It's all about the References

Ryan · 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my co-founder Zongjun, who also goes by Sam. Hello. Hello. And we're the co-founders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey, Matcha, share startup stories and interview experts, and today's episode, What are we talking? About all about the references, a really important topic not only in matcha, but in tea more generally, and even in other specialty products.

Ryan · 0:32

The ability to taste for information is solely dependent on having reliable references. So put another way, if you want to taste Asahi cultivar, you might need to taste 5, 6, 7, 8 examples in contrast with other cultivars to begin to understand and build a mental model for what Asahi cultivar tastes like.

Ryan · 0:54

What does it taste like when it's grown in Uji? What does it taste like when it's grown in Wazuka? What does it taste like with and without fertilizer? And so long as you reliably know the reference on the label Asahi, you can start to build a mental model of the expression for that particular of their cultivar.

Ryan · 1:12

So this is true across cultivars, but it's also true across growing regions, processing styles, tana shelf shaded where the shading kanreisha, the mechanism of shading is elevated versus directly touching the bush. The ability to taste honzu shaded, which uses rice straw and kind of filters a very different type, kind of light versus kanreisha. And then what you're looking for all of these different labels to become a smarter, more intelligent consumer. Arguably very, very difficult to do so right to be able to taste the difference between honzu and kanreisha. But the only way to know if you can or if it is difficult is to know that it was kanreisha versus

Zongjun · 1:57

Kanreisha versus honzu, it's, it's, it's very interesting. And also like, I guess this is really a difficulty across all products. If you do care about the information, the level of 'cause frequently you are not really tasting difference of a change for a single parameter. You are often tasting a difference of multiple parameters being changed from producers to producers, from vintage to vintage, right.

Zongjun · 2:27

You are not just tasting like everything remains the same, just a difference between kanreisha and honzu for this very specific year. That kind of comparison sample is all is always very difficult to acquire, not even not not just for matcha, but for all kinds of products.

Zongjun · 2:44

So the access to information is pretty difficult to begin with. Let alone the access to the reference samples. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Frequently the manufacturers can't even have that level of information to for them, for themselves to reference which is which Is that that very interesting situation that we're seeing here because like, like given this situation, like almost any conversations about flavor is essentially meaningless.

Zongjun · 3:10

People, people are essentially just talking over each other based on their own past tasting experience, past formative experience over a certain sample that they had the chance to acquire at a certain time. And you're using that as your point of preference to hold a conversation with someone else with probably very different experience with a very different product. Yeah, So there's a couple different really interesting schools of thought when it comes to tasting and transparency and labels across products.

Ryan · 3:42

And this doesn't just exist in matcha, but multi and all products. And the most extreme of the two sides is people who want absolute transparent information. They want to know all of the details about the product's growth so that they can build.

Ryan · 3:56

And every new tasting experience is education. It's a chance to learn. And then on the the opposite side of the extreme, there's people who say we shouldn't care about all of this, all of these labels. We don't need to know all of this detail.

Ryan · 4:10

Let's just appreciate the tea for what it is. Why are we making this so complicated? Why don't we just sit and enjoy the raw hedonic pleasure of consuming the tea and all of the sensory pleasure that it brings us So Zongjun, what is your best argument for and against the camp that does doesn't care about transparency? Well, first of all, I think these two schools of thinking should not be mutually exclusive. I can certainly coexist depending on the context, depending on mood, depending on like. What exactly is the purpose of this matcha, this drink sitting in front of you today?

Zongjun · 4:53

I can drink it for for pleasure or you know, I can drink it for educational purpose. Or caffeine for that matter. Oh, caffeine, for that matter, totally functional. And I think there's nothing wrong with any of these directions of consuming a product.

Zongjun · 5:08

But for, I guess a argument to to make that goes against, you know, transparency. It's transparency at best when it comes to the information sitting on the label being true, but still those are selected information to be shared.

Zongjun · 5:27

You cannot, you will not be able to know everything about this tea, like it would. Only the information will only be made it to you if the manufacturer decided to put those information on on the label. That along that it can be twisted or distorted information sometimes. So I guess the the argument to be to be made against transparency is that there's still no ground truth about the product.

Ryan · 5:54

You're still being presented to a twisted, distorted, or at best partial reality. Yeah, absolutely. So just to make this super tangible, if you have something like A1 ceremonial grade organic matcha and that's being sold to you for let's say $60.00 for 20 grams, right, you are absolutely going off of the reputation of the brand that's given it to you and everything else is no form of objective truth.

Ryan · 6:24

Ceremonial grade is not regulated. It does not objective truth. In the same way that saying something was produced from Uji grown tencha, or was produced or was shaded for 40 days, or was kanreisha versus honzu shaded or was fertilized using synthetic fertilizers versus natural fertilizers, right? These are forms of objective truth that we can use to learn about the product.

Ryan · 6:50

It's the difference from a top down system versus a bottom up system in a top down world. At the world of tea ceremony, you need to be told this product is usucha grade, or this product is koicha grade, or this is the top gokumukashi that is endorsed by the Urasenke Iemoto. You should buy it.

Ryan · 7:13

You have to be told that something is good, and maybe you have to then rely on brand reputation or your own experience in deciding whether or not you then like it or dislike it. But it's still a world of information scarcity where someone else is ultimately making that judgement for you. And I recently came across a very interesting piece of industry gossip.

Ryan · 7:33

I never connected the dots on this, but these iemoto endorsements for these different poetically named products from the large blend houses. It turns out that that endorsement isn't always free. I don't know if the rates differ. Surprise.

Ryan · 7:50

And to protect my sources on this piece of news, I'm going to be a little bit general, but I recently met someone who has a very good relationship with a very large matcha producer in Japan. And they were approached and I think they do a mixture of both white label and have their own brand really large producer. And I won't say from which prefecture was approached. And Sam, can you guess the rate that they would have to pay for an Urasenke iemoto endorsement for a poetically named product?

Zongjun · 8:19

Reasonably I would say couple $1000, but it's probably in the 10s of thousands of dollars. $40,000. 40,000. U.S. dollars a year for the. Oh, it's by yearly basis. It's a subscription. It's a subscription. It's reoccurring revenue. Interesting.

Zongjun · 8:40

Very advanced business model. Very advanced business model on the tea ceremony schools part and you know, you know, does this sort of dirty the water in terms of what's going on in the purity of tea ceremony? I think so a little bit, but also it's a very smart business decision.

Zongjun · 8:56

I mean, the iemoto's endorsement does bring probably close to around 1,000,000 practitioners to that particular product of which some segment will then decide to purchase it. Or like if you are a matcha drinker, beginner matcha drinker, like this is something that you probably would recognize as a seal of quality, which I think does help with marketing and with themselves. But if you're in the know, you do know that the same blend, the exact same powder, exists under a different poetic name, Same cultivars, same everything, exact same product, but at probably 20% less the price they got to make up that $40,000 in the endorsement.

Zongjun · 9:41

Yeah, we learned that in the very interesting context, but and we personally experienced it too and also like the same product can live under different, iemoto endorsement, which is also very interesting. You know, it's really not about the product itself when it comes to, you know, traditional matcha consumption.

Ryan · 10:01

Yeah, if you really care about the product itself, these poetically named products, not only does it not tell you anything, but that these undercurrents that are driving the price, it's misleading. And what really matters and what I think everyone cares about outside of a tea ceremony context or even within tea ceremony context, is, is it a good deal? Am I paying a fair price for the quality of the product and its base material and mastery that brought it to life? And just like anything, literally anything, from instant noodles, a soda to beer to wine to spirits, marketing plays an enormous role.

Ryan · 10:37

And sometimes it comes in the form of an iemoto endorsement. Sometimes it comes in the form of a made-up grade where someone's calling something A1 or S S or pick whatever random letter combinations. For some people, A is the highest. We just had a sample here.

Ryan · 10:53

They was the lowest. It was about 40 U.S. dollars a kilo versus their S grade, which it went A through E and then S, which is literally 10 times the price and really bizarre. Sometimes it's how many A's you have. We've seen AAA quadruple A7A's, 7A's.

Ryan · 11:15

And A+ signs following by that 7A's, whatever that means. Everyone's living in their own universe when it comes to these rankings and it really does the whole industry a disservice. So I think that's really the crux of the issue is are you getting a good deal? I have another, another counter argument for the people that say, you know, let's not worry about transparency. It's the wrong focus.

Ryan · 11:38

We should just be enjoying the tea for what it is. So obviously marketing plays a huge role in all of this and very easily influence consumers and it can very easily prime people to decide that they like it more even they can trick themselves. But I actually think engaging in the flavor, especially if you are not a tea ceremony practitioner, is a way of engaging in culture.

Ryan · 12:00

What is the difference between us drinking matcha and a dog eating a steak? To a dog, a juicy steak is delicious. They love it, they are enjoying the taste. It's primal, right? It's animalistic. They can enjoy it through the same 5 senses that we have. Actually arguably even more attune 5 senses as their sense of smell and sense of taste might be more sensitive than ours.

Ryan · 12:28

And I think the difference between raw, animalistic, hedonic pleasure and humans enjoying this food and beverage that we make, that we craft, and that we spent hundreds if not thousands of years perfecting the production of is that it allows us to engage in culture. We can taste the genetic manipulation that humans have done to the tea plant to give us these different cultivars. We can taste the centuries of processing skill and differences in processing skill across regions that lead to very different flavor profile outcomes. We can taste 17 generations of blenders masterfully honing their craft to keep product

Ryan · 13:14

consistent, even though it comes from wildly variable components that nature ends up manipulating in different ways depending on the weather, depending on this or that, it's very much outside of the control of any individual producer and tasting that consistency year after year after year.

Ryan · 13:32

These things matter. And I think it's what distinguishes us as human in enjoying things past. Just enjoy the tea, just enjoy your food, just take it in. Who cares about all of this other stuff? I think that's what makes us human.

Zongjun · 13:49

Wonderful speech from marketing material Ryan's Only if you know those are true and only if you can actually taste the difference. So I I agree. I mean, like any product is beyond the product itself and anything that you are putting into your mouth.

Zongjun · 14:07

If you do end up carrying it's craftsmanship and creation, there is more to know about the product. But you know, like, I guess a counter argument to your argument is that is it worth 10 times the price of such a product or worth a repeating purchasing such a product because the education really comes once right?

Zongjun · 14:28

You are, you are, you drink the product, you consume the product, you know everything about the product and that's it. And anything beyond that, anything after that, I would say that you are consuming for the product because of the product, not because of anything that lives beyond the product itself.

Zongjun · 14:46

You don't relearn a piece of information over time, only if you forgot about it, maybe you, you, you would pick it up again and trying to refresh your memory. And I guess that's also a difference or a argument to be made for or products made for educational purpose.

Zongjun · 15:02

You learn about it and then its purpose is finished. You would not want to repeatingly consume a product that's just objectively tastes bad. I tried this, very interesting, you know, fermentation from a very esoteric grape that made into a funky natural wine.

Zongjun · 15:23

I had that experience I have that I don't like it and I'm not going to buy that again. And I think that the, you know, it really depends on the context and the purpose of consuming the product. And by the end of the day, I think for any product, the quality or if it suffice, a consumer preference, I think should lie, should lie before it's educational purpose needs to be a good product to begin with. Otherwise it's not, it should not be called a product. It's a reference sample.

Ryan · 15:55

That's, that's actually a very good point. And we are, we are all still human in terms of repeat consumption. That that's a really good point. But it does make smarter consumers. You don't have a bunch of consumers that are schmucks and need to be told what's good and wildly overpay.

Ryan · 16:12

I mean, let's be honest, there's a very large percentage of matcha consumers out there that are wildly overpaying for quality. And you really only get good things if you're in a market where you have very transparent labels.

Ryan · 16:27

And it's become very ubiquitous to find these pockets of value. And these pockets of value can be different things. There is no like gold standard when it comes to matcha, right? We all have different preferences. Things that I might love might be things that you don't love.

Ryan · 16:43

So there's all of these different pockets, but we need to give consumers and everyone the vocabulary. And actually, I think it really starts with the matcha brand owners. A lot of matcha brand owners actually don't really know what fertilizer does to the taste of matcha. They don't really know the difference between a lot of these cultivars and a lot of these regions and processing styles.

Ryan · 17:06

We don't either. We're just barely scratching the surface. There's like maybe 200 people like the chashi's out there that really know what's driving quality and everyone else is just taking everyone else's word for it in this remarkably insular culture.

Ryan · 17:25

And I don't want to take someone else's word for it. I want to like taste it myself. And all of these tea people out there that call themselves like tea sommeliers. And I have, you know, if if you look at the type of training that the wine people go through to become actual sommeliers, to actually be able to blind identify something objectively and to have deductive tasting and work backwards.

Ryan · 17:50

I mean, I'm sorry, these tea sommeliers are like at the preschool level where the other people are at their PhDs. Like, there are just remarkably few people on earth that can do that in let's just matcha, let alone in all categories of tea, right? There's all of these gurus.

Ryan · 18:10

It's a huge problem in the tea industry actually, is that people misattribute quality to things all the time. And a great example is your story in Wuyishan of what is considered to be the top tier of Oolong in mainland China.

Ryan · 18:27

Sam, do you want to describe a little bit about your time there and and perhaps some of the marketing at play for the people that say quote UN quote terroir is everything with some nice drone footage of Wuyishan? I actually see a lot of similarities between Wuyi and Japanese tea production, a very large portion of Japanese tea production.

Zongjun · 18:49

So when you are in Wuyishan, like people like mystified this place as you know, the birth place of, you know, Kung Fu cha or Chinese tea ceremony, like it really adopted the child away the brewing tea into it's very sophisticated, you know, tea tea making culture and it got perfected and refined by the literatis over, you know, different dynasties.

Zongjun · 19:14

So it has a very rich history and is arguably the birth place for, you know, Chinese tea or Chinese tea culture, just like how Uji is considered as the birthplace or the origin of Japanese matcha. Well, modern day Chinese tea culture. Kung Fu Cha specifically.

Zongjun · 19:31

Kung Fu Cha specifically, and when you are in Wuyi, when you are in the so so the the core area for the tea production in Wuyishan is what's now the National Park designated area and there is not a single additional Bush allowed to be planned inside the park. All of the bushes tea bushes in the park are registered and numbered, and there are drones surveilling. The park every day with the computational vision to scan if there are any additional bushes being planned. So for people that own tea, tea gardens inside the park, they can only increase their production by increasing the efficiency of each tea Bush

Zongjun · 20:20

units. And by doing so, how are they going to do that? Fertilizers. They dump fertilizers like water into the park. And the bushes in the park are shooting out, you know, fresh leaves in the middle of summer. And they are so like that.

Zongjun · 20:38

That was actually the first time before I actually went to Japan. I've heard that tea plant has a lifespan. They will die at some point. And I was shocked because like, that's not a concept anywhere else like in in Yunnan, which is the, you know, the, the, the terroir for Pu'er or like in Chaozhou, which is the terroir for Dancong.

Zongjun · 21:00

It's some of the other tea production region that really values Gushu or ancient tea tea trees that grows, you know, for hundreds of years. And they value, you know, the, the flavor that comes out from those ancient trees.

Zongjun · 21:14

But in Wuyi, that's a different story. People like young trees because they produce better fragrance, more pungent flavor notes. They dose insane amount of fertilizers to push for unit efficiency to the point that these tea plants would die at some point of their life.

Zongjun · 21:32

Or they would just, you know, eradicate the the older trees, the older bushes and replace it with younger trees because they produce quote-unquote better flavors. So that's really, it was really interesting when I first learned about, you know, Japanese productions in lots of areas in Japan. Such a interesting similarities.

Zongjun · 21:52

And the difference for between a fertilized and unfertilized tea is huge. It's enormous. And that, that's also very obvious in Japanese matcha as well, which is very, very interesting. So what exactly are you tasting by the end of the day?

Zongjun · 22:10

You tasting the culture, you tasting the terroir, are you tasting the cultivar or you're really just tasting the fertilizers or the processing method? I think there's really an argument to be made right there that the, you know, depending on the style of tea making, certain attributes really doesn't matter and certain culture that's being tied or associated to the product is really just stories that people can place a higher price tag to to sell it for, you know, better profit. And and and and, you know, it's not, you know, always like that for all Wuyi right like it.

Ryan · 22:48

They're still in some areas people are more adhered to the more organic, more natural way of farming tea. And it's also the case in Japan. There are many farms in Japan in different areas that really doesn't treat tea trees like a leaf production machine. They do take care of them as life and you do taste the difference of those tea beyond of the fertilizers. Yeah, and even within fertilization, it is an art in and of itself.

Ryan · 23:20

I mean, you can pump synthetic fertilizer in, you know, or you can use rice, oyster shells, rapeseed oil, sesame oil byproducts, mackerel or really types of oily fish that then are allowed to ferment using local microbial flora and then integrate it into the soil. There's a lot of this type of agriculture happening as well, in especially we've heard within actual Uji Uji area Uji, that's Shirakawa Gokasho.

Ryan · 23:49

That's a very interesting culture actually. So I would say that's one thing that I think, you know, matcha in Japan is very different than, you know, teas being grown in certain areas quote-unquote more famous areas in Wuyi Shan is that they really treat the fertilizer as as part of the processing, as part of the recipe, as part of the flavor of the tea versus people are using fertilizer for purely for increase the production. You can can taste you, you, you are able to taste the flavor of the fertilizer, which is a little bit uncanny, but also like very interesting when we were walking in the gardens of Uji and we do smell all these

Ryan · 24:30

fermented fish and oyster shells and all of those odors in the air and we end up tasting them in the tea too afterwards. Yeah, pretty weird. And for those of any of our new listeners that you haven't listened to past episodes, you know, one of the reason that fertilization is so important, important in matcha is that, you know, matcha and tencha pre ground matcha has to undergo shaded cultivation.

Ryan · 24:54

So you put shades up that block the sunlight, which disrupts a lot of natural metabolic pathways, a lot of pathways, biochemical pathways that occur in teeth. And you're actually basically suffocating the plant in a way, because plants rely on sunlight to, you know, do photosynthesis and create energy for themselves.

Ryan · 25:13

So when you block 70 percent, 80% in some places up to a week, they'll block, you know, something close to 98, 99% of the sunlight. You're disrupting a lot of processes. And there's a process which turns amino acids, which are nitrogen rich compounds.

Ryan · 25:31

This is more scientific definition, but in this case, we'll just call them amino acids in general. They're many different ones, including L-theanine through photosynthesis and with sunlight get converted into bitter and astringent catechins. And these catechins are antioxidants, but they also taste bitter.

Ryan · 25:46

And it's these antioxidants that actually help protect the plant from the sun. It's like sunscreen. It like helps prevent them. It helps absorb free radicals. We, you know, you should drink them. The plants produce them for the same reason that we drink them.

Ryan · 26:01

To absorb these free radicals is what antioxidants do. And when you disrupt this chain, you disrupt the balance of the amino acids and sweet and savory amino acids into bitter and astringent catechins and the more nitrogen, AKA fertilizer, which also contains a lot of phosphorus and a lot of potassium. And that balance is also very important, but mostly nitrogen is what's important within the case of matcha. The more nitrogen you put in the soil, the more it's going to go into the plant and the more it's going to concentrate the amino acid profile, which is how you get these insanely umami rich teas and matcha, tencha and gyokuro

Zongjun · 26:45

curl production. It is actually very fundamentally unnatural. If you think of the tea plant as a natural being that has some state where it lives in the wild, it would never taste that savoury. That savouriness is absolutely human intervention, and if you taste a completely unfertilized matcha, you will not taste those crazy levels of umami and savouriness.

Zongjun · 27:16

Yeah. But you know, if we zoom out a little bit, I have always been, you know, kind of cynical about the way how, you know, tea or matcha get so heavily intervened during the farming process. But honestly, like if we zoom, zoom out a little bit and, and, and, and kind of integrate that farming process as part of the manufacturing process of a tea, it's really, how do I frame this?

Zongjun · 27:50

We are not drinking or eating fresh tea leaves or fresh tea plants. Teas we are not like teas are not oxidized, teas are not fermented, Teas are not roasted for being steamed. They are living beings. They are alive. And all of these treatments that make tea taste so different are all human interventions.

Zongjun · 28:12

And I think extending that beyond, you know, tea being picked from its Bush to like tea tea leaves being still grown on the Bush in the farm or in the garden or in the forest, I think that it doesn't there, there isn't a fundamental line that we can draw that we can argue that, you know, like to which point we should stop human intervention. I, I think that's a counter argument to be made for my, you know, cynicism back in the days.

Ryan · 28:44

Yeah, we've evolved as well and our opinions are indeed like constantly changing as we learn more context, especially for two people that had mostly Chinese and Korean tea context coming into this company. Part of the reason we started this podcast was just to share our learning journey in Matcha and what we quickly realized that there were all of these.

Ryan · 29:05

Everyone was making these inter product distinctions on things that actually didn't have much to do with human intervention. They were just these man made fungible abstractions and we're still uncovering them like Uji Macha is a man made like abstraction. It's not much of the comes from uji. It can be, but most of the time it's not. It's like a better word or translation should be uji style matcha.

Ryan · 29:36

This is what's actually going on there because it's trademark and it can come from any material and Nara, Shiga, Mie or Kyoto Prefecture, so long as part of the processing is done in Kyoto Prefecture, which is not an origin at all, there's very little objective truth. Yeah, which makes it exceptionally hard for transparent label because the problem or the driven cost of such confusion is systematic.

Zongjun · 30:04

Like even probably sometimes the producers or the brand owners or your suppliers for your tea brand doesn't even know the full picture of what's inside of, you know, the bag of tea that they end up selling to you. So it's very difficult from a system level to really give off a lot of transparency to the consumers. Most people honestly just don't know and it's so interesting. So when you learn about Chinese tea, especially when you're more classically trained, you were taught to question everything. If you go to a tea market, let's say fun soon in Guangzhou, one of the largest tea markets in the world, and you go there and if you have a good teacher,

Ryan · 30:44

they're going to say you need to go in with some skepticism. These people are trying to sell tea right there. We Yancha Dauphangpao might not even be from the cultivar Dong Pal, it might be a blend, and it might be not grown anywhere in the Wuishan area. It might not be even in WUI or even in Fujian, the province it can actually came from like a different province, which is almost the identical situation to Fuji. So, and when we went in to Japanese tea, like really like deep down learning journey two years ago, I thought to myself this time, I mean, because a lot of what you see in mainland China and Taiwan and other tea

Ryan · 31:29

growing places is like either someone was stupid and they didn't realize what they were purchasing because they never learned the reference sample. To be able to distinguish between real tea that comes from a certain region, an imitation tea that's, you know, from a different region.

Ryan · 31:47

Let's say the difference between real Hangzhou Long Jing versus Long Jing style green tea. It was actually produced in a very different prefecture, very different terroir halfway across the country of China in Guizhou, right?

Ryan · 32:02

These you can learn to taste, but you have to have reliable references. It's the single greatest problem in Chinese tea is finding a teacher, building chains of trust, chains and chains and chains of trust to make sure that you're tasting actual poor from teen 80s to make sure you're actually tasting Longjin that was grown in Hangzhou.

Ryan · 32:26

To make make sure that you're tasting the difference between pre Ching Ming, which is a certain time of year versus post Ching Ming tea. And if you don't have those references, you are going to be part of the problem. And I went into this, you know, telling all of my other tea friends as I was learning about the Japanese tea.

Ryan · 32:46

Oh, if you're buying tea in Japan, you don't have to worry about any of this mislabelling. I mean, it's, it's a first world country. It's a very different, much more developed, much more mature market society, high trust society. This should be no problem.

Ryan · 33:00

And the deeper you go the more you realize. Even like 10 years ago, I think if you bought Shizuoka Cha, there's a very high probability chance that there was Kagoshima tea based material in that. So what is the point of even putting the Shizuoka? Label, it's really all the same.

Ryan · 33:18

It's really all the same. Even like even in Uji, the likelihood of you end up drinking a matcha from Guizhou is very high actually. And you know, to to everyone's surprise, you know, Guizhou not only is a high quantity supplier for a lot of Chinese tea, but also for Japanese matcha.

Ryan · 33:39

One plant from the largest tea manufacturing Guizhou. Guizhou can produce more than 5000 tons of matcha. Yeah, which is larger than the total production of matcha in Japan. That, that, that's really a shocking number to to learn about.

Ryan · 33:54

Let alone that a lot of it's getting exported. So even distinctions like Ujicha or even amongst the traditionally blended products like Gokumukashi or ceremonial grade or all of the dozens and dozens of made-up grades are really just sort of man made abstractions.

Ryan · 34:13

And the problem is if you don't have verifiable references for the people who are labeling these products, let alone the consumers, you really become part of the problem. Wine has verifiable references. It is pretty easy to taste the wine that comes from South Africa or California or France.

Ryan · 34:32

You can be pretty confident, especially if it's as bottle on premise that the grapes come from that place. You can be pretty confident, very high degrees of likelihood that the cultivar of grape Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Gamay, et cetera, are not going to be mislaten.

Ryan · 34:50

They are full of verifiable references, which creates a smarter industry and can create smarter and more sophisticated consumers. And the problem, and I put problems in air quotes here, is that Matcha has such a interesting culture around it that it blinds us to what is actually driving price and quality distinctions.

Ryan · 35:17

If you ask a tea ceremony practitioner that has been studying for three decades about the cultivar of matcha that either serving at their tea ceremony or what they consider to be a very high quality product, I put it there's a 99% likelihood they're going to talk about the brand.

Ryan · 35:35

They're going to talk about how it's endorsed by the iemoto that it's ceremonial grade or maybe they wouldn't say ceremonial grade, but it's a koicha grade as recommended by the consumer. And maybe they have found a particular poetic named product like Tenmyo that they love. And they always serve it on the holiday. Roby Rocky every year.

Ryan · 35:56

And it has always been to everyone's liking and to everyone's preference. They have still only told you abstractions, things that are made-up by other humans, not objective truth, which is where references come. And references can be good or bad, just as there is good and bad matcha are good and bad references, and there should be bad reference samples. We need to learn about like what generally tastes good and what doesn't taste good, and where our preferences converge and diverge.

Ryan · 36:27

Even amongst Sam and myself, we find profiles all the time that I'm much more primed to like than he does, and that he likes way more than me, sometimes for the same reason, sometimes for different reasons. But the only way that you can understand where they came from is if we have that references to learn from which which the coffee industry has, which the wine industry has, cocoa industry has.

Ryan · 36:51

It doesn't exist past the level of the chashi's within matcha. And it is so incredibly frustrating because it creates stupid consumers and it creates stupid matcha brand owners because no one is able to taste something and say this was not actually from Uji-grown tencha. Why am I labeling it as a product from that's Ujicha as a single origin product, for example, or someone tastes something and they're like, you know this doesn't really taste like a Asahi dominant blend, right? Is it actually the case that there's more of these other cultivars than Asahi?

Ryan · 37:32

Or this doesn't really taste ishi-usu milled? Are you sure that this isn't ball milled and all of these things that really matters? It creates a Dumber industry and to be a smart industry with people that have these things, we all need these references so that power doesn't concentrate in the pockets of knowledge that exist within this industry, which are all from like these big traditional blend houses.

Zongjun · 38:01

I, I absolutely agree. And I think, you know, it's generally beneficial for the industry to learn from each other together, but I guess it's still very difficult and first of all, for brand owners or for manufacturers to share so many information to begin with. Sometimes they don't even know.

Zongjun · 38:24

That's a systematic obstacle that I don't know if there's any foreseeable force that can make a very quick change. Second of all, it's less of a incentive for a lot of brand owners to share that many information or even share the flaws in the product to the consumer.

Zongjun · 38:43

Like it doesn't do any goods in the near term for them to share something that's, you know, that to to share the the negative part of the product that they want to sell, right? Eventually they want to make a profit. They want to, you know, have happy customers.

Zongjun · 38:59

They want to sell the product as quickly as possible. That's the purpose of most of the businesses. And 3rd, it's very hard to construct a of reference samples that people can learn 1 parameters at a time, parameter at a time. Frequently these products are crafted in a way that the multiple parameters have been changed during the production or doing the farming or doing the tawa or tawa selection process. So I guess maybe a new set of product category needs to exist in the future.

Zongjun · 39:34

And this do exist sometimes in some wine regions for educational purpose. And, and, and I know that it also exists in some, you know, it lives in some brands or some societies in whiskey, for example, the, the Scottish Whiskey Society that does educational samples for its society members. And for Matcha.

Zongjun · 40:00

I think a new category of such product needs to exist for educational purpose because it's incredibly difficult to acquire those information to begin with. It's incredibly difficult to share all of the information to sell a product as a product that meant to be, you know, enjoyed by people versus educating people and. And I think that, you know, like, especially for macho that has so much, you know, cultural baggage or cultural, not necessarily the baggage, but cultural attachments, it's very hard to treat the product as it is, you know, for the current status quo.

Ryan · 40:43

Very difficult, especially across all the parameters that matter. I mean, it's not a very small list. You have shading time and duration. You mean your shading method, right? Honzu versus raised tana, kanreisha versus direct covering, which all have their pros and cons. And then you have very specific things like what is Ooika if you're not a Japanese person and a native Japanese speaker talking with other people about the flavor of tea and of matcha specifically to be inculturated to truly understand this new word that literally doesn't have a translation, that best translation is the taste of

Ryan · 41:20

shade. But it's not a particularly descriptive term for someone in, you know, in pick your country. Doesn't really matter. The taste of shade doesn't really mean much to a lot of people, right? But you can have a bunch of reference samples and say, hey, most of the Japanese people that we taste these products would agree that this product is Ooika.

Ryan · 41:39

And you can start doing your concentric circles and figure out what these samples will have in common and then become inculturated, become a member of that culture and really grok, really understand, comprehend, internalize that word to adopt it into your vocabulary. So we have things at the vocabulary level. We have all of the different fertilizer types, mix of synthetic and natural, the different types of natural and how those introduce flavors.

Ryan · 42:08

Of course, you have cultivars, you have growing regions, you have all of these things that make matcha so interesting and it's so much to learn. And as you said, it's very hard to get controlled reference samples, which we're hoping will be more available in the future and more available in the future for content marketing purposes. It's like super cool.

Ryan · 42:29

And actually, I recently came across this. I was doing a search because we recently had Oscar Breckel on and he was talking a lot about the Koshin cultivar, which is a very highly fragrant, very floral cultivar typically used for sencha. And he mentioned that it'd be interesting to see what it tastes like in a matcha.

Ryan · 42:50

So it's like, OK, I'll search the Internet, see what I can find. Well, turns out, believe it or not, there is someone in Wazuka that is doing single cultivar matcha. And it's sold by Mizuba, an American matcha brand. And it's been highly revered.

Ryan · 43:05

And a couple of our past guests have actually talked about them. So I really need to buy one of those samples. But you are really starting to see a lot of this with all of these new matcha companies that are creating smarter consumers.

Ryan · 43:17

Who would have thought that we could have found a Cochin cultivar matcha, right? Even Oscar Breckel didn't wasn't aware, as he said on his episode, that anyone was doing shaved cultivation with that cultivar. And here it is coming from an American vendor no less.

Ryan · 43:31

So it's really exciting to see these developments that are coming. And there's never been a better time to learn about specialty matcha. I think all these matcha brand owners and vendors really plays a very important role because like as a consumer, it's very difficult to pull any information as an individual from these tea farmers or from this these large legacy tea brands that they really have 0 leverage in making these people tell what they want to know. But as a brand owner or as brand owners collectively, if we all end up pulling information from from the tea farmers, from these large tea manufacturers, tea

Ryan · 44:12

suppliers, it will be changed as at some point like it will become a industry expectation that this information needs to be shared. And then, you know, like it. It can really bridge the gap of consumer curiosity and consumer education with what is a actually very complicated and interesting and sophisticated specialty product.

Ryan · 44:34

Yeah, absolutely. And it can get us away from these abstractions. Like Sam and I just tasted 8 different matcha samples today. And we like I, I tasted 1. And I looked at Sam and I, I said this is a joke. I said this one ceremonial grade.

Ryan · 44:50

But like, I really think a lot of these product distinctions are that easy. They're literally just someones gut. Like OK yeah this one tastes like a bunch of other things that are labeled ceremonial grade. This is my opinion, what we can slap this on. Maybe the other one could also classify, but it's a slightly worse ceremonial grade.

Ryan · 45:11

You know, you know, it's an interesting tasting experience because like, even though we've been, you know, heavily criticizing the word ceremonial grade, but after tasting the spectrum, it really clicks until, like, grade letter.

Ryan · 45:28

What was it, C or DC or D? Like it was like, yeah, this is ceremonial. And it's like there was a ceremonial greatness in that matcha that I'm having trouble articulating. Well, I mean it's it should be able to taste good as usucha. I mean, that's how I interpret ceremonial grade Should mean that in the most basic version of a tea ceremony where the tea is only being prepared with water, no sweeteners, no attitude, it is no nothing or it's being served in the form of a usucha.

Ryan · 45:58

Is this palatable as a usucha? And of course, that's subjective. We have different standards and other people and we are literally like dividing up these samples to give to industry friends. They're not even for us to randomly sell. So it was also like half a joke.

Ryan · 46:14

But also if we were doing to sell, I'm sure we would be much more generous if we had economic consent. Like it's easy to follow the path of incentives here for these man made terms and actually the spirit of it is OK. But like having everyone assign themselves their own grade.

Ryan · 46:34

Imagine your, you know, your third grade class and if everyone had to grade their own essay, you could imagine the spectrum you had the people that grew up in households that were taught to be over critical of themselves.

Ryan · 46:48

That would have been Sam from a Chinese household would have given us a very low grade versus I'm joking versus people that are directly on point versus people who like to exaggerate their their products, their abilities.

Ryan · 47:02

Giving myself an F for fantastic. And those people that are just so confused by the naming convention, they completely misuse it, which appears to be quite a few people who slap ceremonial grade on a product. Like all things that probably started off the best of intentions. But if there was an independent body, for example, that said, OK, is this palatable as usucha?

Ryan · 47:25

And it was a designation, like a label that was given to you versus you being assigned yourself and actually is 1/2 interesting and decent label. Is is this palatable as in usucha like a 1 to 30 ratio so would be interesting.

Zongjun · 47:41

It's not a reliable reference. Uji matcha is not a reliable reference. Nearly any origin, even Nishio matcha from Aichi is not a reliable reference because nearly anything can go into these products. There's a very interesting story about Nishio that will save for another day around its protective status and how a lot of producers actually asked to have that protective status removed for some very interesting reasons.

Zongjun · 48:06

Purely economic purpose. The the the magic of money really makes a difference in a lot of things. Very easy to follow the path of incentives, but I think references are so important, they're so important and T in general, they're also so important to match up.

Zongjun · 48:22

So we have a couple call to actions. One is for any of the matcha brand owner, listen, owners listening out there collectively, if we all approach producers and I know we're not in any positions of power to demand anything from anyone in Japan considering this matcha boom, you're really just lucky if you get any product at all.

Zongjun · 48:40

But collectively, if we start asking more questions, is the Uji matcha you're selling me from Uji grown tencha? No. Is this from Ujitawara from Wazuka or can we label it that as such? Or maybe we should start labeling thing as Uji style?

Zongjun · 48:56

Or maybe we start asking a lot more about fertilizers and these other things that really are driving quality. If someone's giving you a blend, ask what the blend components are. If we all start asking this, we can collectively change the standard for this type of thing because even 10, 15 years ago from people who are much more experienced in the industry than us, right?

Zongjun · 49:17

Even in like 2019, as early as 2019, right, single cultivar was just like an infancy of an idea. And now it's ubiquitous. If you're a brand owner in Thailand and you're not selling single cultivar, you don't have a business.

Zongjun · 49:32

Quite literally speaking, that's how high the standards have gotten and that's where the consumers have gone. So this is going to continue to evolve across all of these markets. And so for the brand owners, for the consumers, try to pull this information from the brands that you love, right? We need to start electively demanding the higher quality product and any of the producers listening out there. There's such a massive opportunity in content marketing.

Zongjun · 49:55

People are very interested in all of these elements that lead to these flavor profile outcomes. It is no longer a world that is trapped in tea ceremony and blended products. That's dependent on top down marketing where consumers need to be told this is suitable for koicha, this is suitable for usucha.

Zongjun · 50:15

That is literally a dying movement. Every year more and more and more tea ceremony practitioners. So the base is slowly declining. It's not where the future lies. The future relies for the people that are willing to spend more money for a better product. That future lies in the specialty market and it's large and it's growing.

Zongjun · 50:37

And if we don't produce smarter vendors and smarter consumer through reliable references, by giving people objective truths about the products that they're buying, this culture is going to end up not forming at all. And that is the real long term sustainability danger for this industry.

Ryan · 50:53

Absolutely. To be honest, dramatic inertia of this turning into a true specialty movement is actually pretty high even within Japan. All of these regions that are making like very interesting tea just end up getting laundered into a giant supplier or a procurer for these larger plants that would turn them into a plant and honestly like if.

Zongjun · 51:21

Unknown Blend. A unknown blend like their names, their regions, their production, or their culture would actually never be shown, you know in the final product like it's the final product has 0 characteristic of their creation of their forgery. It's part of the reason why a lot of these tea farmers in Japan doesn't feel tencha or Matcha as something that cannot represent themselves.

Zongjun · 51:47

They, they, they, they more see, they see sencha or gyokuro as more of the product that, that, that they can be proud of because they have total control of the final flavor profile of the final product. And all of these matcha just getting blend into some poetic names that that that that their contribution basically has no recognition by the end of the day. Their gokumukashi, their material that gets dumped in that gokumukashi, their human effort has literally been erased with the pen stroke.

Zongjun · 52:18

So yeah, but it's easy money for them. It's steady cash flow, it's a very warm water and thus boiling the frog situation. They are pretty comfortable, like everyone is pretty comfortable with the current status quo, the inside Japan. And if the newer generation doesn't see this as a profitable or interesting future, like no one is going to keep doing this and this will turn into a commodity market. It will not become a specialty of soil for a specialty product. There's no specialty.

Ryan · 52:52

And what's really interesting long term, what's fundamentally happening if you zoom out is you have two existing practitioner bases. You have the tea ceremony practitioners, which are totally fine with top down marketing, which can be told, and products which can be told what's good.

Ryan · 53:08

And products can be endorsed by thing like the iemoto. And there's really strong brand recognition with the old traditional blend houses. This market is literally dying and it will never be as large as it was in the 1980s during Japan's gigantic economic boom. And it's been slowly and steadily declining in terms of the purchasing power of the people who are willing to spend more money for a better product, creating a rich and interesting and dynamic industry, albeit still very traditional. The rest of the market is not going to accept this level of top down marketing forever.

Ryan · 53:44

It works upon new market entry. That's why ceremonial grade I think has been such a remarkable success. But it's not going to stay that way forever, especially as you see a new matcha company arrive every week. People need to start making product distinctions and they're going to start doing that based on objective reality.

Zongjun · 54:02

And there is so much systematic inertia. There is a very much a non 0 probability that we never get to like maximum specialty matcha world. I am actually relatively pessimistic. I probably put it at less than 50% that Matcha can truly live up to its full potential in living up to the expectations of what will be a very new culture willing to pay to support this entire industry of farmers and producers doing very interesting things. And it's very clear where the growth is and where the decline is in amongst these markets.

Zongjun · 54:41

And the infrastructure, the wholesale infrastructure, the way contracts are set up, who can buy tea at auction versus who cannot buy tea at auction, the fact that all of the old customers get prioritized before the new customers literally leaves everyone else trying to do interesting things and develop this new specialty market.

Zongjun · 55:00

Just like we've seen in 3rd wave coffee or natural wine or all of these other movements with the scraps. We have worked so hard trying to find an interesting tencha supply. And I'm a little bit embarrassed, but like 80% of our portfolio that we're about to release, they're all Yabukita. We can't even showcase more interesting cultivars. I mean, like we haven't been venturing into a lot of regions in Japan for some of the regions we end up like venture into, it's actually pretty desperate.

Zongjun · 55:31

Like it's plots and plots and plots of Yabukita. Like there's no specialty living in those regions. I mean, like it's great that those regions exist. I mean, they're, they're the backbones of, you know, we still have matcha on the shelf for a lot of places.

Zongjun · 55:48

But on the other hand, the reality is there's no specialty living in those places. There's no culture, there's no difference. There's very standardized, clean, uniform like practices living in those places and they're all the same. And the most interesting stuff is either spoken for by a brand that's been around much longer than a lot of the new entrants or those farmers that are doing these interesting things. We've heard that a lot of the traditional Uji Matcha farmers that have these ancient wholesale relationship with these blend houses, you know, need to commit way far north of 50% of their volume to go into

Zongjun · 56:26

these blended products and it leaves nothing leftover for the new entrants doing interesting things. I understand that everyone's coming in and it makes sense that old clients are prioritized. But all of the resources and infrastructure are helping and pointed in a direction of a declining consumer base.

Zongjun · 56:45

And it is at the expense of cost and at the expense of availability for what could be a blossoming market with people that have the references because it's being able to be truly labeled honestly as single origin product or a single cultivar product. Like a interesting single cultivar, I mean like a Yabukita in Shizuoka is a single region, single cultivar product, but it's not interesting.

Zongjun · 57:14

And if a farmer decided to eradicate all of the Yabukita and Planet Kosher like he or she is going to take the risk that the market doesn't like this product and they are going to not going to make any profit for the upcoming years or they're going to be kicked out from the current procurement system by all these reach all these existing large procurers in different regions. There is a very large risk for these farmers to undertake or be part of a specialty movement to diversify their portfolio or their the product planning.

Zongjun · 57:48

Yabukita is safe, it's guaranteed profit and doing not doing so is risky and not all farmers have the capability capacity to take such risk. It's a it's a very actually pretty difficult and challenging situation from a farming or farmers level. Especially because it, you know it, it's a 5 to 10 year time horizon before you get yield from anything. So it's a really long term risky bet for not only new cultivar selection, but for a wide variety of these different processing methodologies and anything that can lead to different flavor profile outcomes. I mean, if you move from one to two layers of kanreisha, like who's going to care?

Ryan · 58:34

And if there's a large, I mean, is your wholesaler going to care? Probably not. Does that work for marketing if it really does improve quality, if you're able to have that labeled? Absolutely. And then you have the farmers that, you know, advertise the fact that they do double shading or triple shading, which is even more rare.

Zongjun · 58:53

But you know, those products can reach top dollar just for one more layer from 2:00 to 3:00. So let alone all of the other practices, but we only get to this type of world. People know what they're drinking, which is why it's all about the references. And we are so grateful to everyone who has come before us, all of the matcha brands that have started the single origin, single cultivar movement.

Zongjun · 59:21

And I'm bringing this level of transparency. I'm not going to start naming names because I am afraid I'm going to leave too many people out and it would take way too long. But to everyone in the industry who has started doing this, we are so grateful because it's building the foundations for what can become a very interesting specialty movement and quite honestly, save the Japanese tea industry if ever everyone is focused on serving a literally dying practitioner base.

Zongjun · 59:49

Japan is an aging country. Every year, more and more tea ceremony practitioners die because the majority of the consumer base are old women. That's just the demographic realities of who practices tea ceremony and the products that they buy to support this traditional industry.

Zongjun · 1:00:07

And we really would love to see this blossom in a much more interesting direction. Or even just to stop like already homogenized a culture to become more homogenized. I mean, when a culture dies and when there's no successor of such culture, it will just forever disappear.

Zongjun · 1:00:27

Like even if you look around in in, you know, like if you, you end up visiting the Kanbayashi Matcha Museum in Uji and you look around to all the equipments that used to be used to make tencha. A lot of them are just there for the show. I guess.

Zongjun · 1:00:44

Some of the equipments can actually produce very interesting flavor profiles. And imagine like matcha is still being steamed in wood cases. Like it's it's forever gone. That technique now all of the matcha being steamed using all these steamers either like in trays or either through conveyor belts. And, and when a culture disappear, it would really just disappear like that flavor, that memory of such flavor, that cultural history of such flavor.

Zongjun · 1:01:14

That technique, that trial and error of how to do that well. It would just so into oblivion like no one will ever know. And if someone decided in the future to revive that culture or that technology, it would not be the same.

Zongjun · 1:01:29

It's like people trying to revive more child some dynasty in China like it will not be the same. A continuous culture is so important. Even if it evolved into slightly different forms in the future, there's still a lineage that you can trace back.

Zongjun · 1:01:46

But if that gets cut and that's discontinued, it will just even if someone decided to invent something, the old revive something, the same thing in the future, the same idea in the future, it would actually be a new creation and new imagination and such. And it all comes down to building demand, which means that you have the reference and that you're able to say this indeed, representative of this cultivar, this region, this process, this history, this whatever. Versus like this is ceremonial grade A1 organic Gokumukashi from this blend house Uji Matcha, which literally is just a bunch of buzzwords and doesn't

Zongjun · 1:02:23

tell you anything about the product. What's really in reality is Yabukita, Yabukita, Yabukita, and Yabukita. Nothing wrong with Yabukita. There's some interesting Yabukita certainly being made. That's true. That's true.

Zongjun · 1:02:37

We have some very interesting Yabukita in Korea that doesn't taste like any Yabukita in Japan that ever tasted. So terroir does make a difference. And a lot of the ones in China have a very interesting burnt rubber note.

Zongjun · 1:02:51

It's along with the lower quality ones in Japan I might say. Wow, great news to anyone that loves drinking mezcal. It's. Actually, yeah, the time and place maybe actually can might be a very interesting addition to some mezcal inspired smoky notes and different forms of mixology perhaps.

Ryan · 1:03:12

But the only way you would know that is if you were able to taste the reference. So we are launching and hopefully by the time this has been released, we will have launched the Sanko Reference Library. It has very humble origins and we have some blends that we don't know what they consist of, but we know where they we were grown. We have some Yabukita from Kyoto Prefecture, from Fuchiyama, where we even know the exact recipe of the fertilizer. We have Siamo County.

Ryan · 1:03:43

We have a lot of Yabukita grown in China and some grown in Wazuka, some grown in Kyoto Prefecture, some grown I think somewhere else. Yeah, the, the, the extensive information really vary from samples to samples, A challenging reality that we're facing right now because, you know, not everyone has the same expectation of sharing information to people. But we really hope that will change in the future. And any listeners that have any access and this is where we're really hoping to tap into the community and can be totally transparent the way that we are pricing everything. All reference samples for

Ryan · 1:04:25

tencha will be sold at A3 to 4X mark. So for example, if something is being sold at, you know, $200 a kilo is what we're paying for it. If we multiply that by four, we get 800. And if we turn it into 25 gram samples, it would cost about $20 a bag. So it's, it's not that crazy of a market markup. So that we're doing everything pretty transparently based on what we have paid for and we're going to just apply it into that formula.

Ryan · 1:05:03

We're going to tell you exactly what our margin is. It might sound like a high margin. However, from we're a small business and from a cash flow perspective, we have to sell through 25% of the stock before we can even recoup just the cost of the tea, not including the shipping, the tariffs, the warehousing fee, the repackaging fee, the repackage the package itself.

Ryan · 1:05:27

And then we need to pay extra for the warehouse to have refrigerators and to keep the product cold. So it's a lot of added cost let not including any of the trips to Japan or to Origin and to all of the other samples that we were not able to to purchase or decided not to include.

Zongjun · 1:05:45

Yeah. But really the purpose of such library is purely for education and we are going to try to share as much information as possible to any products that we can find or even back products that we end up getting access to.

Zongjun · 1:06:01

Like one of my very early idea of a brand is called the Bad Tea Company, which the intention was to acquire teas that contains known flaws that we can that that they can serve as a, you know, a piece of reference sample for education for people to learn about the flaw. And we hope we can do the same for all the Tencha samples that we're going to acquire in the future. And we hope that for anyone that end up trusting us can leave the room with, you know, feeling that, you know, you end up knowing a little bit more about tencha or matcha today. Absolutely.

Ryan · 1:06:39

So we're going to do this all with Tencha and it's going to be sort of a living library that exists on our website. All of the products, it's much cheaper for us to centralized warehousing and fulfillment in mainland China.

Ryan · 1:06:52

We've explored a lot of different options, but we're actually importing a lot from Japan to Mainland China. We hope that we'll be able to continue to do that in the future. And I've also found some interesting Chinese tencha as well to make available and hopefully some Korean tencha as well very soon.

Ryan · 1:07:09

So it's a small and very humble list. If you have access to any reference sample of any interesting cultivar from any region that's Tencha, we would be very grateful if you let us purchase about a kilo of it to repackage and to offer into this library.

Ryan · 1:07:27

We don't have a ton of money to invest in inventory, so it will be a relatively small order from us, but we'd actually really love to draw in the community. If you have access to Tezumi tea or handpick tea or to interesting cult, other interesting cultivars, Asahi, Saemidori, Kirari 31, etcetera.

Zongjun · 1:07:47

Different processing styles, different countries. We would love to include it as part of the library. Yeah. And if you do let us, you know, acquire the sample from you and you do allow us, we would love to share, you know, your information on the package or on the as part of the information for people to learn.

Ryan · 1:08:06

You know that you know in the future, you can also acquire tea from you. Anyone can acquire tea from you. And even better, if you're able to supply that 1K on consignment for our own cash flow would be, would we be even more grateful speaking as a small startup that is developing what turns out to be a very, very expensive long matcha mill project?

Ryan · 1:08:31

So that's the Sanko reference library. We're doing a pretty transparent markup of three to 4X and it's also a way if you're interested to support us and our company, if you're not buying the mill to help us continue to grow this library and thrive as a company. Our wholesale rates, we also have started a tencha catalog to have much larger volumes, commercial grade volumes of tencha made available to anyone, not just people who own one of our mills.

Ryan · 1:08:59

But if you have an usu or any other milling mechanism, we are compiling this of tencha and those wholesale rates are much lower markup and we give a very transparent markup along with the same level of product detail.

Ryan · 1:09:13

So that's that, that's something that we would like to do this to support the entire industry and hopefully gain enough buying power that we can start and having some leverage to ask for more and more information about the way these products are processed and cultivated. Yeah, yeah.

1:09:28

And that's really our take or our effort to try to make contribution about, you know, the theme of today's episode. Reference really matters. Context really matters. And everything can only be credible if you know exactly what you are consuming and if you can know that as a fact, and if you can turn that into, you know, not just experience but knowledge. Absolutely turn experiences into knowledge. I can't think of a better way of putting that. And also for the for the Sanko Tencha reference library, we do not promise quality and we do not, I mean, it's not going to poison you.

1:10:08

Everything has gone through very, you know, rigid manufacturing processes and quality checks. However, it the reference samples for a reason. It's not a curated list. And the only reason why we might choose not to include something is because we don't trust we are sourcing it from. But we actually think it's very important that there's a wide range of quality and not everything delivers through in the cup from a sensory perspective. So this is not a curated list.

1:10:37

This is not a reflection of our preferences, and it's not a reflection of our standards. We just want to make things available so that everyone can make up their own mind. Yeah. I I totally agree and also like as AI would say a disclaimer or warning.

1:10:54

Like if you also have a sensitive sensitive stomach like I do, I strongly recommend you not to drink the tencha directly or drink a very small amount of tencha directly. It can be very, very pungent to your digestive system.

1:11:11

Or you might have a very iron stomach like I do and doesn't bother me at all. But the work that these chashi's are doing really is. Mad mad respect, mad respect. It's very difficult to consume Mark Quantity's tencha, although I've heard a lot of people that actually just enjoy drinking tencha's green tea, which is a little weird to me.

1:11:35

Actually. To be totally honest, I don't like the taste of any tencha I've ever had, no matter the quality. It is like literally work. I think all tencha tastes extremely weird green tea to me, but I kind of grew up with like Chinese and and Japanese and Korean normal green teas and tencha just tastes so different to me that I can't square that. I don't like it personally.

1:12:03

I can tell the difference between what Japanese people would consider a high and low quality 1 and I'm slowly learning. OK, this is the taste of the tencha. This is the taste of the matcha after it's milled. I'm very much a novice at that.

1:12:16

But until you have agency over milling, you just can't learn more. So when until I get my own mill at home, it's when I can really accelerate that learning journey. But for anyone who hasn't had a lot of tencha, I wouldn't buy it with the expectations of enjoying its taste, Especially if you're someone that's really into sencha or gyokuro or any other type of green tea out there. It's not a finished product.

1:12:41

It's considered a crude product actually. Actually that's, I would say the first very interesting piece of experience that you can learn from. You know, having tencha or having to taste tencha is the transformation of flavor profile from tencha to matcha is enormous. It's magical.

1:12:59

It's very interesting. Yeah, 'cause what you're really tasting is like what is the when you taste the tencha, what's happening when you're trying that is matcha. OK, let's literally explode the surface area of this leaf and drink the whole leaf. And it's so fine that we, the naked eye, cannot distinguish between those two particles.

1:13:21

And that's where the magic of matcha is. Yeah. And also a lot of these fragrance components inside, inside the tencha is going to the flavor intensity will be magnified 10X20X. And from a human sensory perspective, when you really increase the concentration of the certain chemicals, the the taste from a human perception level is not linear.

1:13:47

Like if you increase a compound that make you feel like you're tasting rose, it's not going to taste more rosy. If you increase the concentration of that compound by 10X or 20X, it's going to taste completely different.

1:14:02

It's going to turn into other, you know, flavor notes or flavor note of notes to you. So not only are you, you're really just fundamentally changing extraction when you mill a tea that finely. That's I really actually find it at no surprise that really doesn't taste that great in its crude format and that all of those flavors are really locked up in those leaves still tastes interesting.

1:14:26

And you can definitely tell the difference between a high and low quality one. For those of you who've never had it tastes like a really heavy body, really full bodied green tea, and there's some missing flavors. It's like you take a really well crafted, like let's say kabusecha or gyokuro, and you just cut, cut out certain parts of the flavor profile and it's like it looks like you're seeing a picture, but you can't see the full picture.

1:14:55

And like there's some pieces of someone's face are missing and their torsos missing and like you can't see what makes them human. It's like the same thing with the tea. They're these weird voids from the fact of the way tencha is processed and the fact that it's not rolled that don't get filled.

1:15:14

And it just ends up tasting to me kind of imbalanced and awkward. But it's really just data. This is what it tastes like before it goes through that. And it's this data that determines wholesale prices. It's this data that every single matcha, all, all the base material that creates these products are traded as tencha.

1:15:33

And that's why it's so important that we all have these references as we move into a world of matcha companies being companies that are basically marketing companies that are repackaging someone else's product into becoming the matcha companies of the future, which actually play a hand in that products creation as fresh milling or maybe people do more shiage processing in in the future.

1:15:58

And what it means to be let's say like a coffee company before like you see all all these micro roasteries or what it meant to be like a beer company before all of these microbreweries existed everywhere. We are at the early phases of the infrastructure being available for the actual meaning of what it is in the domain of agency to be a matcha company is about to change pretty fundamentally in the next 10 years. And it's so important we all have the references. Yeah, absolutely agreed.

1:16:30

And you know, for a lot of these, you know, people, these experts or these Tashi's in Japan, they do have the capability to establish the linkage of what a tencha taste like versus what the matcha coming from that tencha it's going to taste like. So I think that this will be a very interesting capability to kind of unlocked to more people to, to, to have the capable, not capability, but potential or opportunity to, to, to acquire such talent.

1:17:01

And I think that's part of the interesting things that this whole new infrastructure can unlock that so many talents from different corners world can end up having the opportunity to learn such things that has been so sheltered by so very few people in Japan because of the current system, because of history, because of the culture, because of access to information, because of access to, you know, actually play with or experience or experiment those things information and turn those information into true knowledge.

1:17:35

And I think, you know, like this is very important and very critical that we have a library out there for people to experiment with, you know, along with this mill that we are developing really in combination unlocks a lot of potentiality and lot of imagination that that, that, that that I am very, very looking forward to. Matcha culture doesn't have to stop and start in Japan, and it this is really much where like the principles behind just diversity and inclusion come in.

1:18:10

I really fundamentally almost all of the matcha that is produced in Japan is controlled by the pallets of old Japanese men. And I fundamentally do not believe that they can truly understand the flavor preferences of a millennial in Vietnam or in Thailand or of an old person from the West Coast of the United States or of like a teenager in Saudi Arabia. And these are vastly different consumer cohorts that probably a very different preferences are for very different flavored products and this type of tea culture and and should live outside of this Japanese system in the same way that we see specialty coffee roasters all

1:18:53

over the world doing interesting things, crafting things for the people who are actually doing the consumption. Why do we have to project on and tell from a top down perspective to all of these people in every corner of the earth that this is high quality matcha? What if we invert that question?

1:19:12

What flavor profiles might these people like in this market versus that market versus the other market? And how can we improve it for them based on the way that they're using the matcha? We learned from former guests who was based in Mexico that matcha, that matcha lemonades were huge. Like that is one of the things as dominating cafe menus, that's something you just don't see that often in other places. But there's some matcha.

1:19:40

It's probably very well optimized to take that level of acidity. And there's very few people who are actually probably thinking about it, which is why giving this domain, this agency, these abilities, these are reference standards, this knowledge on this level of primary experience to people, to a much wider diverse group of people can lead to an interesting and dynamic future, not just a future.

Zongjun · 1:20:03

It's constantly looking backwards asking about how did we do this a few 100 years ago. Yeah, I, I absolutely agree for, for the current status quo. I mean, there's a lot of restrictions or obstacles that have been blocking people from doing so, which is I guess a excuse for, for the current movement. But we really hope that in the future that these potentials, opportunities can be unlocked because we have more access to processings, we have more access to information, and we have more access to ways that can verify some of the imaginations or some of the interpretations that we have for the preference that we have grown.

Zongjun · 1:20:48

Human preferences, perceptions are widely different across the world because of their formative experience. People eat differently, people drink differently, people like things differently. And we hope that the future flavors of matcha is not being dictated by a very few then lifts on one corner of the world because of historical and legacy reasons. I mean, like still huge respects to all those old Japanese men, quote UN quote, that has been continuously practicing this art to these states.

Zongjun · 1:21:21

Without them, we're not going to have any much to consume. But moving to the future, a lot of these imaginations, a lot of these new creativities, we do see that the blossoming creations that can be unlocked if we offer them tools and if we offer them knowledge and if we offer them opportunities.

Ryan · 1:21:40

Well said. It all comes down and it's all about the references. And without that, what it really is is its dependence. Its dependence that we need to be told what's good and what we should like, which is not a rich or interesting world at all. Everyone should be able to form their own judgments and not be dependent on others.

Ryan · 1:22:02

Consumers, brand owners, people all throughout, up and down the matcha supply chain, the matcha industry. And the only way to do that is to actually understand through references what is actually driving product distinctions and what is good, what should be valued, what should be valued in different ways at different time by different people in different circumstances. And, and really capturing all of that complexity versus boiling it down into a single label or a single term. It's so important.

Ryan · 1:22:33

And so that, one, we don't have the sea of misinformation which we currently have. And two, that people's creativity can be expressed, which can only be done through knowledge. So we are very firmly against a blanket statement of we all should just enjoy the tea because then we are all complicit in the problem.

Ryan · 1:22:53

And I think enjoying tea is a beautiful thing, but I think there's a time and place for it. I certainly are not constantly thinking about all of these labels, but it absolutely cannot be at the expense of not learning or not being capable of learning, both from a knowledge and availability perspective with these references. Actually.

Zongjun · 1:23:13

But Ryan, I have a partial difference to to your claim. I think enjoying some product is so important. I would love to see someone in the future can create a product that I would enjoy more. And for them to do so, they need to have the capacity, the agency to be able to make a product or tweak a product that they think will taste will be more suitable to my preference. And I will see that future happening at some point of of the days in the future.

Ryan · 1:23:42

Maybe we'll even be AI. Maybe if you have a custom blend that you know is able to learn all the flavor attributes and characteristics of different cultivars in different regions, and the Super memory can live and create a blended product that's personalized blend. You know, we just don't know what the future holds. But still, you need to have ground truth. You cannot have ground truth without references. So we're a very long way away from that world, but we're getting closer and closer every day, and we're very grateful to everyone who came before us.

Ryan · 1:24:15

I think it's a great place to stop. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing this front. If you have access to Tencha that we would like to contribute to the library, we'd be very grateful. Please do reach out so that we can continue to let that library grow.

Zongjun · 1:24:29

And if you're interested in tasting Tencha, please check out our website sankomatcha.com. It should be up relatively soon. Very humble origins. I can't say that we have the most interesting selection, but we need to start somewhere.

Zongjun · 1:24:43

And it is not a reflection any level of curation. We just want to make things available and we will tell you everything that we know about that product and be very transparent about that product's price. That's our small way of trying to help craft a solution to a lot of the things that we're complaining about on this episode. So on the hierarchy of helpful and hopefully we have not only identified the problem, but can help provide a solution, which is very important to us.

Ryan · 1:25:10

Otherwise we're just a bunch of complainers. We don't want to be either. So thank you so much for listening and we'll see you on the next one. Take care. See you in the future.