.

Ryan · 1:05:32

Have you noticed like come in with a different perspective and they would at a cafe in the UK or a different level of openness is, you know, something that you've recently written a lot about when you're sub stack. So curious to hear like a bit more of your experience on that side.

Maren · 1:05:49

Yeah. For sure. I mean, I think holidays are, I mean, holidays are a time away from real life, right? And a lot of people go on holiday to a place they've never been before or maybe a place they've been already, but like want to experience again.

Maren · 1:06:03

And there is an element of like of, of choice to put yourself in a different context and a new situation in which you have to leave your old frames of reference behind. And then it's easier to develop new ones and to encounter something else in context of, of that thing as opposed to in context of your life. And so I think I, I mean, obviously that's not the case for everyone going on holiday always like that. You know, plenty of people just go, you know, to the beach to lie there and not think about anything and you know, don't want to encounter something new.

Maren · 1:06:35

But a lot of people do want to encounter something new. They're kind of looking for it, even if it's not like overtly what they're going on holiday for. There's kind of the the subconscious shift of like, I'm outside of my usual life. I'm not at my regular job.

Maren · 1:06:49

I'm not seeing the people I see every day. I'm not walking down the same streets as every day. Because when you do, when you are in those regular rhythms, your brain very easily kind of falls into the same cycles and thinks the same thoughts and keeping yourself out of like always having the same cycles. A great way to do that is to put yourself in a different context where you can't autopilot.

Maren · 1:07:08

And then having people on the tours here who are actively choosing not to be on autopilot, they're oftentimes more open to learning something new, experiencing something new. You know, if we get so many people who are like dragged by a family member, like one person is interested in T, the other one is like, I guess. And by the end of the day, they're like, Oh my gosh, this has changed everything.

Maren · 1:07:31

And the person who brought them here will be like I told you, but like, very much like, that is more likely to happen here, I think partially because obviously it's a beautiful environment. The tea fields are gorgeous. It's going to be an amazing day in that sense.

Maren · 1:07:45

But also you are outside of your usual context and think, so things are going to hit differently. Things are going to, like go into your brain in a different way and sometimes in a more unfiltered way because you're not kind of trying to subconsciously fit them into your usual frameworks. And like, I see that here every day, but I also had it a little bit in my, when, when I was in Bath and I was a tour guide there, we had a lot of tourists from other parts of the world, but also a lot of British tourists coming to Bath because Bath is like, you know, also famous in the UK. And even that, like that's

Maren · 1:08:19

tourism way closer to home. Those are folks who like that this, this is not a very different place for them at all. But even that level of remove and openness of, of like, oh, I'm just, I'm in a different city. And particularly because the tours I was doing there were food, specifically it was about food and heritage and kind of the history of of lace from a culinary perspective that is a bit of a different frame of reference from usual.

Maren · 1:08:43

And so like even even there, it was super interesting to see also how open people are to trying things they wouldn't usually try. And one thing I absolutely loved about doing those tours was I also worked at the Matcha Cafe at the time in Bath, and I would take people to the Matcha Cafe on the tours. So I would encounter the customers, they're just like coming to the cafe as customers.

Maren · 1:09:07

And I would also encounter like I would also be taking poor tourists through to the cafe. And the difference in how they engaged with Matcha in that context, like those kind of customer groups. This is super interesting to me.

Maren · 1:09:21

And the kind of the especially some of the folks who like you would never expect to kind of be the clientele of Matcha, how they kind of process both what the product was in terms of how I explained it and how they would or something, how they would kind of come to understand what a menu in the cafe like this is, how to navigate what the product is.

Maren · 1:09:41

Because. And then oftentimes, you know, you make parallels in terms of like coffee drinks. And then people suddenly realize they don't actually know what an Americano is or what a technically a latte is. Like it's the ice coffee with milk, right?

Maren · 1:09:53

But a lot of other drinks are also coffee with milk. So like, what's the difference between all of them? And then, you know, kind of jumping from there to all these levels of like, well, there are so many again, building out the webs of reference kind of the the, the more complex conversations around what else is all going on with these, with these products. A.

Maren · 1:10:12

Magical powder. So many people like literally, I would ask them, do you know anything about matcha? And I got answers like that sometimes like magical powder, like elixir of life one, one person said. And it's like, wow, you've been on some interesting sides of TikTok. And like the, the, IT was just like the, the kind of the openness and the curiosity and like the, the depending on, again, depending on the group and depending on the vibe, like you could, you could take it in different directions. But I found the openness of people in that context to be really encouraging.

Maren · 1:10:42

Also because there is like a self selecting group of people who will, you know, pay the money And like it takes the time to come out to rural Japan, to come out to Wazuka to do a tour like this or to like spend the money to do a tour like that in Bath. But like, those are the people who want to experience something new and are willing to put themselves into a different context where they might encounter something that they have no form of reference for and and kind of try and understand it on its own terms.

Maren · 1:11:12

Very almost vulnerable context. Absolutely, yeah. Vulnerable to your own ignorance and, you know, trying to build off that context. Web, yeah, amazing what travel can do in terms of more people should travel to origin I think.

Ryan · 1:11:26

Yeah, yeah. Well, awesome. This was this was really awesome and thank you so much for your time. And we really recommend all the listeners to check out your sub stack and you're writing. You've really like Nuanced perspectives and I've really enjoyed reading your work recently.

Maren · 1:11:41

Thank you so much for this shout out. Thanks for having me on as well. This has been an awesome time. It's our pleasure. So happy we finally got to record something. Hopefully seeing you in Japan, hopefully soon. My God, please.

Ryan · 1:11:53

Yeah. Thanks in. Hokonami again. Maybe the same parking lot? The same parking. Lot magical moments. Anyways, if you enjoyed listening to this, please consider sharing with a friend and we'll see you on the next one. Take care, see you in the future. You bye.