Korean Matcha (Malcha)

Ryan · 0:05

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan and this is Zongjun Li 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.

Zongjun · 0:20

So in the past week, we've been traveling in Korea sourcing matcha. And as we discussed in our last episode, you know, globalized cultivation and manufacturing of matcha is it's also like a very important part of this coming globalization of matcha in different areas of the world.

Ryan · 0:36

Absolutely. I mean, if you do the math, if you want there to be enough matcha in the world for these people have the ability to try for the first time and especially at a reasonable price point. The amount of production that comes out of Japan around, you know, 4 to 4 1/2 thousand tons I'm just isn't enough to meet global demand, especially with the matcha shortage.

Ryan · 0:58

But even before the matcha shortage, places like South Korea and like China have been very important to the matcha economy, creating products that were not necessarily products of origin or products of provenance. Like a lot of places aren't specifically calling their thing Korean matcha or Chinese matcha. But if you go to a bubble tea store or if you get a matcha tiramisu or a matcha ice cream and there's a non negligible chance that it's coming from one of those places, kind of a much, much more commodity type matcha product. And it's been very important.

Zongjun · 1:31

But we've been hearing that the quality has gotten a lot better in South Korea. And so we had the opportunity to come here for an independent reason. We were like, oh whoa, we're going to be here anyway. Let's go see what we can find. Yeah, that's right.

Ryan · 1:44

So my dad was hosting this art exhibition of some of his new artworks in Busan, so he invited us to come over to Korea. For those of you that don't know, Sam comes from an art family. Both his parents are artists and his dad's also art professor, part of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art. So Sam grew up within those walls of this art community in China.

Zongjun · 2:10

Yeah, Well, we certainly have different focuses. I'm much more into tea than my parents. But, you know, it's it's nice to be back. I was in Korea nine years ago. That was the last time I was here for tea. For tea. Yeah, exactly. So back in the Penn State Tea Institute, we host this Korean tea culture exhibition and we invited three Korean tea experts into to visit Penn State and host a week long lecture about Korean tea.

Zongjun · 2:39

And they invited us back to Korea. And I was leading a group of students traveling across Korea from, you know, all of the tea producing areas, mainly concentrating in GD sign, which is southern part of the Korean Peninsula. And that's actually I think the only concentrated tea production area on the continental Korean part. The other part is Jeju Island.

Ryan · 3:02

Yeah, well, there's Boseong too, but that wasn't set up in until the Japanese occupation during colonial periods. And that's actually where a lot of matcha comes from. And actually it's a lot of Yabukita apparently is in Boseong, but it's a very new, it's a, it's an artifact of colonialism, which we'll talk a little bit about as well because you can't bring that out of the the Korean history.

Zongjun · 3:24

Actually, it's a pretty interesting negative side. You know, in the Japanese Fine Arts and traditions and crafts, we tend to like give so much respect to the producers and the culture behind them, but we also cannot ignore that it was that culture and those people and these traditions that were also part of a really brutal imperial colonialist culture.

Ryan · 3:48

Yeah. I have, I'm half Korean and my both of my grandparents, actually three out of my 4 grandparents were not native English speakers. I'm half Korean, 1/4 Austrian and a quarter like Pennsylvanian, Pennsylvania Quaker.

Ryan · 4:01

But I remember very young my Korean grandparents would come to our home and they would stay for like a week and they'd always cook breakfast for me before school. So I'd go downstairs and they're very Christian like a lot of Korean people are. So we had to pray before they would cook breakfast. And, you know, as a 5 year old, you're a little impatient. And then after the prayer, it was not uncommon actually for them to talk about their experience in Korea. And I have a very vivid memory of them talking about how much they hated the Japanese and how they buried people alive with you were a school child growing

Ryan · 4:36

up in Korea during the colonial imperious imperial era was controlled by the Japanese. You weren't allowed to think in Korea. So in the schools, everything was taught in Japanese and you couldn't think in Korea. And they buried people alive. They did some horrible practices and they didn't treat the Chinese much better.

Zongjun · 4:54

My very similar experience with me and my grandma. She grew up in the Hunan province, which at the time was also occupied by the Japanese and a very similar stories. If you talk to anyone from that generation and they have very different perception about Japan and Japanese culture, but the IT actually a pretty important part for the legacy of tea in East Asia to the only colonial colony that they treated relatively nicely and was in Taiwan. And to this day, the Taiwanese, Japanese respect for each other is still extremely strong.

Zongjun · 5:28

But they said if anyone's ever heard of Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan, the Japanese brought Assam tea from India to Sun Moon Lake in Taiwan to create black tea for export. So it's very similar type of colonial system that you saw the Western superpowers in that similar era set up for forms of economic extraction. And very interestingly, Sun Moon Lake was abandoned for many, many, many years.

Zongjun · 5:52

And it's one of the few places where you can find wild tea. So the tea is basically back into the forest and it's it's allowed to naturally propagate, but what we would call zairai in Japanese tea or in Japanese matcha, leading to some really interesting high quality tea coming out of that region as well. But the Boseong, So the three main ones are around Jirisan, which includes places like Hadong and Gurye, which is where we were.

Zongjun · 6:16

That tea culture took root the earliest. There's some people that said, I think it was like 50 years after CE after Christ is said to have brought tea seeds there. But apparently that's much more of a myth if you talk to anyone who studies this. Yeah, the the the traceable recorded history of the tea cultivation in Korea was set to be around 900, so close to Tang dynasty China.

Zongjun · 6:43

So arguably the genetic similarities of Korean tea in Jirisan area is more similar to Tang Dynasty tea or what people would drink, you know, like kind of like a long time from being the phoenix cake or the dragon dough, kind of like a powderized tea soup at the time. And later evolved into the Song Dynasty matcha, which is the predecessor of Japanese matcha.

Zongjun · 7:06

Yeah, which was also supposedly consumed there during the Korean equivalent period during the Song dynasty that we've learned. But they did drink like this proto matcha, Song dynasty style tea, and then it was later largely not not consumed during the Joseon dynasty which is the vast majority of recent Korean tea history. Yeah, Korean tea history is very, very strongly tied to Buddhism.

Zongjun · 7:31

And as we know, you know, in modern days, Korean is largely a Christian country. And before this period of time, Korean was largely a Confucian country. And from the court level, there were a lot of prosecutions against the Buddhist monk. So a lot of these monks sought, you know, shelter and went into the mountains along with them were teas. So a lot of these teas in the mountains are you can always almost always found like a temple surrounding by all these interesting, you know, semi-zairai tea fields. Mostly zairai and apparently for the vast majority of like to like last 6-7 hundred years.

Zongjun · 8:11

It's not the type of tea cultivation that we would think of. It's pretty. There's a lot of historical facts that like Korea was not really a tea growing, tea drinking tea appreciating country for the majority of its history until modern days.

Ryan · 8:28

And we'll actually leave a link to a wonderful talk given by a friend of ours who invited to Penn State many times a brother Anthony of the TASE community like a profession. He's a professor and he's famous for publishing a lot of translations of ancient Korean poetry into English.

Ryan · 8:44

But he also wrote some fantastic books about tea. And it's done a lot of effort researching on the different topics and making sure like everything is proper references. Because within Korean tea history in general, it's actually a really interesting story.

Ryan · 8:57

It's not that different from Japan is that after World War 2, the was a really strong political urge and push to create a Korean national identity. And a lot of these people that were pushing a very strong Korean national identity were incredibly anti Japanese, very understandably, because they were brutally oppressed during the colonial period. So that's how the colonization story comes full circle. And they leaned into a lot of myths. And so within modern Korean tea circles, there's a lot of variation, we'll say, within the history, some of which might be more historically accurate than others. But they really intentionally

Ryan · 9:41

tried to make it very Korean and lean into that identity to separate themselves from anything related to Japan or China for that matter, and create sort of their own traditions. And some of which claim or try to borrow some ideas from the past, making it seem like, you know, these traditions were always happening.

Ryan · 10:03

Continuous culture. Yeah, but it's probably more narrative than reality if you talk to anyone who studies this seriously. So matcha, it's a very long way of saying matcha does have really deep roots in Korea, but in a nonlinear way, wasn't a continuous practice.

Ryan · 10:21

So supposedly during the Song dynasty equivalent ruling power in Korea, they were drinking something very similar to the Song Chinese in this proto matcha that you hear everyone talk about. But it wasn't until relatively recently that they started to become a matcha producing country. And a lot of that actually didn't happen until the 1970s. So Jeju Island, which is one of the most famous places for Korean tea production, didn't start growing any tea until around the 1970s.

Ryan · 10:50

And they now they use exclusively Japanese cultivars. And a lot of it was spearheaded by just one guy. But in recent years as well, in the most historical part, where tea took root has taken root literally the longest in the Hadong Jirisan area, where you have all of this tea growing around these temples. And there's a pretty long history of tea being there, allowing allowed to grow wild.

Ryan · 11:13

And this has been processed by monks on and off throughout the centuries. But ten years ago, the government, local government set up a tencha processing facility. It's actually the only one in the entire area that we got to visit.

Zongjun · 11:27

And we had a whole tour of this tencha processing facility in Hadong. I want to talk a little bit about our experience there, Sam. Yeah. So Hadong is a very interesting place and we actually got a very interesting taste of the tea cultivation and manufacturing culture in the area.

Zongjun · 11:45

So the connection, Master Khyom is a very reputable Korean tea masters who lives in Gurye. And through him we experienced the very artisanal part of Korean tea drinking culture and Korean tea ceremony, which is called Darye, the mannerism of tea. And you know, he of course, you know, he's just not focusing on the artisanal part of Korean tea. He's actually went very well connected with many of the more industrial side of Korean tea growing and Korean tea making. And through him we got introduced to some of the larger local tea manufacturing companies and people. And you see this very interesting you kind of comparison not so far away from

Zongjun · 12:30

each other, rows and rows of very, you know, well managed industrialized boutique gardens. And right next to them is this wonderful, magnificent mountain of Jirisan scattered with wild teas, you know, in different sides facades of the forest.

Zongjun · 12:47

So that was very interesting and you know, at the tea facility, a huge facility by the way. So we took a tour inside the venue and the first thing that came to our notice is that most of the machines are Japanese made and they are identical machines that we saw in places like, you know, Yame and Izumo and the scale and the factory layout. So, you know, like he got transferred into the factory, gets dumped into a conveyor belt, and then it gets, you know, processed through different, you know, you know, machineries to get refinement, to get steam, to get cutting, to get roasted, and then finally to

Zongjun · 13:33

be packed. It's almost identical to the factory setups in in Japan, which is very interesting. So there's definitely, definitely some Japanese involvement into the setup of this facility. And there's all this compartmentalization.

Zongjun · 13:47

So you have like the like raw leaf, wet leaf receival and that's like 1 section. And then the next one is the steaming, the drying, the roasting, that's another section. And then another section is all around the milling. Very similar compartmentalization tool. Yeah, very clean factory.

Zongjun · 14:04

It's quite interesting. The only difference is the tea. In the Hadong area they use local cultivar instead of, you know, imported Japanese cultivar, mainly Yabukita in Jeju Island. And in Bosong. And in Bosong, so that that's I think a very interesting part of, you know, matcha making in, in in Hadong or in, in Bosong.

Ryan · 14:26

Arguably, it's a much more local product, pretty interesting if you're using this local cultivar. It's a much more powerful expression, I think, of the land and the history. But just to provide some context, all of this tea that's grown around these temples has been there since the Tang Dynasty.

Ryan · 14:43

And there's some speculation, I think it's yet to be proven, but there's a lot of speculation that that tea around those temples in this area is more close genetically to the tea that was being grown and processed in Tang Dynasty China than any of the Chinese cultivars or wild tea that exists today within modern China.

Ryan · 15:05

Because specifically because that area was not very intentionally producing and cultivating tea. It's a monks, we're on and off processing it, using it for their own consumption as part of their meditation practices, etcetera. But they weren't like selecting very specific trees and deciding I like those flavor characteristics. There was no culture took a root of tea appreciation in the same way that we saw in China.

Zongjun · 15:33

And that led to a lot of genetic drift. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, like you look at the wild teas growing in the mountains and you look at the, you know, very well managed gardens, Rd. by Rd. down the mountainside. You know, in the industrial gardens, they're actually the same tea.

Zongjun · 15:51

There's not a sense of cultivar in the team tea, tea growing, tea agriculture in the Hadong area. Like they don't talk about cultivar. They said this is the local tea and everything is seed propagated. Pretty incredible actually.

Zongjun · 16:05

And actually, this trip gave me a real new whole sense of appreciation for Korean tea, green tea, which is actually always been my favorite. I hope that's not too controversial, but of all of the countries that produce green tea, tea specifically from Jirisan and Hadong Goode has by far been my favorite. It is so pure, especially all the stuff that's hand picked because the artisanal produces, there's about 100 artisanal families and that still produce tea. It's all mountainside.

Zongjun · 16:33

We also met with some of the artisanal producers. They don't use any fertilizer. There's it like these plants are also kind of part of the forest. They naturally seed propagated on these hills. There's tons of canopy cover and other vegetation, no pesticides, no fertilizer.

Zongjun · 16:50

And the taste is just so nutty and sweet and pure and simple and fragrant. It's a if you've never had this type of Korean green tea, it's really worth a try. If you reach out to us, we can give you some recommendations.

Zongjun · 17:05

A lot of it is from farmers that are totally non commercial, like our very good friend who hosts to us doesn't sell tea. They're lucky he'll gift you some. So there's a lot of that. But there are there are some commercial operations that are still very small that kind of allow us to have access in the rest of the world.

Zongjun · 17:22

But it is unlike any type of green tea. And if you juxtapose it with a lot of the tea that's being produced in Japan, it is no comparison in terms of level of how industrial these two types of operations are from both the guarded management and the processing.

Zongjun · 17:41

And you can really taste it in the cup. Yeah, exactly. Tawa in Korea, it's much similar to what we have seen in Yunnan. So that that it's not, you know, it's, it's not a tea garden or not a tea. It's not a vast. It's not a tea garden or you know, you know, not, not a tea forest.

Zongjun · 18:05

It's part of the forest. It is the forest and these teas growing underneath the very, very thick canopy gets naturally blocked away from a lot of sunlight. So they have very slow growth. And it's actually have similar effect to what kanreisha would do to, you know, Japanese tea, you know, in garden management. So these tea naturally has this very interesting, like sweet and like salinity and umami kind of notes that is very unique to to, to, you know, green tea as a category. You don't quite taste that in, in, in Chinese green tea either. You can sometimes taste that in some of the pu-erh tea that also gets harvest in very, very deep

Zongjun · 18:50

forest in Yunnan, but that's also very rare. So very interesting you know and unique taste profile of Korean tea in general if you can source some. Very difficult to source, but it's definitely the preferences in Korea are very different from the Japanese, which care a lot about the expression of umami. It's not the case here.

Zongjun · 19:11

It's much more balanced in, in my opinion. And actually the the top tier Korean green teas, not much of A green teas are kind of shade covered naturally by bamboo. And then when the rain comes down, it goes down through the bamboo leaves and on the bamboo and down into the tea.

Zongjun · 19:27

And I think they call it something like bamboo dew. Is the translation green tea supposedly among that top category? Yeah, arguably this is much more clear expression of terroir. You still have larger scale plantations in this area which provide the raw leaf for this tencha factory. So it's kind of like Korean zairai varietal on Japanese processing equipment.

Zongjun · 19:50

Yeah, yeah, it's a very interesting setup and we didn't have the chance to taste the matcha coming out from the factory, but we did end up being gifted some very nice tencha. Yeah, so we got like, I don't know, 100 grams of tencha.

Zongjun · 20:05

So we're going to mill up when we're back to China. So our prototype mill is under the final step of development and we will have the chance to mill some interesting materials when we get back to Guangzhou. Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan · 20:17

This smell coming off that bag isn't readably unique now after like smelling so much tencha. It is really unique compared to some of the Japanese product that we've smelled. It is really like roasty, toasty. And it has this, at least to my taste, this like butter cookie, like a really high, like if anyone has had like a Walker's butter cookie from the UK or any of the Brittany butter cookies in France has this like butter cookie sweetness to it that is really unique. Yeah, very creamy and the the roasty, toasty notes reminds me a little bit of, you know, what Yame tea generally smells like and they.

Zongjun · 20:57

Do use a very interesting piece of tea processing equipment. So something we haven't talked about on this podcast yet, I think, but we've talked about it in some offline conversations is a very interesting producer in Nagasaki in Japan that's using an experimental piece of equipment that it doesn't just steam the tea, the tencha it steams and which in Chinese tea processing we would call sha qing.

Ryan · 21:26

But this piece of machine combines the two sha qing method into one tumbler, and the tea pass through the channel gets pan fried and steamed at the same time, so it gets the benefit of the two. Yeah, it's really good. And that producer out of Nagasaki that has that is I bought 230g packs of this and my girlfriend and I drank through just one pack in one week. Did you save me some?

Ryan · 21:53

We did not. It was so good. It was so good as usucha as a diluted Americano on ice. No ice milk, no milk. It arguably it's less terroir expressive because you're introducing all these roasty, toasty nuts. But wow, I hope that this method becomes more widespread. Has that very similar taste to that. Like if anyone has had anything from like Hoshino Seichaen down in Yame.

Zongjun · 22:20

Very similar roasty toasty expression. Very good, more process driven. Really takes the tea a long way. Interesting. Well, anyways, they use their equipment in this factory, which is very interesting. Otherwise, everything else was like nearly identical to what we'd seen in Japan. So this tencha that we tasted, if you look at it, it really needs to go through one or two more rounds of shiage, stemming and deveining.

Zongjun · 22:45

I think they do end up milling a lot of these stems. And so we're going to have to do that manually. And there's also quite a large degree of color variation. If any Japanese tea person saw that this tencha, they'd be like, wow, there's, there's not enough color homogeneity, which, you know, I am not super convinced that it's going to make a huge it's obviously going to make a huge difference in the color of the final matcha, but in the taste, it's unclear how much a lack of color homogeneity matters for the vast majority of like good matcha. Yeah, but it also depends, right? Like cuz improper usage of the

Zongjun · 23:25

steaming machine might led to different leaves or different parts of the leaves being steamed or fried into different degrees. So some of the leaves looks a little bit yellower than the others, which might be the costs of not very experienced in using these machines.

Zongjun · 23:43

And some of them were actually black, like clearly burnt burnt. So it might be a processing issue, we don't know. But actually the price to quality rate, it might actually be a good thing because I think a lot of this would get rejected by the Japanese, but if it tastes good, who cares?

Ryan · 23:58

Yeah, that's true. If it's literally 1/3 the price, we're not going to mention the price here, but just for our industry friends that are listening, it's probably about 1/3 of the wholesale price of Second Harvest matcha coming out of some random place in Kyoto Prefecture.

Ryan · 24:16

Or Kagoshima. Or or maybe like some of the, the stuff coming out of Kagoshima that's second flush, you know, it's maybe not 1/3 of that respect. It's it's cheap and there might be a fantastic source of value for people, especially B to B. It has a very interesting story.

Zongjun · 24:34

It's very single origin. It's like these really local plant genetics that have been here for a very, very, very long time, deep historical precedent, way longer history actually from a plant genetics perspective than any of the zairai fields that exist in Japan. Korea had tea introduced to it in a way that it took root about 300 years earlier than zairai around these around these temples in this area.

Zongjun · 25:04

But it's it's, it's, it has a really cool stick. It's not a story about matcha from end to end, but it is a story about tea from end to end and tea being constantly adapted from something that Buddhist monks were using to now like feeding this global matcha demand of of what people want.

Zongjun · 25:25

These plants too are playing into that story, which is which is pretty interesting using Japanese equipment like this. What we tasted what we have this bag of tencha. This is matcha like it like you cannot call this fake just because it was grown in Korea. This is actually arguably much better than the super ridiculously fertilized places that we see in Japan where they have to spray tons of pesticides. Yeah, totally agree.

Zongjun · 25:51

Yeah, for sure. And this is a story that will continue to evolve and be told by many's in the future for the Hadong designated area. And we also had the chance to try some of the matcha coming from Jeju Island. Ryan, you want to share a little bit more about, you know, this tea? Yeah.

Ryan · 26:07

So we we tried 2. So the one that we have in front of us is from probably the most famous Jeju Island matcha producer called Osulloc. Excuse me if I mispronounce that. You pronounce that right. I think so I. Think so. I have a horrible pronouncing, pronouncing, horrible pronouncing things. It's from Jeju Island.

Ryan · 26:27

Osulloc is the oldest matcha producer in Jeju Island. They were the first. And they're famous for volcanic soil. So it's actually when they talk about the the conditions for growing this tea in Jeju sounds very similar to what you hear out of Kagoshima and this very volcanic soil story. And, you know, it's not very well milled, but the taste is pretty good.

Ryan · 26:51

Yeah. Very, very, very. Unique. So supposedly so. So it's, you know, different than, you know, tea coming out from, you know, Hadong. In Jeju Island, not only the equipments are Japanese, the cultivar is also Japanese. It's Yabukita, but it doesn't quite taste like the Yabukita that I had in Japan that was coming out from Japan, doesn't have that very green vegetables at all. Instead you are getting tons of floral notes, some very interesting tropical of fruity notes like some kind of like like green mango skin or like lemon zest, lime zest. And the bitterness is not very strong. The stringency is not very

Ryan · 27:32

strong. And I would say that it's actually just about as good as average in more industrial style Japanese matcha. I've had way worse. Yeah, although you know, I I don't quite taste any umami from this matcha. It's not umami driven at odd actually. And the powder is also slightly coarser than some of the tea that we have tried from Japan.

Ryan · 27:56

Yeah. So it might just literally be a milling issue. I bet if this was fresh milled and we put it to another round of D stemming deveining this can be really really good. Yeah, it has a lot of potentials. And probably priced much cheaper than what's at it coming out of Japan given the craziness that's happening in that market. It's just pretty, pretty cool.

Ryan · 28:15

Yeah, but from this trip we learned actually surprisingly little about Jeju Island tea. So we're thinking about setting another trip to go to Jeju Island and really learn what's going on right there. Yeah, we need, we need to do that for sure. So we'll probably do that within like, I don't know, hopefully the next 6 to 8 months because it's a really interesting very promising from everything that we've tasted. And I've tasted this tea now three different ways. We bought some because I really wanted to prepare it while we were controlling all of the variables, and so we did. Very standard usucha recipe

Ryan · 28:49

just now. And that's what Sam was describing, the taste. I also had this prepared by them as a nice americano in one of their cafes, and I was shocked. I was expecting something bitter and astringent and awful, but it wasn't at all. It was the bitterness.

Ryan · 29:03

It was even less bitter than this and it was just really pleasant, really nice Matcha Americano. It has still had a lot of fragrance, had some natural sweetness, had a little bitterness of an astringency to kind of round everything out and make it balance.

Ryan · 29:16

And then we also had this in a bingsu. I mean that shaved ice format. There was a syrup and honestly, as an ingredient in a sweet, wow, holy smokes it's good. Yeah, this Korean tea or Korean matcha in general, I feel it's, it's more tea like you can actually taste, you know, it tastes more similar to green tea than to matcha as its own cat.

Zongjun · 29:40

I I the way I would characterize what what you're saying is that it's less umami. I think. You have this weird umami distortion, Haiyan that really only exists in Japan. And it's like remove that distortion and do some rebalancing.

Zongjun · 29:54

And that's more similar to what the flavor? Yeah, that's a good way to summarizing it. It's not umami at all. A little bit. It's a little. Bit it's good, it's good. I I like it actually. My suspicion is, although we don't know this for sure, is that the fertilization practices are much more reasonable in places like Jeju.

Ryan · 30:13

I think largely too because they want to cater towards an organic market. We had another one at a different cafe that was even better than this one. It was much paler and the cafe is called BBD Dong. Fantastic cafe. If you're ever in Busan, it's way up on the hill and has a beautiful view.

Ryan · 30:30

And for about 10 bucks you can get this really nice Jeju matcha. And then we also went to a very random place that we walked into that had two Ishiusu, the make of the Ishiusu or something like I'd never seen before. They're not full size, but they're larger than the really small hand ones, but they're smaller than the quote UN quote 1 foot 30 centimeter diameter well.

Ryan · 30:51

So I took a closer look to the plaque of the manufacturer. Zhejiang. That's Chinese, yeah. That's Chinese made Ishiusu, or at least the motor is Chinese made. It's not designed to look nice though, it's just a glass box and a motor.

Ryan · 31:06

Like you can see the motor and the manufacturing plates of the motor on top. Actually delightfully scrappy. But we asked them if they and they know all the matcha in the house which I thought was really interesting. So we ordered 1 and I asked them where their tea came from and they said from Japan. But we tasted it and I'm like 99% sure that they are not using tencha and they're not doing any de stemming or deveining. And there were really large chunks of stuff. It was a very chalky texture.

Ryan · 31:38

Chalk, actually. Chalk might be finer these pieces, yeah. Boulders. Like these very fibrous pieces, probably very good for my gut, a lot of fiber. But yeah, it was really. Bad. Yeah, it was not. Good. It tasted like fresh milled extremely old sencha that they bought very cheap that was not milled very well. Yum.

Zongjun · 32:01

So interesting spectrum that exists here in Korea and some cafes do also serve Japanese matcha. We also learned some very interesting gossip in Hadong that they were telling us all of their export countries. Japan was one of their export countries.

Zongjun · 32:19

I. Wonder why they are? They are part of this global, you know, matcha laundry scheme that we have been seeing between Japan and China. Highly doubt that that's being labeled as a Korean product. One more candidate for UGT. By the way, we're doing we're still deep deep deep in this UGT rabbit, but I'll share some statistics is that watch, I'll show a personal anecdote.

Zongjun · 32:45

It's basically impossible to source tea that's actually from Uji grown tencha at the moment unless you have really long standing established relationships with one of 35 farmers. That's how many farmers there are, and they produce about 70 tons of tencha a year.

Zongjun · 33:01

But you compare that to the amount of tencha that can be legally sold as Uji matcha by the trademark definition, which is tea coming from anywhere in Kyoto Prefecture, Nara, Shiga or Mie. So long as that the shiage processing is done in anywhere in Kyoto Prefecture.

Zongjun · 33:20

Uji itself contributes about 1 to 2% of the material that can be legally labeled as Uji matcha, and it's quite irritating actually. I'm not going to reveal who we're sourcing from for many reasons, but one of them is so that I can criticize where we're doing it for a bunch of people, but we're trying to get all this information about like, you know, what are your fertilizing practices, how long is it shaded, how is it processed, etcetera, etcetera.

Zongjun · 33:50

And the quote that we got did not come from Uji, from a actually much less well known area in Kyoto Prefecture that produces tencha. And they wrote on the invoice Uji matcha, but in the e-mail detail they gave all the detail actually what like sub region that it came from and and you know, it's obvious why they're writing that.

Zongjun · 34:10

Yeah, the concept of, you know, geolocations in Asia, I feel like it's quite different, you know, than the Western definition of what a geolabel should be for a product. We saw the same thing in Korea too. Like Hadong tea. The whole GD sign tea producing region actually covers places like Hadong Huage and Gude, but everyone just called their tea huddle.

Zongjun · 34:37

Yeah, even though, you know, tea can be from other regions in the southern part of the mountain. It's like one name gets very famous and it's just easier to bucket everything in. That, yeah, exactly. And you saw that in in Yunnan as well, you know, Yiwu tea in Yunnan.

Zongjun · 34:52

But you know, Yiwu actually contains all the regions around little town. The town was actually the trading center of all of the tea coming from all the nearby areas like Wang Gong, like Mahe. But actually to a very long period of time. In Yiwu, they don't actually produce any tea. Everything was from the surrounding region, but they just got compiled into one location. I guess you see that too in Fujian too. If you look at like Tongmu Village, which is famous for producing Lapsang Souchong, right? The vast majority of the Lapsang Souchong in the world is not coming from Tongmu Village.

Zongjun · 35:28

Yeah, it's a pretty interesting story. Foreigners are not even allowed to enter Tongmu Village. It's one of the few places in China that you not only you need extremely special permission, but for. Foreigners, you need you need a personal invitation coming from a Tongmu village resident to be able to go to the village.

Zongjun · 35:48

So it's a very special opportunity for people, and we have certain interesting stories even from Korean tea friends who, like, sit right outside the village trying to get an invitation to go inside. It's so famous. For those of you that don't know, Lapsang Souchong was a type of fully oxidized tea. So we call it black tea in English, and in China or in Asia we call it red tea.

Zongjun · 36:09

But the good stuff is Pinewood smoked. So it's that very smoky black tea that is now known in the West as Lapsang Souchong. Yeah, and historically, this tea was largely consumed by the European monarchs. They were a very large portion of them, worse, specifically commissioned by the monarchs back in Europe.

Zongjun · 36:31

Now it's a tea that can be enjoyed by our commoners. And produced outside of Tongmu Village as well. But still, I mean people if you buy any random Lapsang Souchong, people are going to mention the words Tongmu Village definitely does not come from that area proper.

Ryan · 36:44

So I mean putting it into further context. Interesting resonance with Uji. Yeah, it's actually makes the Uji phenomenon a lot more forgivable. And I think what happens is, is that a lot of us Westerners get confused when we go in to start doing sourcing because especially if you're not going directly to the source, if you're buying from the middleman, which is what a lot more people do, you get very confused about.

Ryan · 37:10

Like, is it Uji? Like, I'm being told it's Uji. I'm being told it can be labeled as Ujicha from all of these experts in this respect around a products. Provenance in origin is nonexistent by a lot of these tea circles. Not saying they don't respect the tea, but they don't respect the teas provenance.

Zongjun · 37:29

The idea of provenance in origin is much more old world traditional, where the selling was happening, the blending was happening, etcetera. Yeah. It's also about perspective, right? Because like, as a consumer like us, we care about that.

Zongjun · 37:45

But you know, as a tea farmer or manufacturer or procure, you know, they, they, this, these labels doesn't serve anything, you know, interesting or valuable for them. So it's by the end of the day, it's really what do you care about? Right, Back to our old topic.

Ryan · 38:00

Yeah, and if you really care, you need to do a lot more digging to really confirm. Is my tea coming from where we think it's coming from? Because it's you have all of these definitions. I mean, Ujicha is, legally speaking, it's a trademark. It's not even a GI protected status, which has very specific rules about like process and provenance. But it's also an idea, right?

Ryan · 38:24

The idea of uji matcha in a consumers mind. And you know, I would say that the Japanese in general have done a very good job making people believe that when they're drinking uji cha uji matcha that it is coming from uji.

Ryan · 38:38

But that's not true. And then you have all the historical precedent, which is a really interesting, much more complicated story than I ever imagined, which is what that episode's going to be about. And it's also a style, a processing style. It's a flavor.

Zongjun · 38:51

And A flavor style like a. Blend flavor style really complicated when you view this from different angles, like if we put ourselves caring about different things, if we put ourselves in the feeding farmer for the blender or historian or someone from the past or from a consumer that's trying to learn about it's a specialty product. You can define and hash judgment on this practice of what I'll call miss objectively mislabeling Ujicha. If from a purely provenance perspective, you can pass different types of judgment.

Zongjun · 39:22

It's like a really fascinating story. Yeah, a lot of facades. But looping back around a Korean matcha, It's actually incredibly new here. The vast majority of Korean modern matcha production we were asking some industry veterans here didn't really start happening until around the 1990s and it growing in those three main areas in Hadong in Boseong, former colonial era area set up by the Japanese, mainly Japanese cultivars and then starting in the 1970s in Jeju so. It's interesting.

Zongjun · 39:59

It's interesting, I think that you know how do I frame this Matcha is also getting. Very popular within Korea too, like we've been seeing, you know, matcha being served in a lot of these cafes in Korea. And as we have known and personally experienced, we've been coming to Korea in the past decade. Korea was largely a coffee drinking country, yes. Very still is.

Zongjun · 40:26

Still is in modern days. And I think, like, matcha is really helping, you know, Korea to kind of form a homecoming of tea again into the modern generation of, you know, drinking beverages. It might actually just be matcha that helps save the Korean tea industry by getting people interested in tea in general and then discover that Korea itself has this interesting long rich history of tea and actually have a very interesting story. The first time I came to Korea, our friend who basically spent a lot of time growing up around Buddhist monasteries deep within the hills of the area around Hadong and Jirisan, that mountain range, mountain area,

Zongjun · 41:09

and he took me to a temple where he is a very good friend. We got to visit the head monk and they have all this tea growing around the temple that's been there for very, very, very long time. This is one of the temples that it's existed and has all this wild tea growing around it.

Ryan · 41:25

Like we mentioned before, that was brought in during the Tang Dynasty. Yeah, he he brought me there too. I believe that's Huangza, right? Yes. Beautiful, beautiful temple and very nice tea cultivation managed by the monks.

Ryan · 41:37

Well, sort of, sort of. So that's the interesting story. Not managed, but the harvest. Like no, not anymore. So when I went, I went, I think here's after you did. I went in 2022 for the first time there with Hyoem and we talked to the monk and I asked him do they pick and grow the tea? And he said, not anymore.

Ryan · 41:59

Really. Why they all, they all love coffee. There is very little interest among the young monks to like process and pick and process this tea. And it's interesting. So we had a tea session with that with the head monk for about an hour. And I believe we drank the tea that our friend made. And then the next thing that we drank is he Ord a very nice pour over.

Ryan · 42:24

He was telling me all about the origins of these beans and they were roasted by some local guy growing them fresh and we were drinking them out of Korean tea cups. That's hilarious. Oh, here I am. Roast coffees too. It's a very deep coffee culture here. Yeah.

Zongjun · 42:42

Oh wow. Very sad. Yeah, it's a little sad. Anyways, back to your story. Why? No, it's that's the story. And but I mean, full circle is that just like in in Japan, which is actually coffee is what's cool. So it's the majority of young people want to drink and consume. Having the pendulum swing back to having people, you know, discover matcha in all of these new and interesting formats here will get people interested in tea and then realize that, oh, wow, Korea's been producing tea for a long time. Oh, we have this really interesting production that's going on in Jeju or Boseong and in the Hadong area and discover these wonderful products that

Zongjun · 43:19

taste really different than anything else in the rest of the world. It's exactly the same type of phenomenon that can happen within Japanese tea as well. Young people aren't interested in tea. They're not interested in matcha or tea ceremony in general or and look at sencha, gyokuro, kabusecha.

Zongjun · 43:36

All of these things are in a weird form of structural decline. Especially all these Japanese farmers switch from like let's say sencha production to tencha production to feed the global demand. We have even less supply of loose leaf tea to feed Japanese own culture. And it makes sense they're responding to market demands. No one wants to buy the sencha.

Zongjun · 43:56

Why are you making more sencha than anyone wants to drink? But if people get into tea, meet some gateway and matcha is a very easy gateway. And if Japanese people start finding matcha cool, maybe they'll start finding sencha cool again or gyokuro cool again.

Zongjun · 44:12

And then it's a much more interesting thriving market. Like matcha is not a it is a large class of thing that someone could be interested in, but people aren't static either. And it actually can give a whole gift to these very traditional arts and industries, some that we see.

Zongjun · 44:30

It's helping the tea industry as a whole by the end of the day, you know, like for any gardens that can find matcha, they can form other teas. It's really depends on the market dynamic. And, you know, it also encourages farmers to, you know, continue to do farming practices in all these areas. Both Japan and Korea are aging populations. There are less and less people wanted to do agriculture, especially so in in Japan, right? Like it's not only a matcha shortage that we are seeing right now.

Zongjun · 45:01

There's a rice shortage, there's a vegetable shortage. There are a lot of, you know, shortages that's happening in these areas and, you know, making a farming practice cool, making, you know, a farming practice profitable is really the ultimate, I think, impetus for, you know, the next generation to continued this wonderful practice.

Ryan · 45:22

And actually, people underestimate the importance of governments and these types of effort. If you want to read some really interesting literature and some comparison within Japanese crops, you should read about the rice shortage. Yeah, there there's a right now a rice shortage in Japan and it's a little unprecedented, but they've even loosened up the tariffs and restrictions of bringing in American rice or Korean rice to help make up for the deficit. But it's a really interesting case of government controlled government control and government policy and incentives that have led to the system

Ryan · 45:57

where they don't produce enough rice and the price has gone up a lot. And if you really dig deep into the way the government and the Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture and all of these tea cooperatives look and the cooperative system and who owns the tea processing facilities, the government can actually really make or break these industries. And actually even here in Korea, the potential factory that we visited in Hadong is government owned. It's.

Ryan · 46:27

Arguably more collectivized in in Korea. Yeah, and it's with the explicit purpose of propping up the local economy, having a place for for for tea farmers to sell their tea and then get processed to bring local jobs for this factory. And it's also a way of preserving tea culture there, making sure that there's places to sell all of this team. Yeah.

Zongjun · 46:55

It's a wonderful and complex and interesting ecosystem that we are seeing here. It's very. Interesting, we just barely scratched the surface, so we're. Definitely coming back absolutely next time to Jeju probably and then maybe later on the Boseong to do more learning to do some sourcing. We have the, we really think that there's some excellent value to be found here and some very interesting, compelling stories that consumers would deeply resonate with around flavors that they like at a price point. That's interesting.

Zongjun · 47:26

And in the way that they're respecting the local customs and terrains and practices and cultivars and styles that exist, as well as some mimicry, which is obvious, which is, you know, what's going on in Jeju Island and even what we're tasting, you know, you can taste some local expression.

Ryan · 47:44

It does not exactly taste like anything we've had from the Japanese. Product. No, it does not, even though it's Yabukita. Yeah, it's really a like eye opening moment for what Yabukita can be. And it has unleashed its potential apparently in Jeju Island, which is quite fascinating. I wonder what's their shading practice and fertilization practice over there must be very different. And there's some really, you know, as we as we wrap up this episode, I was reflecting with Sam yesterday that there's some really deep resonances here of what's going on even within East Asia tea culture and East Asian

Ryan · 48:19

matcha production. There's some really interesting echoes of these very new ways of taking over a narrative within the context of American Asianness. So I within the last 10 years or so, there's been a wave of Asian founded food and beverage brands in the United States by Vietnamese immigrants, by Chinese immigrants.

Ryan · 48:43

And these are typically second generation people. So people are fully culturally American, but you know, they grew up where people were asking them, where are you from? No, where are you really? From. This is a really common trope and their complaint when they started founding these businesses that it was actually the whole industrial food system that had control over the narrative of Asian food. Like there's this concept of the ethnic aisle, and all the Chinese products had that horrible bamboo font, or the Japanese products had this horrible bamboo font. And you had, like, samurai pictures on, like, Chinese noodle packaging.

Ryan · 49:23

Yeah. Or like Japanese cherry blossom on Gray wall, it's. This weird lack of understanding around defining what Asian Ness is like. They could take back control over that narrative, especially from a quality perspective. It's like Fly by Jing is a chili oil chili crisp brand and their goal was to produce the highest quality ingredients in Sichuan. Make it much more modern and sell it to a modern audience within the US and try to break out of these narratives that yeah, Chinese food can be extremely high quality and very interesting and very versatile, introducing people to a bunch of new flavors.

Ryan · 50:06

I mean, they're remarkably successful now. And you had other Asian food brands like Omsom and there's this all of these Asian founded brands that are trying to take back control over the narrative of of what is essentially A reductivist mindset. All Chinese food is this way, All Asian food is this way. It's like, you know, Chinese food is orange chicken and it to a much more nuanced conversation. And I feel like a similar transformation is going to happen within matcha because we have this very reductionist idea of what matcha is and that it has to be from Japan. It is Japanese.

Ryan · 50:41

Anything else is faked and it's a form of mimicry. But that's a reductivist argument. If you like, zoom out and draw through the multiple threads of tea and tea influence both in East Asia and how tea spread from China to Korea to Japan. But also how things were changing in Japan. And all of the foreign influences and pressure and the dynamics around nationalism have created all of these stories. And the push to create Japanese NIST and where tea was chosen as a cultural element in Japan to embody Japanese Ness in the same way that modern Korean tea ceremony dot it is also was used by nationalists, anti Japanese

Ryan · 51:23

nationalists to create a strong sense of Korean identity. So you have to start separating up the myths, the agendas and the incentives. And when you start doing that, it gets to a much more interesting story where Korean matcha can be a broader story of tea in general than just trying to copy what's being done in Japan.

Zongjun · 51:45

Yeah, exactly. It's very, it's a, it's a really interesting reflection of what Korean what, what Korean tea is and what Korean tea can be. It's taking control over the narrative of authenticity. Yeah, Because ultimately it's an authenticity argument that anything that isn't made in Japan is not authentic. Yeah, it's quite an interesting dynamic that we're seeing here in all these East Asian countries that matcha as a vehicle really carries a lot of things that beyond its own taste, culture and history.

Zongjun · 52:20

Like think a true globalization future of matcha, but it shouldn't be that, you know, like no one is talking about, you know, how coffee is carrying Ethiopian culture or Yemen culture. No one's talking about how Pinot Grigio is carrying Italian culture.

Zongjun · 52:37

Like I think, you know, in the future as we, you know, grow altogether consumer wise and industry wise, a true healthy future of matcha should be a vehicle to carry the local terroir and the local flavor instead of you know.

Zongjun · 52:53

Or both. Or, or or both. But, you know, like, I think 1 should not be a blocker of the other, you know, 1 cultural or identity identity argument should not be a blocker of something that can be done elsewhere that can be, you know, reflective of its own culture or its own, you know, history. Yeah.

Zongjun · 53:16

So that's a long way to saying that, you know, like we I think, I think we should keep more open mind when we are seeing, you know, matcha, or mocha, or malcha in Korean being, you know, grown, being manufactured and being consumed coming outside of Japan. Yeah, no, absolutely.

Ryan · 53:39

And it's interesting how tea has always been chosen as this vehicle. Yeah, yeah. And. Everyone, actually. It's very interesting. And also, like, tea has always been international. Yeah. Like, from the very, very beginning, like even within China, China was separated into different states.

Ryan · 53:59

Yunnan was its own state. It's not actually part of, you know, the great China idea for a long time. And it was international at that time. And then, you know, matcha, or mocha, was being introduced into the Korean Peninsula and then later into Japan.

Ryan · 54:17

That was international. And now we are seeing much of being, you know, consumed all of the globe by different, you know, countries and that's international. And now we are seeing, you know, the way the making matcha in Japan in modern days gets reintroduced into Korea and into China and gets transformed into its own thing using, you know, their own local cultivars. In China, they use Longjing.

Ryan · 54:42

In Korea they use, you know, local Hadong tea. And that's again international. The coolness factor, The spotlight has just moved. Yeah, yeah. It's really a continual evolution of what tea can be, not what tea should be. That's a.

Ryan · 54:58

Great framework. In, you know, across all these times. Yeah, absolutely. And just needs, you know, refreshing take to get out of the narratives that we all live and breathe in every day. And that this is actually much more complicated than just a Japanese story that the Japanese participated in themselves during the imperial period. That's how a lot of the, the, you know, some of these tea producing places got set up not only in in Korea, but in places like Taiwan.

Ryan · 55:25

So it's much more complex history and not as pure as you might think. And let's just appreciate the diversity and, you know, differences instead of, you know, arguing and debating over each other. Absolutely, it's the subject of appreciation should be the key and it doesn't need to carry along all this cultural baggage to use a very loaded word. But it's to a Korean could be very anti Japanese. Rightly so based on the historical. Turmoil.

Zongjun · 55:56

Turmoil, mistreatment, killing, torture, rape. It's really nasty Japanese colonial history too. And it's actually interesting to see how adopted a this, what is perceived as a Japanese product in Korea. It's really shown that a lot of time has passed, I think because maybe this could not have taken root during like my grandparents generations or, you know, when they were like mid aged adults in the 60s. Yeah.

Zongjun · 56:23

Time can really smooth everything I feel like because, you know, back in the Tang dynasty, the Chinese also did something very horrible to the Koreans to multiple invasions conducted by the Tang and the sway court. But you know, by the end of the day, everyone still drinks tea across different, you know, dynasties across different areas, across different people. So maybe T is the answer.

Ryan · 56:47

Or maybe T is the answer. So anyway, thanks for listening and we'll see you in the next one. See you in the future.