Interview with Tezumi, David

Ryan · 0:00

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

Ryan · 0:15

And today we have David from Tezumi joining our podcast. Hello, David. Hello. Thank you for having me on. Thank you for agreeing to come on. We've been fans of your content for for quite a while. And even in the early days of starting this company, your blog was one of the first places I went to go read because you really were one of the few companies that I could find that were treating matcha like through a specialty lens with single cultivars, single origins, sort of unique takes. So you guys were a super early player to that. I'd love to learn a little bit more around the founding inspiration of Tezumi and and

David · 0:50

how you've grown the company well. Maybe first of all, thank you for reading my blogs. It feels like on my end I just type stuff and it goes on the website and I have no idea if anyone sees it like those metrics. But still, it's nice to know that people actually read what I spend hours typing.

David · 1:06

So I think like a lot of people, I approach Matcha from a specialty lens first, from like a specialty coffee perspective. I got into March 2018 and I was into like Kong Future and stuff at the same time. Oh, nice, nice.

David · 1:23

And so seeing the way that people were treating specialty in Kong Future and there wasn't quite the same level of specificity of transparency on the matcha side. Fast forward a year and Tezumi was sort of being birthed towards the second-half of 2019 when I as a broke college student, wanted a kyusu for steeping sencha.

David · 1:49

And you can find, you know, affordable gaiwan easily. But finding an affordable kyusu that isn't shipped from Japan or isn't like second hand and really dirty was a bit of a stretch for me. So after finding some for myself, I thought, well, I can I can sell some off to make some cash as a as a broke college student.

David · 2:10

And then my brother got involved and we started formalizing it at an Etsy store. And then a few months later my brother's friend Ryan got involved. And then from there things really took off. So the three of us really started Tezumi in full steam in the beginning of 2020, which is which is funny considering what happened the rest of that year. Great timing.

David · 2:32

Yeah, yeah, fantastic timing. So we were all in on on vintage tea Ware originally because vintage tea Ware is more affordable for, you know, the budding Japanese tea connoisseur. So it's vintage kyusu, vintage chawan. And then we started talking to artists and Potters in Japan, sourcing the new tea Ware.

David · 2:51

And then in 2021, we decided it's finally time to do what we wanted to do from the start and start selling tea. And we approached it from a small farm, small batch, single origin, single cultivar sort of approach because these are things that I thought were sort of missing from the US domestic tea market, Japanese tea market. There's, you know, a lot of nameless sencha from who knows where in Kyoto.

David · 3:19

But I wanted to know, you know, this is an unshaded sencha from Wazuka of the Okumidori cultivar. I'm going at so and so elevation, etcetera. And so that was my mindset going into it. Five years later on the other side, it's having had some time steeping in the industry, I've learned that it's more complicated than just that. But I still want to maintain all of the transparency that we strive to from the start.

Ryan · 3:43

And what were those like early sourcing philosophies like where would you guys make compromises? Where were their hard lines and sort of like what were you looking for, like products that met your own taste preferences or really diverse range of flavors or like what was the philosophy there?

David · 4:01

And how did you start it in the first place? Yeah. Yeah, we're. Curious about that actually. In the beginning, it was a little bit of both. I wanted to get teas that captured sort of the classic flavor profiles while still being single origin, single cultivar.

David · 4:16

And then also try and highlight some of the more innovative players in the field. I guess literally in the fields making Japanese oolongs and black teas, but black teas of a different style than they were making in the, you know, 1800s, early 1900s, which was in those days.

David · 4:32

The black teas were like second flush, a second thought for export only. But in recent years, as some farmers have travelled to China and Taiwan and learned different production methods, I wanted to sort of highlight those teas as well as people making white tea in Japan.

David · 4:47

Because there's a handful of people who do that and sort of try and catch the whole gamut, the whole spectrum of Japanese tea in the present day, from the classics to the more sort of specialty stuff. And that's how we originally sort of envisioned our tea lineup.

David · 5:03

We had our classics and we still do these stuff that I think is representative of, or at least a, a classic style or taste of a type of tea or region. So we have a sencha from Wazuka. We have a Fukamushi sencha from Yame that's full of roasty, toasty notes. We have a matcha from Yame and a matcha from Kyoto when we started.

David · 5:25

So getting into contact with farms was fun. I will say I owe a lot of it to the Global Japanese Tea Association's Shincha Marathon. They did work in 2021, which was highlighting producers from different regions. So some of those producers are who we started working with.

David · 5:43

And then I also sort of discovered some more when I was doing my, my sourcing research on the Internet, just seeing what the product offerings were and then going from there, the barrier to entry because I, I speak more Japanese now than I did then. But then I had enough to get by contacting farmers. So it was a little bit that made it easier so I didn't have to only talk to suppliers who could only speak English, which allowed me to read some who were not as familiar with the whole export process, but still had some fantastic teas. Cool.

Ryan · 6:16

Actually I had no idea about the cross cultural inspiration. I I forget where I was listening to this, but you said I think it was one of the producers was making Tina Baojong style. It's like a northern Taiwanese stranded Oolong style.

David · 6:30

But that's interesting. I I'd never thought of contemporary cross culture inspiration. And Japanese mita. Yeah, Japanese baicha. That's and that's an interesting one as well, because most of the, the Japanese baicha had been tasted distinctly Japanese like it was. It didn't taste at all like a, a Chinese white tea of any type. But there was 1 producer who I don't know, I think he went to, he went over there to, he might have gone to Fujian, I forget. But his white tea was distinctly more Chinese tasting. The way he picked it, the way he withered and processed it. Interesting.

David · 7:10

So that's something that I, I would like to continue to support. So one of our like early founding statement mission ideas that is written down somewhere was that we'd want to support farmers who are innovating, but also support those who are preserving and perfecting the age-old traditions, because those are sort of the two ends of the spectrum. And like, one of those age-old traditions is zairai, like seed grown teas.

David · 7:34

And I feel like I'm in the minority here, but I love zairai, right? I know some of the farmers absolutely hate working with zairai, right? Because it's a pain because it, you know, you have to do a lot more work with it and it doesn't yield quite as much.

David · 7:45

One of the farmers we work with, Morisaki-san in Wazuka, he's a big passionate about zairai and he's been taking over the fields of farmers who no longer want to take care of their own zairai to say, I'll do it for you. Cool.

David · 7:58

Yeah, it's definitely a pain working with, you know, vegetations that doesn't necessarily have. You can't really make any predictions. Yeah, but that's also what's interesting about it, right? Like 'cause it's really, you know, representing its own flavor and also the flavor of the terroir.

David · 8:18

And I think that's very beautiful about zairai. Yeah, and that zai is seen as like this casual term for all seed grown plants. But Uji zairai and Shizuoka zairai tastes quite different because they are descended from different lineages of plants in different terroir.

David · 8:33

So this one side I found that I went to him last year and he was saying that this field over here is actually Shizuoka zairai that was brought from Shizuoka. And I think it was actually seedlings of the yabukita back in the sort of 70s when the yabukita was all the craze. But getting cultivars was more expensive than getting seeds. So if you wanted to get something that was like yabukita, instead of buying yabukita, you bought the seeds of someone's yabukita plant.

Ryan · 9:03

Interesting. So like, there's a lot of depth and intrigue within zairai that sort of gets, you know, washed when you just call it zairai. Because. Even our favorite Uji cultivars, your Asahi's Uji Khadi, those came purely from Uji zairai and Nadi knows as well.

David · 9:23

When Horii Shichimeien cut down all their old fields, they picked like 2 plants. These two are fantastic. This one's. Got in Okunoyama I think. Exactly. Yeah, that's the other one. That's interesting, what is the SO?

Ryan · 9:35

I've heard I've had like 2 zairai matchas. My understand. My understanding I think is what most people's is. What you said is like a very reductive idea. It's like a monolith to me. It usually means it's more bitter and astringent and can be very floral or fragrant. But like what are some of the other? How would you segment some of the other variations? Like, what's the nuance within zairai that you've had in a matcha context?

David · 10:01

In a matcha context, it's very limiting because no one makes it and it's like a handful of producers who want to experiment with this because it's very labour intensive, low yield and low demand. Because it makes sense.

David · 10:14

It makes sense. Like it's purely a passion project, right? And the other thing that goes with that passion project is usually because zairai is representative of an older style of farming. You're sort of getting an older style of taste without as much of the intensive fertilization that you'd expect in a super modern umami rich matcha. So yeah, it would lean towards more aromatics, more florals and more bitterness because of it.

David · 10:39

I think there's an untapped potential here to see what could happen if you selected Uji zairai in the same way that we used to, as opposed to just using what zairai plants are left. But again, no one really wants to do this work.

David · 10:51

So we'll see if this passionate farmers who have some spare time and some spare fields to see what they can do with it. But I'm assuming if if you gave it the same fertilization that you give your Asahis and you can get something similar because it has that potential. And because of the other thing with zairai, because each plant sort of flushes at a different time, it encourages hand picking.

David · 11:16

But again, that's more labour intensive than your machine picking, so it will. Because it's on a plant to plant basis, what organizing labor to do all of that is probably a nightmare. Exactly. Especially because you basically have to go out each morning and go, all right, this plant's ready.

David · 11:34

We'll pick that one today, this one maybe tomorrow, and this one maybe next week, which is how it used to be done only like 50 to 60 years ago. There is. I was reading someone's blog about what the that farming situation was like in Wazuka in the 70s before the the Haagen Dazs boom of culinary matcha export to the West and it was like 90% plus of all the plants in in Kyoto prefecture was zairai. Wow, wow.

David · 12:04

And that's that's a huge. Shift in in such a short amount of time. At this point, Wazuka didn't make any matcha, only sencha. OK. And the majority of it was handpicked actually, and it was all handpicked. They didn't even bring over the mechanical like hedge trimmer scissor harvesters from and they were being used and she's a worker and over in Nishio and Aichi but in Wazuka and Kyoto Prefecture in general no one was using them because it was handpicked from zairai.

Ryan · 12:34

Interesting. I had no idea. It's just the the state of change, like the tea industry has changed a lot behind the scenes, but of course this stuff doesn't even get seen as much by the consumers either in Japan or outside of Japan because people don't know what zairai is.

Ryan · 12:51

What cultivars are open? Till relatively recently, this has been a agricultural sphere only terminology. I've heard of this Haagen Dazs town that popped up out of nowhere that industrialized quickly but I kept searching and I could not find if it was Ujitawara or if it was Wazuka or one of these other regions. It it was it Wazuka?

David · 13:12

I don't think it was was like it was somewhere in in Kyoto Prefecture. I'm not sure where it was that got the deal with Haagen Dazs. The story goes that then, like the next year, tencha prices shot up 150% and everyone rushed to industrialize and mechanize their tencha production to scale to meet this new growing demand.

David · 13:35

I'd love to meet the people who were there, like, they're probably still alive. It's only still alive. Yeah, they're still writing about it. This this farmer I mentioned, he's got a, A blog. He was just like reminiscing about what it was like in in the 70s before the there was like a internal push for industrialization of I'm going to say industrialization, by which I mean like bead milling and machine harvesting of tencha. There was a push towards that in, I'm going to say 85. And then the Haagen Dazs shock came in 96. And then there was like a second push to continue doing this. This is when you're starting to

David · 14:09

see Second Harvest Tencha being used for the first time in Kyoto ever. Interesting. And people starting adopting mechanical picking for the first time in in Kyoto. And then this is bolstered by the Starbucks shock of of 2006 with the spread of the Starbucks matcha latte. And of course, that just continued the trend towards this.

Zongjun · 14:30

And do you know that like the initial shift of, you know, farming methods and also the shift of, you know, from zairai to more mono crop kind of growing practice, did that come from like like Haagen Dazs or like Starbucks or was it like kind of started from within? Or like a municipality government like push? All right, this is actually it's going to be in my next video that I've already filmed, but this goes back to the 19. I just do the little industry recap here or thereabouts. So industrialization came to the tea industry matcha and sencha beginning in the 19 tens 1920s.

David · 15:12

We have the first machine electric powered ishi-usu stone mills. Of course, there was still a transition period. So in like 19 O 6 there's still stories of all women at tea shops grinding everything by hand to order for customers as we transition from the tencha buying period where you'd buy tencha and grind it yourself.

David · 15:31

To. The matcha buying period where you buy finished ground matcha. So that was I think 19121916 thereabouts where the electric ishi-usu was born. And at the same time sencha was being turned into a mechanized thing. So instead of temomi hand rolled sencha, you have the machines that basically try and copy all these steps. Mechanical tencha or the tencha furnace was developed again in the early, early 1900s and this allowed factories to produce more tea than ever before. So we're looking at like 20 tons of finished matcha, not 20 tons, 200 tons.

David · 16:13

I have to get my numbers right, but the match industry basically tripled from the pre industrial period to the beginning of the industrial period. It actually had a low point in 1874 tons of matcha produced total, which is the lowest it's ever been on record. Oh wow, interesting.

Ryan · 16:29

That's nothing. We're roughly like, what, 4000 tons this past year? Yeah, something like that. So the Japanese government put out a research project basically in somewhere in the 30s to produce what is called moga. And this is the beginning of culinary or like less than traditional air quotes here for those who aren't seeing the matcha. And this was the idea of modifying sencha equipment to produce tencha traditionally.

David · 17:00

To leverage existing capital equipment. Exactly. So these are already there. You just have to skip some steps, turn off the rolling and you get something that resembles tencha. And then you put that into they didn't have the emails yet, but some sort of early non ishi-usu grinding machine.

David · 17:18

They're somewhere that yeah, someone calls Kyoto Prefecture, the area of the grinding graveyard because they've been trying so many different technologies to mass grind tencha. That's. Like a lab, Ryan. Yeah, it's just a list of all the different technologies they've tried and you know, we've settled on on bead and four mills as the best way to do it on on a grand scale. And they were trying like different size issues as well. There was because now we're at the one shaku 33 centimetre wide ishi-usu for the mechanical stone mills, but they had some that were five times as wide and like again five times as heavy. Oh, wow.

David · 17:56

Interesting. OK. And they were trying to spin them even faster to get more tea. And they just finally found we've settled at like 40 grams an hour thereabouts at the one shaku 23 centimetre size is our golden area. A little faster, a little slower, depending on what you want to do, but that's where we've settled.

David · 18:17

But they were playing with a lot to see what happens and see if it works at a larger scale. And the problem with grinding too fine is that you lose some of the texture and flavour they found for the the larger ishi-usu and you get more friction and more heat. Makes sense?

David · 18:30

So it was this research was started in the 30s and then it sort of SAT for a while, slowly grew, but then the big boom, the push was in the 80s and then 90s with Haagen Dazs. Interesting. Very. Cool. Yeah, very cool. Wow, I. Had no idea.

Ryan · 18:46

Hey me too this. Probably won't be published for like another month so we can we'll we'll put in a link if it's live, hopefully in the next. Week or so I'll put this one out. So awesome. Yeah, I'll. Send you guys the link, just speaking.

David · 18:58

Of all this industrialization, it's led to a pretty interesting range of matcha products both from Kyoto Prefecture and in other tea producing regions in Japan. And you have these traditional companies marketing traditional products, you have incoming Western companies with a wide range of, of marketing and product positioning.

Zongjun · 19:19

Like what's your take on the existing matcha landscape, both as an industry person and as a on the consumer side? Like how do you view both sides of that equation around the way quality is communicated, the way value is communicated and and things like that? I think it's something.

David · 19:39

That has been changing and it's hard to predict where that change will continue to go. So like rewind 5 to 10 years. Ceremonial grade kind of meant something. It didn't mean anything specifically, but it meant that at least it was potentially from Japan and maybe first flush or something, I don't know. It's.

David · 20:00

A low barge. It's a low bar, but that's kind of where we were the early days. Like when I first encountered, I think that was at my parents at Costco and saw the giant Costco bag of matcha. And that's, that is not a good introduction to matcha for anyone because that doesn't taste like matcha. And so I think we've we've moved a little past that. And for the past ten years or so, we've been seeing everyone get told to buy a ceremonial grade. And only recently, I mean, in the background of all this, the specialty tea connoisseurs or people even doing chanoyu had some deeper knowledge of what was going on. So like in my chanoyu circles,

David · 20:34

the term ceremonial grade has been a red flag for years. But I think only only recently has that sort of mindset. I want to say recently in the past year or two being the past few months has the term has that concept of ceremonial grade being a bad sign beginning to influence like the main sector of the international market, which is more casual consumers and and latte drinkers. So that's been a shift I think, and an increase towards transparency where it's available is something that I think we're beginning to see more of and something that I've been trying to champion the entire time with Tezumi. But of course the other part of

David · 21:18

it is that people are now getting a taste of all the lovely blends from traditional blend houses in in Kyoto and elsewhere. Of course, there's there's no transparency there. You're not going to get any information from that. But at the same time, they taste fantastic. And so you as a consumer, you have to sort of reckon with that.

David · 21:36

It doesn't say ceremonial grade. It doesn't tell me what cultivar it is. And yet this is some. Of the best. Match I've ever had potentially and at a pretty good price point as well for compared to where we're seeing some teas sold at super premium ceremonial grade with a price tag attached that doesn't match the flavour.

David · 21:55

So I think from like a consumer standpoint, at the end of the day, it's a sort of value for flavour. But unfortunately, without transparency or familiarity with with brands and blend houses, it just comes to trying a lot of tea and finding what you like. And so it's I think that's currently where we are. I think we're also seeing more single origin stuff coming. So there's myself and a few other companies who have been sourcing like Suji San is a name that everyone recognizes when it comes to to tencha.

Zongjun · 22:27

He's a superstar farmer and there are a few others that have begun to garner that sort of recognition. So that's now a mark of of value across the industry. You can recognize certain farmers names. Yeah. Do what do you think the?

Zongjun · 22:42

Desire is of other tea farmers that could have similar status to have that type of status. Is this a replicable playbook and be like a little cold objective capitalist? Like, is this an economic model that's that would work well for other macho farmers? I think it.

David · 23:00

Really depends on a on a personal basis because I've met some farmers who are like, I want this much of craze to end. Even though. Like there's all that demand and push for it and they could grow. At the same time, they kind of want the lifestyle that they've been having.

David · 23:15

So I think some of them would, you know, love the family recognition. They put in a lot of hard work and seeing it back, seeing that, you know, customers loving it and also getting the sort of formal recognition from awards and that sort of stuff. They enjoy that.

David · 23:30

But I think other people are perfectly fine putting in their day's work and you know, knowing that it's going to Koyama and potentially and being used in something, being served to the iemoto or something. And that's that's all they want.

David · 23:44

So it's hard to see how scalable or replicable this model is, because I think Suji San is quite a particular individual. In this case. But you're seeing especially as there's these the newer awards because the city stands mostly been winning the traditional like regional and national awards. But there are more consumer voted or consumer judged awards even within Japan and outside of Japan where you're seeing the farmers that have already tried and are trying to sell directly to customers get more recognition because that's something that already is decided by the farmers. A lot of farmers will not sell

David · 24:23

directly to to retail customers. They only produce for wholesale. And those are ones that like as people outside of the industry, you're not going to find them. You're not going to find ways to contact them because they don't want to be contacted.

David · 24:36

They don't have a, they don't have a web store, even in Japanese, they don't have that sort of presence on online. Or maybe there's only in person at a small shop near their farm. But there are farmers who have their web stores who are trying to create their own brand. And I think in that case it could be replicable that their names and their tastes and their styles are seen as desirable. We kind of see this in the the Black Tea World. There is Yoshidaian up up north of of Kyoto. I think they're in Saitama.

David · 25:11

There's like a dozen farms named Yoshidaian because Yoshida is a very common Japanese last name, but I think it's Yoshida Chayan is actually their official name and they're really famous for their black teas. But they're a single origin, single cultivar style producer with a desire to be known on the market and especially by the international market.

Zongjun · 25:36

So it really depends I think on the on the farmers and farmers individual preferences on what they want to do with that at that time. Here's a question. For you, David, so we we've been talking mostly on matcha, but it's my personal curiosity, I guess.

Zongjun · 25:51

So has this whole craze of, you know, matcha being cascade down to other Japanese tea. Have you seen that happening or if so, like in what, which sector do you see are happening the most? It's interesting. Because when we started, we knew that matcha was popular, but it wasn't. It was actually not our best sellers. For a long time, Fukamushi sencha and sencha in general was of our top movers.

David · 26:15

This sort of changed top with your last year and as much has taken off in the populist sphere, we've seen a big shift towards matcha. I think it's hard for people to, especially for like latte drinkers or people who make mixed drinks to get into other Japanese teas because they aren't swappable in the same way.

David · 26:35

They don't function as well as ingredients in a larger hole, with the singular exception of hojicha. Hojicha and hojicha powder are easier to work into the same sort of mindset of using tea as either a secondary or like tertiary ingredient in in crafting something.

David · 26:51

Sencha's flavor doesn't cut through a mix the same way as much as does, and especially in like the the single origin way where a caution sencha's florality will get sort of lost in a mix of of any other flavours. So I think the rise in Japanese tea in general is just due to the increasing interest of people in the West.

David · 27:14

I'm using the West in quotation marks as well. I mean, outside of Japan, sort of how Japan uses the term overseas in teas in general, but also in Japanese culture because that's seeing a rise in interest again. You know, there was a big rise in tea ceremony practitioners and interest in Japanese culture in the 80s during Japan's economic boom. And that's led a huge wave of tea ceremony practitioners in the US and overseas.

David · 27:39

And that was like they brought the idea of drinking matcha with them. And that sort of popularity has declined and now we're at another influx of interest in Japanese culture and interest in Japan in general. So I think more so than the explosion and much of popularity, if anything's going to drive an interest in loose leaf Japanese teas, it might be that interesting.

Ryan · 28:00

I hope it does because my suspicion is that sencha is in trouble, particularly because the domestic market is 1 drinking drastically less prepared tea. But two, the quality of ready to drink tea in these PET bottles is so high. Last time Sam and I went to Japan, we kind of, we were at all these tea places, All the sencha was available. We were like, OK, on the side, we're just going to try a bunch of stuff because we're just curious and we're tea people. And honestly, I we had a lot of trouble getting any of it to taste good.

Ryan · 28:32

We have a gumfur background. We have like a pretty decent understanding of the variables that go into making tea taste good. And honestly, I think some of the PET RTD stuff is way better than we were making and we were buying some of the stuff at like a dollar a gram like it was, you know, like some hand rolled stuff like it it's challenging and then you have to all this mess to clean up.

David · 29:00

That's and like, so not, not only is it tradition, which, you know, the Japanese people aren't so interested in, especially young people and there's mess and the other stuff tastes good and it's probably cheaper and you know, it's as easy as just going to the Family Mart or something.

David · 29:14

I think without the West. Like, would you agree with that? Like understanding or projecting? That's right. And that's the concern of the Japanese industry and sort of like a a top down perspective and that's kind of been how they've been thinking about the industry for a while. They see domestic consumption, especially as sencha decreasing, there's consumption of ready to drink pet bottle tea is increasing.

David · 29:36

But that doesn't make nearly as much money for the farmers because for the most part they're using either like tractor harvested, machine harvested or second flush leaves to make the majority of these ready to drink bottle products.

David · 29:49

And price per kilo on those is much lower than price per kilo on the first flush sencha. So there's been a push to try and create senchas that are more appealing to the younger market domestically. This has been a push towards floral senchas that are moving away from the Super umami associations. So this is your Koshin sencha or the withered senchas that are still quite rare.

David · 30:14

But that's been an attempt to create those, which again, by withering a green tea, you get a more floral flavor out of it. This is seen as a response to people drinking like Jasmine tea in these PET bottles as well, but.

David · 30:28

I. As is typical, I think of the Japanese tea industry from a top down perspective, they sort of didn't look at the overseas market all that much when it comes to sencha. And I think there's a lot of interest in in high quality sencha from overseas.

David · 30:41

And there's the thing with sencha is that it's such a wide variety of styles and qualities that it's all under one label. But Fukamushi sencha from Kagoshima tastes wildly different to a Fukamushi sencha from from Yame, which will taste completely different from a super light steam sencha from the top of a mountain in Honyama or Kawane.

David · 31:01

And communicating these differences to consumers is a bit of a challenge if they've never tried any of them before or had a negative experience with sencha the first time because it tasted bitter or astringent or or grassy or was otherwise unpleasant. And yeah, there are some really good bottled ones. My favorite was at the Lawson in Wazuka. There's one combini in Wazuka and I'm pretty sure it's a Lawson.

David · 31:25

They had like a locally made Wazuka bottled sencha and that was by far the best one I've ever had as far as ready to interesting, I didn't know. They had like local selections that that that's really cool. They even have.

Ryan · 31:39

Like Wazuka tea flavored potato chips at the local Lawson in Wazuka. Oh wow, cool. That's great, Great. So. Speaking or I guess transitioning off what I would say is the most innovative thing in in tea being these ready to drink teas and the more traditional side being ceremonial practice. You're a member of a pretty obscure school of chanoyu or Japanese tea ceremony, which is different than the Sansenke. I'd love to learn more about your tea practice and and how it might differ from like an Omotesenke or or a senke tea practitioner would be doing.

David · 32:16

Yeah, this is. My like personal, the what I'm most intrigued in is is tea practice and especially contemporary tea practice, because Japanese tea ceremony is seen as a vestige of something that was lost 500 years ago, but it's still a living contemporary art.

David · 32:35

And I think that gets lost a lot in translation and lost in practice as well. For those who don't know, the largest 3 tea ceremony schools in Japan are the Sansenke. They are Omotesenke, Urasenke, and Mushakoji Senke, in that order. Omotesenke is by far the largest.

David · 32:52

I think there's about a million in Japan Urasenke practitioners. There's about 100 tea schools in Japan and I think the total number of practitioners is around 2 million. So 50% of them do Urasenke. My guess is like another 30% of them do Omotesenke and other 10 do Mushakoji, and then the rest is divvied up into the 100.

David · 33:11

Also local smaller schools. The Sansenke are descended from the three great grandchildren of Sen no Rikyu. So Rikyu's grandson, adopted grandson Sen Sotan had three kids. I think he actually had 4, but he had three that he gave his property to.

David · 33:29

There's the house in the front Omotesenke, the house in the back Urasenke and then the property on the street over by Mushakoji, and that's Mushakoji Senke. And so those 3 became the most popular throughout the Edo period. This is sort of the the 16 to 18 fifties, 1500s to 1850. This is the time where Japan's borders were closed, the time where hierarchy became the the mainstay of Japanese culture. Tea ceremony existed before this and existed in a very different cultural sphere.

David · 34:02

Sen no Rikyu was living in a time known as the Sengoku jidai, the Warring States period for Japan civil war it was a time of extreme violence and unrest and a concept known as gekokujo, which is the lower classes overthrowing the hierarchy. So upwards mobility has never been higher in Japan before this and it was a time of social flux. And so in this chaotic time tea ceremony flourished as a contemporary art.

David · 34:31

I mean it has been practiced in Japan since the 12/13/14 hundreds at least drinking matcha. And in it's early days tea ceremony was kind of about flaunting your wealth of Chinese goods. Back in the 1314 hundreds having imported goods from Song and Yuan Dynasty, China was seen as like, wow, you've made it.

David · 34:53

You're rich, you're cultured, you know things and you have things and you can show them off and you know how to use them. And chanoyu was originally kind of like this. And so when Wabicha, which eventually got taken up by Rikyu, came along, it was sort of a pushback or at least an antithesis of this where it was instead of having to use expensive imported wares, you could use locally made ceramics.

David · 35:17

Or instead of in this beautiful painted, gilded, wallpapered Japanese space, you can do it in a little thatched Hut using whatever you had. And that's kind of in a very roundabout way what Wabicha is. And it was Oribe's student, for the sorry, it was Rikyu's student, the Oribe, who took this to another level. And he actually took prized utensils and broke them into pieces and glued them back together different sizes and took centuries old scrolls and cut them in half so they would fit in the alcove, which is a very radical approach. He was a samurai warrior and one of his students and one of Rikyu's students, that was Ueda

David · 35:57

Soko. And that's the tea school that I practice the way that's all called you. Oh, so it's a? Super early split. It's a super. Early split so he was a student of Rikyu and then later a student of Oribe in the late 15 early 1600s. And before I forget to mention this, tea schools are a relatively new idea.

David · 36:19

Back then. You learned from your teacher, you mastered what they taught you, and you developed your new style on top of that. And that's how it had been going for a few centuries at this point. Once the Edo period settled in and social hierarchy became, with a little bit of neo Confucianism shoved in there, the norm, then tea became something that had to be hierarchical, that had to be a single source of truth at the top, and that became the iemoto.

David · 36:43

Tea didn't have an iemoto before this. This was a relatively new invention in the 1700s where this started. So by formalizing it, you now have a formal head of a school. You have the way that this person does tea is the way that you do tea if you learn from them, and it becomes much more rigid and strict, whereas in the earlier days it was a little more free and expressive.

David · 37:07

So differences, I guess, between the samurai schools and the Sansenke is that the samurai schools tried to marry the sort of rusticity of wabicha, of using, you know, more rustic objects with the dignity that comes with being a samurai or a daimyo or a feudal Lord. So you see a mix of of more stately and flashy wares and styles of movement mixed with the rustic and humbleness that came from Rikyu.

David · 37:40

And I think that's a really interesting combination. A lot of these early samurai practitioners were very expressive in the tea ceremony. I think that has been carried down through the lineage where especially with my teacher, very much emphasizes expression and creativity and innovation in the tea room while upholding what is 400 years of direct lineage.

David · 38:03

So I think in that mix is where tea ceremony has its power. Still combining what is a really deep and interesting traditional art with the idea of it being a contemporary performance art or contemporary art that can speak to something that is happening now, currently and adapt to the times is what makes it intriguing to me. And how much?

Zongjun · 38:23

Flexibility do you have as a practitioner? Because like we're both Omotesenke students, so like maybe when we never got to the point of hosting anything. But if we did, I'm sure we could pick out maybe the flower and the tea that we were serving and maybe some of the utensils to make a theme. Like, that's about as much creative freedom to my knowledge.

Zongjun · 38:43

At least my. Eyeglasses. I had the freedom to choose that before the fact. But. You know, we're still getting yelled at to move something 2cm to the left and we should go under the ball, not over the ball. How much liberty does your school have?

Zongjun · 38:57

Is it similar to this Urasenke or is there it's a quite a bit more open like something like Kung Fu Cha Chinese tea ceremony. There's, it's less codified, like there's no one's going to tell you you're doing something wrong.

David · 39:10

I think it's, it's, I mean it's at the end of the day, it's still chanoyu and it's still the same sort of codified movements and ideas that exist in the other schools. But I think the difference is not in how codified the movements are, but it's in how much emphasis is placed on expression and innovation. And that that kind of comes both from the practitioners, but also from the top.

David · 39:36

Like our iemoto, we're a small school. There's about 2000 of us total. So the power gap between your everyday practitioner and the iemoto is much smaller. Like in Urasenke and Urasenke, you have to climb through a lot of ranks to even maybe meet iemoto, whereas we're a little bit smaller. And I've said hi to him so and because my branch under my teachers overseas.

David · 40:02

We're kind of a little outside the oversight where I know by I have some Urasenke friends where like if you want to label something as Urasenke, you have to be stamped of approval. You have to be at a certain level to, you know, dare to represent the school. Whereas I think it's a little different in my case, especially with with my teacher who's basically been given the go ahead by iemoto to do whatever he wants as long as he's got some historical and textual inspiration for it, which leads to some interesting and and powerful expressions. And because the tea ceremony wasn't nearly as codified back when it was at its heyday in the

David · 40:41

1500s, 1600s. And so there's a lot more innovation and expression that was happening then. So using that as inspiration to do something now. And it's like citing your sources, if you would, can, can lead to some some powerful stuff.

David · 40:55

It's almost like that. As a kind. Of yeah. And I think some people will say that, like, tea ceremony is a dying art in Japan as the number of practitioners as like, halved in the past 10 years. We were down from like 4 million in the 2010s to about 2,000,000 now. And that's mostly because the bulk of tea ceremony practitioners in Japan are older women who took it up when it was part of formal education in 30s, forties, fifties, 60s, the good wife, wise mothers.

David · 41:24

Exactly without. Getting too much into Japanese politics, this was sort of a push back of of rapid Westernization and, you know, the move of the populace away from traditional Japanese culture. And so by putting it in the good wives education air quotes here, it was trying to pull that back. And I guess the idea was again for Japan in the 90s, get all the industrialization from the West for, to keep all of Japanese culture.

David · 41:50

So as you know, we're at a very different time period now where that sort of generation is no longer the future of tea ceremonies. So we're looking, I think, overseas for inspiration and trying to see how tea ceremony fits into different contexts. Like I do it here in New York, NY, there's, there's what, 3 formal traditional Japanese tea rooms in New York. There's the Urasenke compound there, there's a private room in some teacher's house, and then there's Global Washitsu on, on Broadway down like 19th St.

David · 42:24

And that's it. So we have to get creative with how you want to do tea in New York. You can do it on the streets, you can do it in Central Park, and you have to adapt to your surroundings. And that leads to some, some innovation and some some fun and creativity and spontaneity. And I think the, the true fun of chanoyu comes in the moments of spontaneity and creativity where you have to adapt to situations. And you know, you won't have that access to all the traditional utensils.

David · 42:49

So you have to do something known as mitate and take something and use it for a purpose other than it was intended to. And it's like traditionally. We. Have some objects that are now like they were mitate objects 500 years ago and now they are the standard normal objects. Like Ido chawan was a Korean rice bowl, but now it's very much a tea bowl.

David · 43:10

It's been a tea bowl for 600 years. But being forced to do that today and get creative with it, like my friend, there's there's a type of candle stand we use in the tea room that has three legs and a spike pointing out to hold the candle. And those are hard to get outside Japan. So he took a big fork and bent one of its tines up. So the handle is one leg, 2 fork tines of the other leg, and the middle tine is where you shove the candle on. I think that's brilliantly creative. I love it.

David · 43:36

You. Know, especially in a in a context where no one's seen a fork be used like that before. You're forcing people to see things with different eyes. Like I never knew a fork could be a candle stand. You're like using a large seashell as a as a tea bowl.

Zongjun · 43:51

I never thought it could be used that way. So there's a lot of. Room for the creativity in the tea room. In that sense, I guess inside the tea room. Very cool. Well, this is like exactly what contemporary matcha needs. Like this, this spirit like you be more innovative, more adaptive to the scenarios and situations that you are drinking or consuming matcha while, you know, stay relevant and connected with the tradition, I think, I think.

David · 44:19

In many ways, it's more true. It's a more true preservation of tradition because instead of preserving the forms exclusively, you're preserving the spirit you know? People what have been. Innovative in the past, matcha only exists as we know it today because of innovation.

David · 44:37

We had, you know, the innovation of shading in the mid 1500s completely changed the taste of matcha, but they didn't stop innovating there. We had Oribe and Enshu, who are the leading tea masters in the early Edo period, continuing to have the farmers innovate with production and we've lost some of their production methods. There was one where instead of steaming the tea leaves they would boil them in alkaline lye water because it made them even greener.

David · 45:04

Interesting. And that's. Entirely lost like alternate processing methods for matcha other than, you know, steam devein and grind. They're experimenting with ways to improve the taste. Oh, I'm sure they would all be on board with breeding new cultivars and trying new fertilization and new shading and all this stuff. And that's the sort of the double edged sword of of tradition is are you preserving things the way they are just for preservation?

David · 45:33

I mean, in that case, you're sort of you're a museum as my teacher. That sort of exactly. But then it's now out of context, right? You've taken. Something that was this way for a reason and now it is this way because it has been this way for a few 100 years. As my teacher says, that sort of chanoyu is Museum T it's sort of dead.

David · 45:54

There's no, there's no spirit left. And I think it's important that someone does this because that sort of preservation for documentation purposes alone is important. But at the same time, we need to be preserving the the spirit and philosophies.

David · 46:09

And those I think are more interesting than purely, this is what a tea room looked like in 1612. So this is what a tea room looks like today. Because that doesn't make any sense. Wabi was sort of an expression of sort of can't say dignified poverty, artistic poverty. You're using a thatched mud walls because I'm sure Rikyu could afford to put wallpaper up, but he chose not to. But erecting A wabi style tea house outside of Japan, or even in Japan is quite expensive.

David · 46:40

There's. There's. Nothing wabi about importing to timing mats and hiring a Japanese Carpenter to do the type of joinery that no one else knows how to do. There's nothing resourceful. Or or. Humble about that. And while I absolutely love the aesthetic of that stuff, it's more interesting to sort of challenge yourself to to fit into a different space. And what does the philosophy of Wabi or the philosophy of your game mean in your setting, in your time period to you, in your cultural context?

Zongjun · 47:12

So totally great. Tea had its. Golden Age in a time of political and civil unrest. I wonder what that means for the Yeah. For. Contemporary Time A. Contemporary chanoyu I think we need we need a good Rikyu in in times like these to show us the way.

David · 47:31

Yeah. The discourse is unfortunately, I can, I, I want to characterize as low intelligence where people are questioning who has the license to make these changes and the agency. And if you're not Japanese and it's cultural appropriation, it's just some weird toxic soup of Internet dialogue. Yeah, if only it was.

David · 47:55

Limited to the Internet, this stuff happens in the tea room too. This is what we affectionately dubbed the the Tea Police. And it's sort of sort of an understandable thing. You see it in in every spheres. Like as soon as you know a little bit more than someone else, there's the tendency to have people sort of look down on everyone else and say, oh, you're doing this wrong or who are you to do this? And of course that has been encouraged by the very top down hierarchical structure of Japanese society since the end of period where like of course that would breed that sort of behaviour.

David · 48:24

So it's going to be hard to transition out of that. But we are, we're seeing it slowly in the tea space. And I think we'll see that reflected in how teach culture is presented outside of Japan. But it, it is a bit of a catch because I'm, I'm not Japanese, so I don't feel the pressure to represent traditional Japan in the same way as say, I have a, a friend here in New York who teaches chanoyu.

David · 48:51

He's not my teacher, but he's a fantastic teacher nonetheless. He's Japanese. And while in Japan he might do something a little more avant-garde, a little more artistically expressive. Here in New York he is sort of reduced to, oh, he's Japanese. So he has to do the Japanese tea ceremony the traditional Japanese way.

David · 49:09

And I think that can be limiting to both Japanese and non practitioners that sort of view of authenticity as it were, whatever that means. Yeah, we actually wrote an article about it. What exactly is authenticity and what exactly is tradition? Is older, is more traditional, and that's never. We should all be doing Song dynasty, dian cha and call it a day.

David · 49:35

Yeah, dian cha. The real. Shame is that at least for like on premise exposure to matcha in the way that people get exposed to it, It's a beverage, it's a cafes and like the stereotype of an average barista, someone who's typically very liberal, very sensitive to these ideas of neo colonialism, cultural appropriation, doing things respectfully. Of course, that's not everybody, but that's the stereotype. So they look to doing things properly and respecting it the way it is.

David · 50:03

And when you only go one inch deep and realize that chanoyu and traditional practices and authenticity is this endless well of requiring more context than any one person could ever have. You end up in this very weird state of like the the matcha practices that we see today where the vast majority of consumption and introduction of this product is being done to new consumers.

Ryan · 50:29

What's your take on like the way coffee companies and tea companies are like that own physical stores are presenting the product to new consumers and how they fall into this authenticity trap right I. Mean, of course, it's, it's usually done as they usually with with good intentions, right. You're trying to give a little bit of cultural background to this, this new beverage.

David · 50:55

But as you said, it's, it's a, it's a never ending rabbit hole if you want to go into it. So like if someone's never had much before, they're at a cafe and they ask barista, what is this? You'll get something along the lines of, oh, this is a type of tea that's been used in the Japanese tea ceremony for a few 100 years.

David · 51:14

Here. Is it in a, in a latte? I guess this isn't, this isn't remotely the setting or the environment of how it's been served for a few 100 years, but this is tangentially related to that. It's a, you know, this great of tea might not actually be used in a tea setting, whatever. But there's not enough time for a, for a barista in a, they've got a queue of, of customers out the door is often the case to you in New York to go through that sort of of explanation. And I'm not sure what the, the solution to that is because people are familiar with coffee.

David · 51:49

Coffee has been, you know, taken out of North Africa and spread around the world for a few centuries. But matcha is relatively recent and it's, you know, divulgence out of Japan. And so in many ways, it's still incredibly tied to the culture, even though it's increasingly less so these days. And sort of one of my operating ideas, both as a as a person interacting with tea and interacting with tea people and as a vendor is the notion that you don't have to study chanoyu or be a tea master to appreciate matcha. And in the same way, you don't have to understand the agricultural sides of matcha to

David · 52:29

be a good chajin. However, it is much more interesting when you understand a little bit of the other side of the sphere. And I think it's a much more holistically enjoyable practice to to understand either side of the spectrum Because in the tea room, people don't know enough about how much has grown. I think today is something that I would say definitively, they don't know how much work goes into managing a farm, how much work goes into selecting cultivars and blending tencha and shading things or what any of that means because they've never been taught that and I think it would enrich their experiences if they did.

David · 53:08

At the same time, if you're drinking matcha latte, maybe understanding a tiny bit of the philosophies of chanoyu, of maybe Ichigo Ichie as a really easy one to try and get people to to understand. That's that's a reason.

Zongjun · 53:21

That's like a a very good marketing tool for the Japanese tea ceremony because it's quite easy to sort of take that idea and and link it to something that everyone can practice. Makes sense, actually. I really like that, that comparison, because the tea people, tea ceremony practitioners, know very little about the product and average consumers know very little about the ceremony.

David · 53:45

It's an interesting contradiction, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Historically, I mean you know, people drinking and serving matcha and participating in chanoyu, they are pretty far away from the day-to-day farmers in the social hierarchy setting of Japan naturally. And historically that part of education has never been built into the tea ceremony education.

David · 54:07

Exactly. And I feel like in in older, I'm going way back 16/15/14 hundreds, that gap was shorter because the industry hadn't quite developed yet. So if you are buying tencha, you necessarily have to interact more closely closer to the source of of tea production.

David · 54:27

And you see again, people like Oribe and Enshu in the 1516 hundreds trying to experiment with tea production. They're at the one end. They are, you know, the highest tea practitioner in Japan and yet they're still having an interest in how this tea is produced because it's important to them and important to their practice.

David · 54:46

And we're not really seeing that same way today. And but these, as you said, are two opposite ends of the social hierarchy. And there is one person traditionally who is the go between. And this is where the modern blend house comes from.

David · 55:00

They're known as chashi or, or tea purveyors. I guess it's a good translation. And they are the ones who buy tencha from the farms and then they are the ones who would pack it into the chatsubo that would then be given to the feudal Lord. So they have to exist on both ends of the social hierarchy. We have to understand the agricultural practices of matcha farming, but also understand the social nuances of Japanese high society because they are and to this day are on very different ends of the spectrum.

David · 55:28

You know, some Japanese farmers are the most down to earth, relaxed, enjoyable people to spend time with, but having also interacted in the the upper echelons of Japanese society. This is where chanoyu has been raised.

David · 55:43

It's very. Different. Everyone is much more indirect in their communication. There's expectations, all this stuff that happens silently, it's a completely different sphere to operate in and unfortunately that gap gets gets ever wider.

David · 55:57

These go betweens, the chashi, have now developed into something as giant as Marukyu Koyamaen, and they know a lot about agricultural practices. But that doesn't make it through to the front where the consumer is. And hence,

Zongjun · 56:13

Poetic names, hence poetic. Names, I know you hate them because I listened to that episode, but it's, it's, it's a very recent trend that consumers, at least some of them, some of us have been interested in the agricultural practices. So and I guess as I mentioned, it's only been recently that we've changed over to using cultivars in the 1st place. So that's a good point.

David · 56:37

The. The beauty of poetic names is that it presents a as stable as physically possible product for someone to depend on. If you're throwing a Chaji and you're worried about the flowers and the, the, the bowls, the the rooms, the guest order, you've got all this stuff in your hair.

David · 56:57

The last thing you need to think about is, is this year's harvest of, of Asahi matcha as good as last year's, I forget. And which farm is that from? If you know that Gokumukashi from this vendor was good last time you had it, it's probably going to be just about as good as it was that time.

David · 57:12

So in that case, it's, it's consistency, it's dependability. Unfortunately, I think like while I want to raise the, the craft of the farmer, the craft of the blender gets sort of lost. But it's an incredibly important and incredibly complicated and difficult task 'cause you as a chashi, as a matcha tencha blender, you have to taste the fresh year's tencha. Imagine how it's going to taste in like 6 months time when it's aged a bit.

David · 57:42

Also imagine how it's going to taste when it's ground. Because all this tencha blending happens as tencha and it doesn't get tasted as matcha. And you have to think, how do I blend this year's tencha to get the exact same flavor profile as last year's tencha? And the chashi, the tencha purveyor for my school has like said that the current iemoto konomi, the one that the iemoto says is his favorite matcha, has like 33 different tencha in it.

David · 58:07

Oh wow, that's a lot. Wow. That is a lot that. That's a lot. It's like it's mostly these cultivars, but it changes as certain tencha go out of stock or this year's harvest from this farm wasn't as good as last year's. You have to adapt as a blender because at the end of the day, you can't disappoint your customer.

David · 58:25

If your customer is the iemoto of a school or is the head Abbot of a a shrine or temple, you know these they have very high pressure to maintain consistency and supply. And so it's a very tough job. And I think it's sort of underrated the role that these blenders play.

David · 58:45

Because it's not. Celebrated enough, I think 'cause, you know, as a specialty industry, we're looking mostly at single origin, single cultivar and extolling the virtues of that. But blending is in and of itself a very sort of specialty craft. It is absolutely a craft to be able to create a intentional mix of flavors from disparate cultivars and disparate sources and create something new, interesting, unique, but also consistent.

David · 59:14

Because I will say some of the best matches I've ever had are blended and I have no idea what they're blended from. And some of the most memorable matches I had have been single Origin. But these are both valuable parts I think of of the industry.

David · 59:28

And moving forward, I want to see both of them celebrated for the different and unique styles that they are. Because with with single Origin, you get the idea of a like strong terroir presence and a strong cultivar presence that is detectable and like you can, you can taste every step of the processing. You know, this is Uji Hikari.

David · 59:49

It has this taste profile. I can see how it's expressed here. I can see that it's from, you know, Uji and I expect these flavour profiles out of it. And it's honzu shaded. So it's slightly lighter in colour than if it were like synthetically shaded, those sort of things where? It's less of a rounded flavour profile, but you get a more distinct note.

David · 1:00:09

With blends you get the concept of intentionally crafting every single note in a flavour profile, which I think is is incredibly it's. Intention. Yeah, it it's all about intention. You can craft a top note like I want this sort of creamy top note, but I would also like a sort of nuttiness in rounding it out. And you can do that as a tencha blender. Sounds like the way.

David · 1:00:32

Fragrances get made when you use words like top, note, right body. Yeah. And this is reminds me of the difficulty of conveying taste. Every food industry has this issue and mache is difficult because a lot of the flavours are foreign to an overseas market. You see some people using words like seaweed or marine or nori. But like if you've never had Nori, this is not a useful, if you've never had matcha, you might also have never had Nouri. So it's it's a difficult vocabulary. Of flavor doesn't necessarily translate from one culture to another.

David · 1:01:06

Well, the other problem is that these blend houses, I think Marukyu Koyamaen, I think I was looking on their website, I was counting, I think they have 54 unique matchas including everything that they make for the schools, etcetera.

David · 1:01:21

I don't know how anyone can know what that portfolio tastes like. I bet the people who work there don't know what all of those products taste like. Probably not I. Mean like I don't sure how many tencha blenders they have, but it's in their heads somewhere what everything tastes like.

Ryan · 1:01:37

But I'm sure the people who work the shops haven't tried all 54. I mean we're tomorrow. I think our matcha lineup will increase to 31 matchas that aren't all currently in stock. Matcha shortage, but. I'm. Struggling to try and keep all of those in my head and that's not nearly as many as they have to deal with.

Ryan · 1:02:01

But we, we would love to talk to some of these chashi, I mean like, because from all the information you have shared, David, it sounds like they historically were and are probably the people that had the most contacts of everything, right? The most contacts about the farmers, the agriculture and the usage of their product and the intention and reason why they end up creating these products to begin with. So yeah, we will love to speak to these people and maybe have them on the podcast too, but that that would be. Great, seems to be.

Ryan · 1:02:36

A little bit hard to to to talk to someone like that. You know why? They're so secretive. Why do do you know if they talk to each other across the company, It's very weird. It's so like, I have no mental model of, of these people as A and this profession other than what other people say about them.

David · 1:03:00

Yeah. I've met 2 chashi in my life and they're both incredibly interesting people, but they both work for smaller. Well, I guess they both own smaller blend houses, so it's hard for me to extrapolate from those experiences what it's like working at Koyamaen and and the transparency there. I think part of it in this sort of cynical way is protection. They don't want to out all of their suppliers and all of their sources, especially if you're one of the larger plant houses and you want to keep everything a little more proprietary, a little more in house.

David · 1:03:31

Yeah, makes. Sense, but I think part. Of it is just not expecting consumers to care. And I think slowly we'll see that change, especially the influx of people outside of Japan and a little bit of people inside Japan adopting the specialty mindset and thinking more about the, the chain that gets your tea from the soil to your bowl. I think we might see a change in that. But like to one of the chashi I work with for Visio and one of our suppliers, you'll tell me what cultivars generally are in the blend as best as like, because it changes from year to year, but generally it's like these cultivars. And this one contains Narino

David · 1:04:08

from Horii Shichimeien. And this one contains some samidori from Zigisan, along with some other stuff to round out the flavour profile. So like the top three ingredients I might know. And then the rest will be like it's a blend of of stuff to sort of round up the flavour.

David · 1:04:23

But that's, I guess, in my experience, a little bit of an exception to the rule where it's still seen as a bit of a trade secret what they're doing in in the blending room. Yeah. They're probably kind of like the head formulators of larger flavour houses.

David · 1:04:37

Exactly. Yeah, they're like flavours. Yeah, yes, and. Also like they have their own ranking system, they have a karate dan system, they have levels I've heard. Yeah, yeah. And that it's like it's a competition or something.

David · 1:04:49

It's not like a license or a test. It's like when you have like A10 belt or something. I I was asking someone about that recently. It's AI wonder how that's structured. I would die to know like. I think that the first. Three dan are are more like a test and after that it gets a little different in how it's structured.

David · 1:05:09

I would love to learn more about that. I have a friend in Japan, he is an American. He's one of the few American Nihoncha instructors. If you're familiar with the term and he wants to pursue that route in his career, cool. OK, if he does.

David · 1:05:24

I'll, I'll get some insider knowledge on, on how that works because I think that's, that's interesting. It's, it's a sort of behind the scenes thing in the tea world. And I think that's sort of my intuition, and I might be wrong here, is that all the stuff is behind the scenes because they don't think that people care. And it's not because it's not primarily because they're trying to keep everything secret and keep the customer in the dark. It's just purely because it hasn't been what the customer has cared about before.

David · 1:05:52

And now that's changing at least a little bit. So hopefully we see more transparency into this and we see more celebration of the people who are who are good at their job or are passionate about blending tencha because it would. Be I think.

David · 1:06:05

It would be sad to lose that part of the industry in a specialty mindset because it is such a interesting and historical aspect of it. And there's there's crash to it. I. I feel naive in saying this 'cause I I'm wondering if I'm stumbling in with no context, but it would be very cool to see more foreigners trained by these people in a similar way that like someone might come to France to learn about wine making or cheese making and bring it back to their country. Because I like those tea blenders. Well, as skilled as they are, they're incredibly narrow demographic profile that have extremely limited like world experience compared to the

David · 1:06:47

people of the world. Where like. Someone from the Middle East or from South America or from the States or from Europe or for Southeast Asia, like all these places where we see much of booming, understand at a very fundamental level what people in their country will like.

David · 1:07:03

It can blend to meet their preferences. And that like it would be inconceivable probably to pretty much every blender alive what someone in Mexico would love versus Saudi versus Philippines, right because. They don't have those markets in mind and they don't have the contacts in those markets to fill out what they possibly could want. So it's, I mean, anyone can blend tencha if you just buy tencha and blend it yourself.

David · 1:07:30

But without access to a mill, you, you can't grind it. And without access to the generational and centuries of knowledge that goes into it, you might have a hard time of doing a good job of it. So I'm not sure if we'll see anytime soon that get opened up because Japan.

David · 1:07:49

Culture. Will change, but it does change at a glacial pace and the rest of the world moves a lot faster when it comes to cultural change. And because Japan, I'm speaking in very broad terms here, generally is especially in the traditional cultural sectors where matcha has lived, is about preservation and is about taking things slowly, that it'll be a slow change if we do see it.

David · 1:08:14

I don't know if there are any non Japanese tencha blenders at the moment. And if my friend goes down that path, he might be one of the first if not the first to get into the system. He's been living in Japan for quite a long time now. The barrier to entry is not just language, it's, it's culture, it's connections.

David · 1:08:32

It's a very hard to reach sector of the industry. If you know, people say that Japan's difficult as a tourist because of the language barrier, You can imagine in these centuries old industries how much more difficult it is in these, in these institutions where there is a lot of power and there is a lot of cultural baggage.

David · 1:08:50

And it's difficult to navigate that stuff unless you've had time to let it. So it it'll be a while, I think if before we see this open up if we do. But it's something that I think should be explored even outside of the traditional blending practices.

David · 1:09:06

If people want to get hands on on tencha and try and try and blend it themselves, or if companies who work with tencha blenders want to start trying to craft or ask them to craft blends to meet their own customer expectations.

David · 1:09:19

Because we see this in the coffee industry. It's very common for a coffee start up who knows nothing about coffee blending to go to one of the giant blenders. There's this like James Hoffman did a video on this. Yeah, yeah. And like asked like, I want something that's kind of has these notes and they'll go, Oh yeah, we'll make a blend for you.

David · 1:09:35

Boom. And like that is in theory the idea behind iemoto economy like. Oh, it's like all white labels. It's. All yeah, like in theory, this depends on the size of the school because Omotesenke's iemoto have like 20 different matchas that say, oh, their preferred matcha.

David · 1:09:57

Like a lot of different blend houses, like will have one that says, Oh yeah, the 16th generation Grandmaster Omotesenke has said that this is a preferred matcha, but he has one from Kuyama. And there's multi from Kuyama and some from, yeah, Master Kuyama and some from even smaller producers like say who and who we work with.

David · 1:10:15

So I don't know how it actually works. They just blend tea, give it to the iemoto and say, is it any good? But yeah, it's fine. Cool, great. We'll put your endorsement on it. I know in the case of my school, because we're smaller and the tea supplier that we work with is smaller, the iemoto and the chashi actually have some back and forth about crafting these blends because yeah, it's it's cool to see this at the small scale kind of the way it used to be or the way that it works on paper in theory, actually done in practice, where the chashi actually manually packs the chatsubo with the tencha for the entire year for our iemoto.

David · 1:10:53

And that's a very like, I guess the listeners who who don't know the way that T used to be delivered is you get tencha, you blend it, sort it into different grades and you put them into little paper bags. And on these paper bags, you write the poetic name. These paper bags get put into a giant ceramic jar called a chatsubo.

David · 1:11:14

The space around these bags is filled with some more tencha as padding, and then the entire thing is sealed with paper and glue. And that's shoved underground for six months. And that's where the concept of aging your tea. For like the six?

David · 1:11:27

Months after harvest, before drinking it, before releasing it from the warehouses in November thereabouts, September, October, November, the drinking, that's where that was originally done. And then in November you'd take the jar, cut it open and drink the New Year's tea. The stuff that's in the paper bags would be poetically named. That would be your koicha.

David · 1:11:48

And everything that was used as padding that is lower quality tencha would be your usucha is how it used to work. So with that tradition still happens a little bit, but that's kind of the root of the Usucha Koicha divide in quality.

David · 1:12:01

That's kind of the root of poetic names. And it's fun to see that this still actually happens and these things aren't just relics of the past and people are still practicing the forms and practices that this all originated from, but people don't know this.

David · 1:12:16

There's very little education and communication of these practices outside of Japan or even in Japan. So I think this goes for much in general, The the learning curve is steep outside of Japan. It's slightly less steep in Japan. And So what I've been trying to do with my blog and my videos is just get information that is readily available in Japanese or even like slightly less readily available and make it in English so that people outside of Japan have access to it. And I noticed.

David · 1:12:46

Too your AI dubbing that was cool. Yeah, that's a. That's a new feature that that YouTube has put on me. So now I apparently can speak in in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese. So you. Didn't just learn those languages. I can get by a little bit in French and German, but not that well.

Ryan · 1:13:06

I think it's a good segue into what can be a a last question and I'm sure people are like really interested in your process of creating content, especially for YouTube. Because. I think of the people who are on we talked about matcha on YouTube.

David · 1:13:21

You are by far one of the most prolific and Japanese tea in general. I really enjoy your videos and the graphics and the animations. Like how is how do you decide what to talk about too? I wonder how you like narrow down the topic the. That's actually probably the hardest part of it, at least from a creative standpoint, is picking what to talk about, especially now that I've covered a lot of the basics. I've wanted to when like a year or two ago when I had the finally, because I've been wanting to do the YouTube for a long time.

David · 1:13:49

And I finally started doing it last year and I had a lot of video topics in mind. And now that I've sort of reached the end of those original topic ideas, it's sort of, oh, now what do I make a video about? So a little. Bit comes from from comments of what people want to hear and a little bit comes from seeing where the the gap is in informational videos on YouTube about this in practice. So my mindset has generally been do all the basic information 1st and then dive deep.

David · 1:14:16

So I'm still covering some basics. I want to do some basic videos about Chanoyu and history of Tea in Japan because once I get those basics covered, I can dive deeper into these topics and I've done a how sencha is made video, but I'm still waiting to get a little more information and footage to do the how matcha is made one, which I think we should be able to get out this year.

David · 1:14:36

So picking topics is a little bit based on what I want to talk about, what my commenters and customers have asked me to talk about and where I think there is an informational gap that I think I have the ability to fill.

David · 1:14:49

If I have enough knowledge or or resources to do it, then I'll try and do it. As far as the creative process goes, I've I'm generally unscripted which. Really, I wouldn't have guessed that, much to my brother's dismay, because my brother who is one of the Co founders of Tezumi and is the cameraman for these YouTube videos and one of the editors. I'm the other editor.

David · 1:15:09

He has the unfortunate job of taking my ramblings and cutting them down into a editable, watchable format, especially in the early days during these videos unscripted, it would be like a three hour session to get a 20 minute video out of it.

David · 1:15:25

That's just. Comfortable. Yeah, me being uncomfortable in front of a camera, me forgetting what I said 5 seconds ago and how to segue onto that to the next topic. I guess slightly relatable ideas here. So I think I'm getting a bit better at that. But once the footage is filmed and I've, you know, talked about, wanted to talk about on the camera and I've used the utensils and stuff that's sent to my brother, my brother Will will edit it down.

David · 1:15:48

And then I'm the sole graphics department for Tezumi and for the videos. So it's up to me to make the graphics, the animations, and then all the texts and translations. And that's, that's basically it. As it comes to making these videos, it's a bit of time consuming and I'd like to have more time to do it so I can cover more diverse topics and go deeper.

David · 1:16:10

So hopefully this year we'll see some. I have a lot of videos planned for the next few months, which will be interesting. I'll be in Japan in May and I'll be doing a lot of filming over there, right? We have the same plan. It's it's like.

David · 1:16:25

As more people who have insider access to these sort of crafts and traditions, as much it gets more popular, it's the better it is that people actually see what happens behind the scenes. Because 10 years ago or even five years ago, videos of Tencha production were very small and they're probably only on the Japanese side of YouTube. And so as more of that gets disseminated and we see a lot more of it, you can as a consumer understand a lot more and it's a lot easier to to learn from more readily available sources.

Ryan · 1:16:57

Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. Is there anything that you wanted? I I know actually we didn't have much time to talk about much. And I know that we're running super late. I hope you don't have a hard stop. Oh no. It's fine.

David · 1:17:09

I'm, I'm relatively open today, so I can go for as, as long as you need me to, OK? Cool. Thank you. Sorry we. Indulged a little bit too much in some of the the lines of questions that's. Fine. I I enjoy the the natural flow of conversation.

Ryan · 1:17:24

Is there anything that you wanted to talk about specifically that we didn't touch on? Yeah. But then this recording might be a long time, right? But yeah, the the stuff that I have open and maybe we can just select the shortage is interesting where you want to see things go in the future, like how you want to see the industry evolve and like what what end state would you be happy with in like 10 years?

David · 1:17:49

And like how we would get there is interesting. I'm really interested to in like getting to a world where matcha just doesn't suck at most places where it's served. Curious to see like what knowledge, infrastructure and sourcing gaps other matcha businesses too that are listening can help solve especially in their local markets and how. Your perspective and experience change year after year, you know, after you keep going back to Japan, OK. People.

David · 1:18:20

Maybe we should do a second episode. Yeah, maybe. Like. David went to Japan and then we can all gather together into a second. How did? You learn a lot of reading, and this is the trick of running a business while also trying to continue to learn about it because there's stuff that I will learn on the fly as I do matcha business. You know, I'm getting better at Japanese business communication. I'm learning a bit more, but a lot of it does come from reading because there is a lot of published literature in Japanese about tea production and unfortunately it's just not available in English or people

David · 1:19:01

don't know where to look. Even if they know Japanese, they don't know where to look. So a lot of it is published in like scientific journals where they've done the studies of like how long when you steep matcha or steep tencha does it get better? That sort of stuff that's published in scientific journals in Japanese.

David · 1:19:17

That's what research is out there. The industry side there's, I mean, the Japanese government puts out annual reports on the the state of the tea industry. This is on the Ministry for Agriculture's Forestry and fishing.gov. Yeah.

David · 1:19:33

Those decks. So they in there you see like the report on the industry, but also you can see how much it's trying to promote certain things. So in there you see the push for organic, which I haven't talked about at all yet. You see the push towards pushing farmers into using more mechanical production to increase supply. There's like a graph on there where it's, it's just measuring the amount of riding style machines. But what's subtextually is that they're trying to get more farmers to use riding style harvesting machines. Otherwise they put that graph there. So reading like a little bit between the lines, you can see where the motives are, even if

David · 1:20:17

it's not overtly stated. And sometimes it is overtly stated. There's like the whole project for with its sencha was. Like, yes, let's try making with it sencha. They called it kaori sencha or aromatic sencha to to, But like the fact that that's branded in Japanese and the fact that it's tells you that they're only looking at the domestic market. Like that's not branded as aromatic sencha in English for export.

Zongjun · 1:20:41

That's kaori sencha because that's what they think younger people in Tokyo want to drink. And it's very like that's what they think. I'm not sure where they're getting their data from. Yeah. We used to work in consumer insights and I have some sense that was probably just some old guy looking at young Japanese girls thinking this is what they should like.

David · 1:21:03

They. They they put flowers on their purse. They like, they like floral things. Therefore we should make them floral. Of course, you can see the dots in in their heads. They're a little. Too obvious, yeah. So that's the sort of that's the sort of state of the industry. There's the sort of that side of it along with the craft side and the specialty side.

David · 1:21:26

And somewhere in between there we can get to a future where we have high quality matcha for everyone because I this. Is sort of. I guess goes back to my take on the matcha marketplace, but also on the industry. There's the two sort of approaches to marketing tea to customers, and that is the meeting customers where they're at, which is what I think people have been trying to do for the past 10 years of dumbing things down.

Zongjun · 1:21:50

Can I? Wait, before I can I set you up for this, I'll cut that part because this this is getting really good We. Can just use all of these conversations. Keep it. Really. Behind the scenes, yeah. Like just keep it the you know the natural way.

David · 1:22:07

Are you able to? Jump right back in. Sorry, I shouldn't. Yeah, I think I can get. That, yeah. OK, OK, OK. Sorry, yeah. So this. Is like the two different ways, at least in my head of how I think about it of marketing to customers or approaching marketing to customers. And one of them is meeting the customer where they're at. And I think this is what some people have been trying to do for the past 10 years with.

David · 1:22:30

Without lack. Of a better term, dumbing things down, putting ceremonial grade on it because. That's what they know the. Customers are looking for. That's what they know the customers know about and therefore that's where they're at knowledge base wise.

David · 1:22:43

And then you can convert them into buy and do a ceremonial grade matcha. My philosophy has been sort of the other end and that is trying to raise the bar and hoping I raise everyone else with it. I was sort of, that's something that my tea ceremony teacher has said in some context that's sort of been inspired by that sense of setting the example and trying to bring everyone with you and hoping that in doing so you can just raise the base level of everyone.

David · 1:23:11

So that's in my case, not using the word ceremonial grade and trying to be as transparent as possible when it comes to all the details about the matcha and teas that we sell. But on top of that, it's doing the outreach and education work into telling people what all of these things mean.

David · 1:23:26

Like I can put in the cultivars and the shading period and jikagise shading, but if I don't explain what jikagise shading is, that doesn't do anything. That's just more Japanese jargon. It's as as a poetic name, and if you don't know Japanese, Okumidori and Matsunomidori are the same thing. They'd make no difference whether it's. I didn't know that.

David · 1:23:47

Yeah. I mean. Matsunomidori means pine green and Okumidori means deep green. Like if you don't, even if you know Japanese, it doesn't recognize what is a cultivar name and what is the poetic name. It's just not. It's not there so I will try my best to, you know, provide translations for the poetic renamed T that we sell.

Ryan · 1:24:05

Try and explain the shiro and mukashi nonsense because no one actually knows what's going on there. There's like 3 different theories and all of them must have been true at one point in history, but none of them are true today, I learned. Something very interesting about that. Maybe you can either confirm or deny. Back when it was all zairai, you'd have different colored leaves naturally and some would be more pale or not pale. And it was like the job of the tea blender to go into the field and label the Shiro bushes because they naturally produced lighter leaves.

David · 1:24:37

Is that is that one of those three that you were talking about? I think. I think. That's one of them, yeah. Because we see something similar back in like Song Dynasty tea records where like their ideal tea is white. And I think that somehow has got the.

David · 1:24:52

And I think that somehow got distilled through tea knowledge in the transmission with ASI and through traditional tea practice. Of course, it's kind of lost today unless you're doing hakuyocha the like. Have you seen like the white leaf teas where they shade the tea plants beyond normal shading?

Ryan · 1:25:10

We just learned. About that, yeah. Sam. You were reading a paper in Japanese about this? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's all very interesting. And I think someone did an experiment of trying to turn those tea into matcha years ago, because I didn't know if that started or. Something turning to.

David · 1:25:27

Something commercial. It's. Hard to scale because when you shade the tea bushes that intensely the yield just plummets. Makes sense? Like, yeah. They've, they've got no more sunlight, so they can't do anything. But I think that might be one of them trying to put it briefly. Another one is that Shiro Mukashi refers to which side of the 88th day of the year.

David · 1:25:47

So traditionally, Hachijuhachiya, the 88th night is the picking day. This is the 88th day counted from the start of spring addition, the start of the new year. So traditionally you'd count 88 days from the start of spring and that's the tea picking day.

David · 1:26:01

But of course, tea picking isn't that simple. So you kind of put 20 days on either side of it and say if it was before the 88th of the night, then it's I think it's Mukashi and then it's after then it's Shiro one of those.

David · 1:26:12

That's one of the theories, OK, and. Then the last is the koicha usucha thing. I think that's like. Kind of how it is now kind of and it depends on the suppliers. Some of them I know have like everything is something no shadow in the usucha range except for their hatsu mukashi because they put their hatsu mukashi down there. But for other blenders, they put their hatsu mukashi because for some reason everyone has to have a hatsu mukashi. They put it at like the top of their koicha range. So but the other one goes back to that Oribe and Enshu idea of boiling tea leaves in lye because it made them greener. And that was known as the blue

David · 1:26:46

production method. Of course, Japanese language blue and green are kind of the same thing, yeah. Yeah. It's, it's very confusing if you don't know that traffic lights in Japan turn blue instead of green. Yeah, it's. It's in Chinese too. That character means a lot of different things, ranging from Gray to blue to green, depending on the context. Really.

David · 1:27:07

Wow, that's confusing. It's yeah. It's a. It's very interesting, but. If you don't know, if you don't know the kanji, then it's. It's very confusing, but I think that was then contrasted with the old production method, which produces a lighter color of tea leaves, which was shiro. But it also could have been that the older production method is mukashi, because mukashi means ancient old times. So at this point, at this point, I don't think anyone really knows.

David · 1:27:36

I think everyone has their own version and that's what they use. But moving back to where I was, Oh yeah, talking about raising the bar and raising the field for everyone trying to do this sort of education because the knowledge base to enter the specialty matcha world is relatively high. And because a lot of that is in Japanese, it's doubly harder by trying to make this information readily available on the products we have, but also just to consumers in general in the blogs and the videos.

David · 1:28:05

I've been too busy making videos to write more blogs, but I'll get back on it at some point, I promise. I'm hopefully encouraging other people to do the same and write about tea and get information that only exists in Japanese or in small sections of long abandoned forums more readily available. Yeah, in many ways it is also meeting people where they're at because if they don't have the education, just providing it for them is at multiple levels of the of the spectrum. Because if if I go to someone who's never had tea before, I've only had matcha for like, you know, a few weeks and had a few lattes saying okumidori tencha

David · 1:28:40

blending, honzu, shading, it then means nothing. You have to like, you know, create the almost like a course developed my online course yet, but sort of the idea of introducing them to every step of the production in an order that makes it easy to understand, but not intimidating because it is intimidating. Japanese tea or specialty industries in general can be intimidating and some people are scared away because of that. And some people are drawn in and that type of person thing. But like if I see a hobby or an industry that has an incredibly deep rabbit hole, matcha for one, espresso for another, like wine, these are incredibly niche

David · 1:29:17

areas that have incredibly deep rabbit holes and relatively steep learning curves. So for some people that's attractive, but for other people it's you will push them away. So you kind of have to also develop a way of talking about tea that is not scary, but isn't talking down to consumers and treating them like idiots because they're not idiots.

David · 1:29:39

They just don't know anything yet. And therefore you have to tell them. But you have to tell them in a way that isn't just trying to show off your knowledge of Japanese. Yeah. I think it's. The biggest, it's the biggest problem, it's not enough.

David · 1:29:51

It's all top down positioning so it's quite a shame. And in many ways that is part of the culture of matcha, and it's something so it makes it. Doubly worse though, so it. Makes it doubly worse. Well, it's that side of Japanese that you don't really want, yeah.

David · 1:30:11

It's something that like I will, I will joke about it because I've been dealing with it. But yeah, it's not something that the average customer outside of Japan wants to deal with. But for people like myself in or have interacted with traditional Japanese culture in other aspects or just Japanese culture in general, it's something that you just sort of accept as part of it.

David · 1:30:28

And matcha is on the extreme side of that because for centuries it's been only if the rich people have it and they want to show it off to everyone else. In the current era of matcha shortage where only people who have the resources to obtain matcha and then flaunted on on social media, it's almost the same thing.

David · 1:30:48

Yeah, that's interesting. Parallel. Kind of, yeah. I mean, if you go back to Heian era Japan, where only the rich people had connections to China, could obtain fancy tea bowls, and had connections to nobles who could source the very, very limited supply of matcha that was ever produced in Japan during this time, It was a way of showing off wealth. And in the same way, in the early 90s when Japan westernized, using tea ceremony was a way of showing off culture.

David · 1:31:16

And this has been a thread for a while. If you come from a place that is outside of these traditionally wealthy or traditionally cultured air quotes, again, parts of society, these are tools that people have used for centuries to express I am wealthy and I am cultured and I'm better than you because of it.

David · 1:31:35

And unfortunately, we kind of see that a little bit in how people who are new to the industry and are new followers have been pushed away by the sort of toxicity around the shortage on multiple sides of the spectrum. Somehow this? Heritage of vanity stayed the same. It's a human condition.

David · 1:31:53

Is that not just? A human at some point, and how avoidable is that? Social distinction is almost a consumer need. Right. And like, as much as I want to try and be better than that, it's, it's a state of the things where they are right now.

David · 1:32:11

And I think we can all strive. We can all strive for you better. That's the sort of the point of tea ceremonies, continual self improvement and reflection and taking in the moment and thinking of how you're actually acting in it and interacting with the world.

David · 1:32:23

But we're in a very consumerist mindset right now. And that's it's led to online toxicity from multiple sides of the section. I think whereas, you know, some tea ceremony practitioners are really hating on Instagram barely's air quotes again for flaunting the expensive matcha being put into mixed drinks. And but at the same time, these people are desperate for tea and wanted to so.

David · 1:32:52

We'll see how this. Evolves and new tension will come. I mean, this year is going to be rough because there's not going to be enough tencha to satisfy the demand. That's just the state of the industry because it's it's agriculture and things take time to grow. Tea is all about slowing down culturally. And while the industry is speeding up, it's going to take a while for the plants to grow.

David · 1:33:11

Like some of the suppliers I've known have planted vast new fields of Uji Hikari, but it's going to take a while for those to three to five years for those to be harvestable. Some people are converting their sencha production over to tencha production, another blow in the side of sencha, but it's going to take a while for that to, you know, mature and actually feed the industry well. And then there's Kagoshima.

David · 1:33:34

For the entire time we've been talking about tea, at least, I've been mentioning Yame and Uji, primarily because that's the two most, I think, familiar flavor profiles for people who get into you do specialty matcha. You get the sort of bright vegetable, vibrant green green tasting tea from Uji, and you get the nutty, roasty, rounded, potentially creamy tea from Yame and Kagoshima.

David · 1:33:59

As a new player to the game, they haven't been growing tea for nearly as long. The culture, the industry, for better or for worse, isn't there. So the entrenched top down hierarchy isn't there, but neither is the generational knowledge.

David · 1:34:12

So it's a bit of a mixed bag, but you have young entrepreneurial, innovative people who are trying things and that's exciting. And I think as time goes on and they learn more about tension production and continually hone their craft, we'll see a lot more high quality matcha out of Kagashima. One of the Tashi I was speaking to has been trying for a long time to to get good tension out of Kagashima because they are currently the largest tea producing region in Japan. That is a a switch that's happened in 2024. She's.

David · 1:34:46

Yeah. Finally outpaced she's Walker as the overseas demand for matcha is increasing in quantity but is also increasing in quality. People are demanding higher quality matcha across the board. We'll hopefully see that demand to get communicated to farms, but I think Uji currently is geographically limited and limited in manpower to respond entirely on their own to this demand.

David · 1:35:15

So we'll need help from the other two producing regions and maybe people will start to see them in their own right outside of just being supplemental like IG prefecture. Nishio Macha has a bit of a reputation of being good team, but it's not nearly as well known outside of Japan for its for its quality is Ujicha has Uji and Kyoto have long been both in and outside of Japan. A sort of marker of this is the this is the real stuff. This is the good stuff.

David · 1:35:41

So hopefully as chisel worker as well, chisel worker Koshima and and IG become more known. This will be because their quality has improved and more people can catch on to that. So when it comes to sort of marketing your tea, it's important to to communicate the region and everything so that there'll be more incentive life to produce better tea in the future. I think Kiboshi Macha will become a household name in the same way that, you know, Ujicha has been. I hope, I hope for all of us that that happens because then there'll be more good quality tea for us to enjoy and people will rave about, you know,

David · 1:36:20

Shizuoka cha or Kawane cha Matcha the same way we do about Fujicha and Yamicha. That'd be a great. Future. Yeah, yeah, because right now, you know, for the ugly secret of the industry, you know, like the people laundering Kagoshimati into Wuji and make it as Wujicha. And that's already happening.

David · 1:36:42

Right on the other. Hand you know it was it's happening because Kagoshimati is having such stigma in the market. So if that is that's going to be change in the future, I think that's a women's situation for everybody and I think that has. To come from both sides as people lose their stigma and the quality will have to rise to match it. And there are people producing good quality tension down there, but it's just the scale hasn't yet met the demand. And some of the, again, Tasha had mentioned just slowly waiting for things to get to the point where they can include them in there, the blends for

David · 1:37:19

for sale and blends for Yamoto and that sort of stuff. And speaking about laundering tea into uchicha, I'm not sure how well known this is, but uchicha on its own is kind of an unregulated term, the same way that ceremonial grade is.

David · 1:37:33

Like. There are guidelines put out by the Kyoto Tea Board, for lack of a better word, that uchicha should come from Kyoto Prefecture X percentage, or at least Kyoto Prefecture and then the surrounding 3 prefectures, Mia Mia Shiga and oh, I'm forgetting now.

David · 1:37:50

But like, these are guidelines and no one's bound by them, so just be wary of the importance of Fuji Cha I guess. Yeah. It's, I think we learned a number that only was under 1% of the T out in the market. That market as UJI Cha is actually grown from UJI.

David · 1:38:12

Right. It's a crazy number. It is a crazy number. And like even if you take Uji Cha at the slightly less specific designation that it's T from Kyoto Prefecture in general, even then you find a lot of it actually doesn't come from Kyoto Prefecture.

David · 1:38:26

It's from the neighboring prefectures like Chige and Mia. Because it's just there's a lot of demand and the supply in Kyoto Prefecture is limited and the supply in Uji is even more limited as over the past 200 years kind of see a.

David · 1:38:38

Gradient level exactly. Yeah. But like a lot of UGI has actually grown in Mosca because UGI is now a city. Like UGI used to be T Fields, but people moved there and there's no more space for T fields. One of the producers we work with, Yoshida MHN, they have pictures of their fields back in like the early 1900s where it was fields and their neighbors were also T fields and their other neighbors were also T fields. But now the neighbors are houses and businesses. So just the the space for agriculture in UGI is as evaporated.

David · 1:39:09

And so a lot of that's being shifted over to Uji Tawara and and Wazzuka. And I think we're seeing some of those names become more recognized in the specialty world, like people begin to recognize Wazzuka. People have recognized Shirakawa exclusively because of Sujiki of Suji. Sansti has developed a reputation for Shirakawa. I don't think anyone's heard of Shira Kawaji outside of him. So the sort of sub specificity within Uji is becoming slightly more known as Uji itself is very limited in what it can produce and is now just sort of the catch all cultural term for tea produce in that area.

David · 1:39:46

It's a bit of a shame. Because people drink it and they think they're tasting Gucci Cha. It's a lie. They're not tasting the place, no. And as like, as with grapes and wine, tawa is arguably more important than cultivar. And the tawa of Uji is different to that of Wazaka is different to that of Uji Tawada of Kyotanabe of Shirakawa. But all of these are relatively close geographically. But there is still quite big differences, like because Wazaka is up in the mountains, tea harvested there is roughly a week later than what actually happens. Interesting.

David · 1:40:21

I didn't know that. Uji Tawada and Uji. Yeah. So I've, I think you've had him on here. Pow. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah, my friend pal, he's the same T school as me. He has the same teacher as I do. Really. OK, Yeah, cool. Small world.

David · 1:40:35

Small world. Small world. After all, yeah. So when I was there last year, he drove me from his house in Kyoto into Wazaka, and we passed T fields in Yuji Tawada. I think it is. And he's like, oh, yeah, this is how I know what I'm doing for work next week because I see what they're doing here.

David · 1:40:51

And I know in a week's time I'll be doing the same thing. They're putting the shading on now. I think we'll be putting the shading on in a week's time. Oh, they're picking now. We'll probably be picking next week. It is quite a.

David · 1:41:00

Drive from Kyoto to to Wazuka because it's out in the mountains and you have to do all these little mountain passes to get there. They're building a tunnel which might make it easier. I think it just. Finished. Or at least it's just finished.

David · 1:41:12

OK the the drive is fun, little winding roads. Horii mentioned to me that he sees people taking their rally cars and trying to do them like little race tracks? Because of these winding. Around the passes, but he said that he saw someone in like a full race racing helmet and racing kit taking these corners really slowly because they're they're really quite tight and dangerous.

David · 1:41:34

Meanwhile, the farmers are just zipping by in their kei trucks. They know the roads and they're just. I guess this also brings us another side tangent because I can't stop thinking of them to another difference in in how much it has changed taste wise over the the few the last century. I guess as more factories, aracha factories, are being placed next to areas of production, the time between picking and steaming is getting ever shorter. Which.

David · 1:41:59

Is. The goal, what we've been thinking has been the goal is steam as fast as possible to lock in as much freshness and no oxidation. But back in the day, that wasn't how it was. You'd have to, you know, hike down the mountain on foot and it would take longer for the tea leaves that you picked to get to the steaming basket and they were steamed by hand in small batches. So you would take a little bit, steam it and be done with it and then the batch waiting would get, you know, would take longer.

David · 1:42:25

So there's probably a lot more withering happening in older styles of matcha production that we have moved away from. So as the industry has moved towards super umami, super fresh, super green and in Yami, we've moved towards nutty and and toasty. I think we're missing out on the floral and bright that came from probably withered zairai being the slightly withered zairai. But I'm not sure if the, I hope someone will choose to, to produce that again.

David · 1:42:56

And we see that expression of matcha as people innovate, but I'm not sure if that's where the the mainstay of the overseas industry is looking at the moment if they're just trying to get and ice cream, umami stuff and our and our drinks.

David · 1:43:08

But hopefully there's enough specialty demand that this sort of innovation continues. Yeah, and they start. Looking outside like the traditional buyers because I feel like I I have this theory that all of the incentives and feedback loop and setting prices are around flaw minimization, which are all set by these blenders.

David · 1:43:24

And it's just old Japanese men have set up the system of buying tea from each other based on what they understand to be quality, which quality to me is a pretty socially constructed construct. And that their ideas of what's good and bad, you know, is homogenizes the taste of matcha that the world is consuming, right?

David · 1:43:45

You see that? In in the, in the way the tea is evaluated and scored at the wholesale market and I guess also for competitions is that it'll take tea. This is, I think this is true of sencha. It's probably also true for matcha brew it at boiling water temperatures to extract every single negative quality they can from it and expose it in all of its floors.

David · 1:44:11

Because if you brew it at lower temperatures, you don't see any of that. And then you basically score it and you say, oh, this is too oxidized or this was picked too late and that sort of stuff. So yeah, it's very definitely a floor minimization approach and that discourages innovation because the market is primed at stability and consistency and trying to push towards that. Where as if you get more farmers selling direct to customers, you get a little bit more of that innovation, especially outside of specialty matcha.

David · 1:44:41

You get all of the other types of tea. But even within specialty matcha, you start seeing more innovation when people are operating outside of this traditional wholesale market practice. That's good. And I think it'd. Be.

David · 1:44:53

Yeah, it's good. And it's more like direct consumption is important, but I'm not sure how scalable that is because the the majority of tea is put on the wholesale market. While it's good that a lot of producers are experimenting outside of the wholesale market, we need a change to the wholesale market itself and the guidelines that they set. If you want to see changes across the board that a lot more people can experience rather than just one or two producers and with very limited supply, makes sense. Big structural problem.

David · 1:45:24

I don't think that's going to get solved anytime soon. No, no. Probably not, but the push towards organic is interesting because like if we have a ideal flavor profile for matcha as being incredibly umami and green, that necessitates intense fertilization.

David · 1:45:40

Which is hard. To do purely with organic fertilizer. And that's where like, is this what matcha used to taste like? Have we moved so far away from the natural taste of the plant that it's unrecognizable as matcha? Because if you have some of the like lower quality again quotes organic matcha, it tastes quite different than yeah, for sure something you'd get out of the traditional Uji blend. And is that something that customers want, or is it something that they're trying to move away from because everyone wants vibrancy and umami, which you just simply have a hard time getting if all you've got is

David · 1:46:15

canola seeds and other organic fertilizers? Yeah, I mean. Like with that level of fertilizers being used, you know, you can base theoretically, like produce that tea like on the moon. So it's no to the soil. Yeah, yeah, it's all the nitrogen. That you pour on it, yeah.

David · 1:46:35

So we're seeing a. Little bit of push, that push back in the specialty industry against that sort of push towards the Super umami. And this is something that one of the chashi I spoke to Ed Rishuan has mentioned that like aroma is something that used to be the primary driving character of T blenders is all about aroma.

David · 1:46:53

And now that the push is towards umami suffers a little bit, but flavour is a lot more subjective. This is what he said than aroma and it's a lot harder to to judge quality wise as a as a tension blender. So they still operate a little bit on on the aroma primarily rather than the flavour. But, and this is also something I've noticed, that the difference between how tea practitioners make tea and how casual drinkers, or I guess hobbyist drinkers drink matcha, is that for the longest time everyone's been telling everyone to brew matcha at like 60°, seventy degrees, 80° to minimize bitterness.

David · 1:47:30

But in the tea room, as I'm sure you've known, you just take it straight out of the kama. Right out of the kama and. This is something that I think isn't explored enough because this has been done for centuries. And if it tastes better at lower temperatures, then why are we using boiling water? And of course, my theory here is that one at the higher ends of quality spectrum, you can use boiling water. You take one of the Suji San's teas, you can hit it with boiling water and you'll still get very little bitterness. But the other thing is that aroma is more important back then and higher temperatures

David · 1:48:02

extract more aromatic compounds and therefore you experience more of the aroma. And two, bitterness wasn't seen as the worst thing ever as it kind of is now where we are terrified of bitterness. We also kind of need it to cut through milk and a latte. But in usucha and koicha we hate bitterness as though as the the enemy, whereas it used to be seen as not only a part of matcha, but as an important part of matcha's flavour, like. Preferences have literally changed. Preferences have literally.

David · 1:48:31

Changed and like there's there's kind of a thing people say that Omotesenke prefers slightly bitter matcha. I'm not sure how true that is. I've I haven't I haven't tasted all of the the blends of all the different iemoto.

David · 1:48:40

But like Acei writing and the tropics promoted matcha because it was bitter and taste of change. Yeah, because it lines as as part of traditional Chinese medicine. Yeah, and if you see, examine the record of how tea being made back in Song dynasty, it will be very bitter. So probably closer to nowadays white tea and historically even to now, you know, Chinese tea doesn't necessarily assess bitterness as a negative component of the tea. Usually some tea with some exceptions. But yeah, it's an interesting phenomenon that we're seeing now that bitterness is so hostile in matcha. It's not just.

David · 1:49:20

Matcha, you see it in sencha as well. And I think sencha is something that matcha can learn from where for a long time. Bitterness and astringency with the enemy. And then we invented fukamushicha in the 1950s, deep steamed sencha to eliminate bitterness and astringency. But the vast majority of cheap fukamushicha, and I'm being a bit mean here because a lot of the cheap ones I think taste kind of lifeless without the backbone of astringency. Like that structure, I think is very important to a good sencha, at least in my preferences. In the sort of mountainous sencha from Shizuoka, you get that backbone.

David · 1:49:54

And from there you can structure the umami, you can structure the aromatics. So that's gone through multiple different waves of evolving taste preferences in sencha. And I'm curious to see how this all exists in matcha.

David · 1:50:09

I don't think we'll see a return of bitterness as a positive, as a positive quality. But broadly speaking, I wonder in the long run how taste preferences will evolve over time or if we will continue to dive ever deeper into maximizing umami and greenness and see those amino acid percentages rise each year. And at some point, we're drinking straight LCM. It's baked.

David · 1:50:30

Into the incentive model at the auctions and the wholesale level, if you're if you know whether or not you're gonna sell something is based on the stupid score sheet that someone invented. And that was a flaw. How is it ever gonna change? Maybe we have to start seeing China and Korea coming into the game with higher quality tencha that aren't bound by any of these rules serving the specialty market abroad for matcha.

David · 1:50:54

Like it's because these I I don't know I I've worked with a lot of large Japanese companies in the past and there's an unusual amount of rigidity and hesitance for structural change, especially structural change. Maybe as a one off but like.

David · 1:51:12

Are the. Japanese gonna adapt fast enough to let 1000 flowers bloom and see what can be good, some newer. Farmers in Kagoshima, I mean, they seem to be very innovative. That's my. Bet the word of mouth. The idea is that the corporate rigidity is less so down South in Yame and Kagoshima like that sort of rigidity is very much seen in Tokyo and Kyoto.

David · 1:51:38

Kyoto is especially Kyoto is like, is kind of the cultural landmine of very rigid social structures and the importance of indirect communication. And as a foreigner, if you don't know the trappings, it's it's, it's a trap.

David · 1:51:53

People don't say exactly what they mean. And this is true of Japanese culture in general, broadly speaking, but it's even more so in Kyoto, where like centuries of culture and tradition have been steeped and people have, you know, generations of lineage to uphold.

David · 1:52:08

You see Potter's in Kyoto, Potter's like Asahiyaki with like multiple generations and he's at 16 now, will destroy like 70% of their works because they have to upkeep their name. Whereas outside of Kyoto, the pressure isn't as strong to be upholding centuries of tradition.

David · 1:52:26

So I think people are a little more free, but I'm speaking very broadly here about. Regional. Differences in Japanese culture, I'm sure it's a lot more complicated and people have different opinions, but that's kind of the understanding is that that's how Kyoto is.

David · 1:52:41

And places further South, further away from Kyoto, a little less like that. That's good, yeah. The only place where people from Tokyo is going to get trolled and joke is in Kyoto. There's one reason why my tea school, so I didn't mention this going back to my tea school, but we're based in Hiroshima, OK? So the.

David · 1:53:01

Sansenke and the majority of tea schools are based in Kyoto. We're based in Hiroshima because Oeda Soko was sort of kicked out of Kyoto and given land in Hiroshima to be the feudal Lord of. So being removed from the influences of the Sansenke and Kyoto and the Edo government just distance wise has LED it to sort of pursue a different path.

David · 1:53:23

And then being in Hiroshima, of course, it survived an atomic bomb. And that has had a profound impact on our tea school, because our tea school used to be centered in the castle. It's a New York car alarm right there, if you can hear that. It used to be centered in the castle at the center of Hiroshima.

David · 1:53:45

And just by luck, after the major restoration, after the samurai were disbanded, they moved out to the suburbs and moved the family and everything important with them. Otherwise the entire tradition would have been lost in World War 2. But while the lineage has survived, we lost a lot of people and obviously in in the blast and it's sort of been a survival story since then, a rebuilding story for the school, like our iemoto lost, you know, very dear people to him during that is.

David · 1:54:18

Is the iemoto? Did the iemoto live through World War Two? Yes, I'm. Pretty sure he was very young though. Ogre and iemoto. Wow. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. And he was definitely succeeded in iemoto. Our previous one lived through that for sure. So we're very tied to that, as well as to the idea of surviving the civil war of Japan.

David · 1:54:40

Like being a samurai school meant something different in the warring period, because samurai in the Edo period didn't do anything. It was a time of peace. Samurai just became a social class. You didn't actually fight. You carried your sword as a symbol of status and that's about it.

David · 1:54:56

During the Civil War period, these people were fighting. It was dangerous. Their lives could be lost at any moment. And Oedo Soko had been on the front lines of battle multiple times as Ichiban Yari, the first spear. So it's very much a story of survival and perseverance for the school.

David · 1:55:11

Not only did Oedo Soko survive the tumultuous period of civil war, but his descendants have survived nuclear war in Hiroshima. So I think that has also been a bit of a, a guiding spirit to push us forward into persevering and surviving and adapting to to new situations Makes sense.

David · 1:55:28

And it's. Very heavy. It's it's kind of crazy. Very. Interesting story, yeah, for sure. Maybe like. Definitely. I'm sure it lends into their adaptive spirit, yeah. And I tying this back to different regional cultures in Japan, Hiroshima has had is very different culturally, I think to Kyoto. I've only been there for like a week, but I felt a difference as people have just sort of had that shared experience of of, of trauma and horror and I've just sort of become friendlier and nicer and just more accepting.

David · 1:56:01

And so they're. They're. Tea blenders in Hiroshima and I think they might have a different outlook to tea blenders in Kyoto. But this is just my point that it's easy to think of Japan as a monolithic culture. And the cynicist in me would like to say that Japan wants you to think of Japan as a monolithic culture. This is something that they've tried to craft post major restoration, but the truth is that it's not. And I think we'll see hopefully more regional expression in different styles of tea, but also different styles of doing business and adapting to the changing world and the changing market of matcha.

David · 1:56:39

Maybe the chashi's are easier to talk to in Hiroshima, Ryan. But you're already there's. One, there's the one who provides to our school, he's actually in Onomichi, which is like a 2 hour drive out of Hiroshima. OK, he's great.

David · 1:56:53

Super down to earth guy, very, very nice. But yeah, he's the one I mentioned who did like 30 different tenchas in his blend last year for Vyomoto. So crazy. They're out there. That's. Cool. Well. I guess we're coming up way past two hours, so it's sort of a final question.

Ryan · 1:57:09

What can everyone expect of Tezumi into the future? Like where, where are you guys headed and what what's your your plans into the future? I think. What we've been trying to do is highlight producers and highlight Craftsman both in the TNT West Side.

David · 1:57:26

And we're basically trying to continue to do that, but just expand more into areas that we haven't covered before. So this is looking at more matcha outside of where we've been originally forcing in the matcha side. So we've been very heavy on single origin from Kyoto from the start. We're looking a little more into sourcing blended teas from there and maybe some single origin outside of Kyoto. We've had some from Yame, we have a few in Shizuoka, but more of that so we can better represent the of wide variety, the spectrum of matcha flavors.

David · 1:58:02

As I've said, we're currently at about 30 different matches and we're probably going to see that number increase if everything goes well. And my goal there is just to show people that matcha exists in such a wide spectrum of quality and style. And style's something I want to focus on here because we talk a lot about quality as if it's linear. Oh yeah.

David · 1:58:22

It's not at all. It's huge variation and it's so much. Down to personal preference and once you're at the point of quality, as drinkable as usage, then your world opens to now what I want to do, you know, I can pursue tea in this style if I want single origin, super focus tasting profiles, if I want something crafted and rounded. It's just different.

David · 1:58:43

So that's our goal there in the matcha sector at least, is to try and showcase more variety or continue to do that because that's what I've been trying to do from the start and that now as we're growing, we have the capacity to do that.

David · 1:58:57

So that's one side of it. And I guess the same is true across the board in our other sectors in NT where we've been focused on a certain area, the teapots, Tokoname, but you know, branch outside of that and showcase more of Japan's, you know, regional crafts. We're doing that slowly.

David · 1:59:14

We'll hopefully be doing even more of that in the coming years. And then on our content side, I hope to produce more and more and more and cover all of these different aspects, not just as products that we sell, but as stories that we can craft and bring to people.

David · 1:59:28

Because these are such interesting stories with such deep and interesting history, ancient or even recent history for some of these Potters and these tea producers, that I want to show everyone what's actually happening and not just show the end work of the product. So that's hopefully what's on the plan. Book has been in the talks for a while. Nice if I have the.

David · 1:59:47

Time to produce that. Maybe that's a project for the end of this year and moving into next year because and this is just the issue with running a company is that we're all too busy running the company to do. Even more stuff that we want to do. So I've been thinking about this for a long time and there's a lot of stuff that I can talk about in situations like this that I've not put down on paper.

David · 2:00:09

Like this thought of information I've shared today and my thoughts, they've not been put into my blogs or into my videos yet. And so hopefully I can coalesce all of this and put it into a book that'd. Be awesome. It's a book that thank you.

Ryan · 2:00:23

For doing this, yeah. Thank you. For all the content, we've learned a lot. It's very helpful and it's context too. You're not telling anyone what to think or how to think or that this is good or that's good. It's just really the foundations to make your own judgement as a consumer, at least when I'm consuming that content. So really appreciate it.

David · 2:00:44

I'm glad to hear that, that's definitely my intention and I hope that people see it that way. And I mean, from a business perspective, that's sort of the, the ethos I want to build that I'm not being telling you to buy our tea. I'm not telling you that this is good. I'm just trying to give you the information to show you why the tea that we sell is good, that the people who've put all the work into it have put in all this work and how it turns into what you get in the cup or in the bowl if it's matcha. But I hope that, you know, this sort of education can use to to spread and I can make more of

Zongjun · 2:01:17

it. We hope so. But thank you so much, I think it's a great place to stop. So thank you so much for listening. I think it's the longest episode ever, just over 2 hours. But it's great actually. Personally, I love long form content. I hope our audience feels the same. And if you enjoyed it, please consider sharing with friend and we'll see you in the next one.

David · 2:01:42

See you in the future. Thanks. Thank you.