Largest *Matcha Factory in the World

Ryan · 0:07

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

Ryan · 0:20

And we are currently in the middle of nowhere, Guizhou, very close to Tongren, which is perhaps a place a lot of matcha enthusiasts have never heard of. Perhaps they should. Administratively actually part of Tongren, but it's one hour away by car, so we are actually pretty far from actual Tongren proper, but this is technically Tongren too. So why are we here, Sam?

Zongjun · 0:43

We're here for Guizhou, the largest matcha producer in the world, in Bumble Freak Nowhere. Yes, censored content here. I actually I almost said the same thing earlier, but middle of nowhere, Guizhou. So sort sort of western central ish China.

Zongjun · 1:00

And depending on how you define matcha, and in the case of this episode, we are going to keep a slightly less conservative definition, that matcha can also come from mainland China. But so long as it goes through tencha processing is how we're going to define matcha. And by that definition, Guizhou is the largest matcha producer in the world and I think they have been for some time. Yeah.

Zongjun · 1:22

And we just learned a new figure today visiting their factory is that they processed about 16,000 tons of wet leaf in a year. That's crazy number. Crazy number. And they make approximately 4000 tons of finished matcha a year.

Zongjun · 1:39

And I think Japan in 2025 did a little over 5000 tons. So I think in 2024, technically Guizhou produced more matcha or about as much matcha as the entire country of Japan. But I think Japan started transitioning a lot more of their sencha fields and tencha fields.

Zongjun · 1:59

And what then? They were able to increase the total production of tencha. But either way, it's very impressive the quantity and the scale that goes on at a single company in China in one province, in one region of 1 province. Although they are working with the farmers outside of Tongren as well, that's something that we learned that they they have been working with some 60 companies and cooperatives across different areas in Guizhou. That's including 210,000 farmers in the whole province. That is a mind blowing number.

Ryan · 2:38

Like just to put that into perspective, I think in Kyoto Prefecture, just Kyoto Prefecture, there's something like 500 farmers. Like it's really not very many. It used to be a lot more, but there's a decline in overall tea farming households, tea farms in general across Japan.

Ryan · 2:55

And I believe the total number, it sits somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000. I'll link it in the show notes. But this is just, if you're counting the number of farmers, it's more than all of the farmers in Japan in just what this one company sources from, which is a ridiculous statement.

Ryan · 3:14

And so we're here. We just toured the factory and Sam did a pretty effective job of flirting with the tour guide and got a geolocation pin for some of their tea fields. So then we drove another hour further into the middle of nowhere, Guizhou, where we were able to see some of their plants first hand. And we actually got to chitchat with one of the farmers who was just looking after some ox.

Zongjun · 3:39

What what are the water Buffalo? I oxen. Oxen. There was 1 oxen and two little calves in the field. And this tea farmer was just sitting there and we decided to take out the drone and he came up and was very curious what we were doing and got some interesting information from him.

Zongjun · 3:54

Yeah. So he has been working on that plot of the fuel of that's making EU grade matcha for five years and, and, and, and he technically only owns a very small portion of the land over there and everything else is owned either by the company or the cooperative.

Ryan · 4:10

And right in the middle of this tea field is a gigantic billboard that says EU compliant matcha in Chinese, and beneath it is a chasen and a iced latte. Bubble tea. Bubble tea, iced matcha latte, bubble tea. And then I was staring into saying, because it really, honestly looks a little bit out of place.

Ryan · 4:32

I mean, this really looks like countryside, very rural. It is very rural. Not only does it look like that, but it is very countryside. So I asked Sam to ask the farmer, has he ever tasted matcha? Does he like matcha and what was his response?

Zongjun · 4:47

He said no, all these tea gets sold to countries very, very far away. And and we asked like, have you ever tried matcha before? He said no, we don't drink that. So it's, you know, this really reminds me too of coffee drinking and coffee producing cultures at the beginning of the third wave coffee movement. If you went to go talk to coffee farmers, even in places like Colombia, I think some places in Indonesia and a lot of the sourcing countries.

Zongjun · 5:15

And you asked like, do you drink your own product? And the answer would be pretty much no. Like maybe they were familiar with instant coffee, but this like specialty level coffee in general. It until very recently there was very little actual production being done in origin to the point where they were able to taste their own product. Yeah, And also even within China, you know, you were looking at how pu-erh was produced back in the days. Local people in Yunnan do not drink pu-erh. They drink green tea.

Zongjun · 5:45

And it's much, I guess a similar situation here too. Like historically this is a green tea and hong cha black tea or red tea town, people making this what they call the emerald green tea or red, Ruby red tea. As you know that they're this is their historical produce and it was only until 2017 that they start to experiment with matcha production.

Ryan · 6:09

Yeah, it's super. And the total level of investment we've learned is about 120 million U.S. dollars in this massive facility, which is the largest factory for matcha in the entire world. It is apparently. We act, we've got to see it. We got to go inside it 2. 178 meters by length and 48 meters by width.

Ryan · 6:30

It is ridiculously massive and it is the single largest matcha factory in the world. We got to see a really large color sorter, which is very impressive. And they have 4 dedicated tencha production lines and four dedicated massive shiage lines.

Ryan · 6:46

And they said was that all of those were Chinese made, but they did have some Japanese made equipment. Particularly they were very proud of a steam sanitation machine that would give it a massive high temperature steam for three to five seconds. But it imparts it's very high temperature steam and it imparts very little moisture.

Ryan · 7:06

And that was a bought and purchased from Japan. Yeah, which actually, you know, got me thinking. This is not the first time we've heard that tencha processing facilities outside of Japan are utilizing Japanese processing equipment. We've heard that a lot in China.

Ryan · 7:21

We've heard that in Hadong, in Korea, in the South of southern part of South Korea. And we've also heard that these tencha equipment manufacturers are really the ones who are making a killing in this global matcha boom because they're exporting all of this equipment. And it got me thinking, if Japan really wanted to be to protect matcha, they could just make it forbidden for these equipment manufacturers to set up all of these production countries. And because they don't they're able to produce what is in a Japanese style product with Japanese characteristics. And if Japan really cared about

Zongjun · 7:57

protectionism, then they would just do this. But they don't do that. And these key regions, these tea producing countries that are now making matcha are just able to do it by simply purchasing the equipment. Yeah, well, I mean like hardware blockage, I don't think will stop people from doing anything for long.

Zongjun · 8:17

Will slow them down. It will. Slow them down. But if you really take into the consideration of, you know, the impressiveness I would say of China for modern engineering, I mean, we got to experience that first hand. I don't think that's going to slow anyone down for long. Indeed, yeah.

Ryan · 8:32

Minus, well, just work with them. Yeah, at least then they get some money out of it. Yeah, and can bring in some quality standards. Yeah. So, Sam, I don't know what's the biggest surprise to you between your expectations and reality.

Zongjun · 8:45

Having now toured the facility, we've tasted their tea before. Yeah, we taste our tea and we saw the factory, which was pretty large and we saw some of their main production tea facilities. It's a little actually smaller than I expected.

Ryan · 8:59

The whole scale compared to, you know, some other, you know, facilities that we have visited in the past, not just tea but also for other food producing facilities like, you know, I guess we can talk about their names now, but General Mills, we visited their factories in Shanghai.

Zongjun · 9:14

It was massive. And you know, the sheer scale that we are talking about here is actually not that comparable to some of the larger facilities that we have experienced in China. Yeah. That's true. I mean, definitely. More rooms to grow some. Food production, some food factories that we've been to in our last job, literally some of them had their own power plant and their own railway station.

Zongjun · 9:37

It's a small. City almost, yeah. That I agree. It was a little bit smaller than I was expecting. But you know, during our factory tour they were talking about expansion plan. And the expansion plan looked massive, like I think it would more than like double or triple the footprint based on comparing the sizes of the photos that they had.

Ryan · 9:56

Yeah. What's the implication, Ryan? Yeah. What's the implication? I mean that that's a good question. Like, you know, I'm so torn about this because, you know, China at this moment is the number one producer of matcha in the world. And what's so interesting is you hear all of these people making judgments back and forth.

Ryan · 10:15

Unless you go to Japan and you ask people about Chinese matcha, the vast majority of the people are very dismissive. They say the quality might be getting better, but it's not really matcha. The Chinese have no business doing this. And then you know, but they've never been here. A lot of the people, people that say that have maybe tried one Chinese matcha, they've definitely never had this more contemporary matcha that's coming out of China, which is shaded cultivation.

Ryan · 10:43

A lot of it is not even direct cover. It's Tana. Even in Guicha. They have, they have Chinese made, but they have traditional stone mills, They have a Chinese ishi-usu. They have incredibly rigorous quality programs even where they test I think 500 different chemicals for pesticide residue test testing. And everything is run through SGS, so a third party, very reputable testing institution.

Ryan · 11:08

Like by all means, it is a world class production. Does it produce the same level of quality of something you'd see out of, would you? No, but that's not who Guicha is targeting. Guicha is trying to target a fantastic product that's very well priced.

Ryan · 11:27

And then, you know, every once in a while we get mail from emails from people who listen to the podcast. And sometimes I feel like I get stuck in my own bubble. But someone emailed me who is from a developing country recently and they said, you know, in our market, Japanese matcha is getting more and more and more expensive.

Ryan · 11:43

It's super hard to source. It's getting a little bit out of reach for our customer base. This is someone who runs a special coffee shop. And I've always dismissed Chinese matcha because everything I've ever had is bad. But then I listened to your one of your podcast episodes and I'm like, want to explore more. I realized that maybe the information that I've had and my idea of quality is a little bit outdated. And you know what the prices that you're talking about, you know, between 80 to $120.00 a kilo, right? Like this is something that would really work in my market and it would work for my

Ryan · 12:17

business. And it's something that my consumers can actually afford. And it's something that I can actually source consistently and I can trust that the quality is going to be good. And this is exactly who I think Guicha is targeting. It's someone who doesn't care that it's a Japanese matcha latte or uji matcha latte.

Ryan · 12:35

And it's so important for the specialty matcha movement even amongst the high end Japanese farmers because without a pipeline of new practitioners, and this is something you say on the podcast all the time, Sam, you need the commodity market to support the specialty market. Without instant coffee, you don't get specialty coffee drinkers.

Ryan · 12:55

If tiramisu didn't exist, if, if coffee ice cream didn't exist, if coffee candies didn't exist. Actually, if you look at the early history of how coffee got adopted in Japan and huge thank you to one of our podcast listeners who made this connection. It was actually a decades long plan from coffee companies to enter the Japanese market.

Ryan · 13:16

They said you need to get people tasting this earlier on in their lives. And they started off with these coffee candies. They got everyone hooked. People in their childhood were able to taste them. Actually, even I have memories of tasting chocolate or of coffee flavored candies and coffee ice cream, and I didn't like coffee at the time, but it certainly got me used to this idea. And as all of these people in Japan and even abroad who are really proponents of Japanese matcha and the Japanese product get horrified by mixing matcha and all of these applications. But actually it's incredibly important for creating a new pipeline of people that will

Ryan · 13:51

appreciate a blended product from a very traditional institution or that will appreciate a single cultivar who someone who's willing to pay four, $5 a gram for hand picked Honzu Asahi. It's so important. So I think Weicha is a huge gift.

Zongjun · 14:09

And the implications of them scaling even more, I think is actually only going to expand the pipeline of new practitioners that are willing to support a high end Japanese product. Yep. And we're not talking about like low quality dumb expansion.

Zongjun · 14:27

We have tried some of the Weicha teas, actually pretty decent. Pretty decent and. Honestly, for the price it's great. And, and in the applications that they're serving it in, it's fantastic. Like we had this morning, there's a retail branch of Weicha in our hotel that we're staying in and we had a coconut milk coconut drink matcha as we walked out of our hotel this morning. It didn't tastes that strongly of matcha, but it balanced the drink and it was fantastic and honestly I couldn't stop drinking it.

Zongjun · 15:02

It was so good. It was crazy good actually. I couldn't see how anyone wouldn't like to drink that. And even for some like Usucha that we have experiment with some of the newer batches coming from not just from Guizhou but also from like places like Hangzhou or Hubei, we are we start to see some very interesting products, very interesting innovative flavor profiles and very interesting cultivars too. Very interesting.

Zongjun · 15:29

We, we recently met with the Fujianese factory and they had something that we have never heard of and we think it's such a great story. They had hybridized Yabukita locally with local cultivars and we're only propagating by seed, so no cuttings. So when you propagate by seed, it's able to grow a taproot. So you this is like the epitome of what I think a modern Chinese matcha renaissance could be, where you have the power of a taproot, the minerals, the nutrients that that plant is able to get. It makes the plant so much more healthy too, because it's much more established in the ground and it has Japanese DNA and. There's, there's something

Zongjun · 16:12

romantic about this whole situation, like this genetic marriage of a Japanese product with the local Chinese cultivar and this whole homecoming of, you know, making matcha in a region that has been historically producing tea in China and, and it tastes great. We got to taste it.

Ryan · 16:31

It was really good it. Was really, really tasty. Very mineral, very creamy, some nice umami. It's a really wonderful thing and seeing that unfold in front of it was. Incredible. And it also had a lot of Yame notes and we were talking to the producers who were making this Fujianese matcha and actually they sold out of their entire stock for the entire year already. And what are we were we're in, I guess now. So it's only a couple of months after their harvest. They don't have any more to sell. I think they had five.

Ryan · 17:00

They produced 5 tons, which is not nothing. And we were talking with them. And what was interesting is, you know, so many people in Japan will say, oh, I hate these Chinese producers. I don't like what they're doing. They're copying our product. They project on.

Ryan · 17:15

And actually a lot of people in the West do this too. They project on all of this malintent. It's like these Chinese are coming in, they're trying to RIP off. It's not fair competition. They're getting a lot of help and money from the government and they're kind of trying to undercut our product.

Ryan · 17:32

And when you come here and you talk to these producers, you talk to the people at Gui Cha, you talk to these Fujianese matcha and tencha farmers, you talk, We've talked to a lot of these people and we've even had dinner with some of them.

Ryan · 17:44

And they'll just, they're, they're people who are super curious and they're trying to just make better. That's it. There's super nice people who are trying to make better tea. And what we've learned is that a huge reason why the Chinese government is willing to invest so much in converting matcha production so much into expanding matcha production capacity is it's predominantly grown and relatively poor rural areas.

Ryan · 18:13

And it's elevating people out of poverty. And just Gui Cha alone and they have the official statistics has elevated 11,500 farmers out of what they consider below poverty levels. That is like about as many tea farmers as there are in the entire country of Japan.

Ryan · 18:33

Like it is not a it's not nothing. And these are being done for poverty alleviation reasons. And so when you go here and talk, these are just people trying to make a better product every year a little better. There is no malintent like here. Like I think they under recognize the how much which Japan has done.

Ryan · 18:52

They basically claim this is a Chinese product because of its ties to Song dynasty tea ceremony. But other than that, like I don't think there's this negative intent that people like to project onto onto this. You know, the result is pretty obvious.

Zongjun · 19:08

This might sound a little bit too pro China, but we were driving into all of these mountains and Guizhou has been historically the poorest province in China. This is like, you know, Alabama or West Virginia if you compare to the status to the United States.

Zongjun · 19:25

And and we've been driving on really well paved Rd. all the way into the mountains into the tea fields and you can see visible improvement of people's livelihood. You know when you compare to some like old houses sitting besides the road? Like I bet those were like pretty much what used to be like back.

Ryan · 19:43

Yeah, they're like falling down. They're open air homes, like, they're not even sealed like it really. There's a really interesting contrast that you can see between all the new here. Yeah. And there are a lot of new houses, concrete houses, new constructions. And and this is like pretty wonderful in the sense that, you know, on one hand is consumptionism, you know, like it's, it's people spending, you know, way too much on. On, on a cup of matcha.

Ryan · 20:11

But on the other hand, you see this cascading effect of, you know, all these money being actually working on people that that, that needs them. Yeah, it's a nice thing to see it. Takes me back to the farmer that we were interacting with earlier this day.

Ryan · 20:25

Like, I mean, by all means, this is like a very like classic profile Chinese farmer. Like, I don't think this guy makes a lot of money. His teeths are crooked and stained. Like, you know, he pretty choppy Mandarin from what you were saying and very local dialect.

Ryan · 20:42

And like, this is not like a town that looks like it's thriving, but it looks like it's surviving. And we were like really well received. He came up, he smiled, he asked what we were doing and he gave us a reception like nothing we've ever had in Japan.

Ryan · 20:57

We're constantly living in fear that we're being intrusive in Japan and that we're overstepping boundaries. We've never really actually felt that welcome. We always feel like they're all of the these invisible lines to be to make sure that we don't cross.

Ryan · 21:12

Like even when we went to go pick tea in Toyota, like Sam got yelled at by one of the older ladies for wearing sunglasses. Like I'm sure Sam didn't walk into the tea fields with negative intent, but she made her feel uncomfortable.

Zongjun · 21:26

I mean, we accidentally he accidentally crossed a little invisible line. And this is like a nothingness. But like Japan is littered with all of these little things said to be incredibly mindful of. It's so easy to offend someone and here as we were leaving, he said.

Zongjun · 21:40

Take take as many pictures as you want. Feel free. Show the world what we're doing here. Thank you for showing the world. Thank you for showing the world what we're doing here. He was proud and he wanted people to see, look at this organic cultivation. Look at how natural and beauty.

Zongjun · 21:58

I mean, it was a beautiful sight. You had these very pointy mountains with these clouds flowing over them. You had tons of insects and bugs and like chickens running around all over the place in this region. Like it was really like.

Zongjun · 22:13

And yeah, and though it was very visibly organic because there are a lot of weeds growing in the tea hills. Too, by Japanese standards, it looks almost semi abandoned. I really know that nothing's being sprayed there.

Ryan · 22:25

And this actually brings me to another thing that always really bothers me. I, I, I've had calls with a bunch of people with the years who are really staunch Japanese tea people. And you know what? Sometimes I talk about Chinese matcha and someone will say, you know, you have to be very careful.

Ryan · 22:41

It's to be very careful when you're sourcing from China. I, I don't trust anything the Chinese are doing, probably full of chemicals and heavy metals, etcetera. And this tea is absolutely cleaner, average do you can get in Japan from a chemical standpoint, the level of testing and the fact that everything is EU compliant.

Ryan · 23:00

These are so many Japanese producers are not able to say that and it's being designed to be EU compliant. They do soil samples regularly for every farmer, I think it's once a year, she said. Once a year. On like 500 different chemicals to make sure that everyone's compliant and if someone's not compliant, they'll no longer work with them. But this is also not to dismiss that, you know, like everything in China is great.

Ryan · 23:25

Like it's, it's still a semi true statement when it comes to a lot of other, you know, companies in China that are doing very sketchy works, which is totally a reality as well. Yeah, we we got to experience a lot of these counterfeit products too. And it's I would say these two realities are not mutually dismissive to each other.

Ryan · 23:48

They both exist and you have to be careful, that's true. But on the other hand, you know, like there are goodies coming from China now. That's that's for sure. Yeah, well, even in Japan, I mean you have not direct counterfeits, but you definitely have some cheating.

Ryan · 24:05

Bancha is a huge example and how so much bancha gets blended into matcha and being sold as matcha even though it doesn't come from tencha. And you have all this inclusion of Chinese tencha that's be labeled to Japanese product, not anymore after GI, but. Well, we actually saw that first hand in GUI t.A.T.u, yeah. Actually, so they always give their export list and guess what country always comes first on all of these export lists and Nihon we even export to Japan always the first one. They never failed to leave out this detail. It was it was really something else. So Sam, they talked a lot of bit

Zongjun · 24:40

a lot about different levels of government support and government money. What we're What were some of your takeaways there? Yeah. So I was curious about because that's the other thing that I learned quite surprisingly about great, great highs that it's a private company since the very beginning.

Zongjun · 24:56

It's not one of those state owned company that got privatized during the 90s. It's completely private and and there's a lot of government help and government subsidies. Yeah, it's kind of crazy how much China's trying to amp up the the domestic market for matcha.

Zongjun · 25:11

We see it more and more across CPG products, Consumer Packaged Goods and more and more in, you know, these different applications with these bubble teas, all of these latte shops. It seems like it's really exploding here.

Zongjun · 25:24

And all of these big names like Luckin Coffee or Cotti Coffee, I've heard that a lot of these companies are actually being semi forced to take up the quantities, production quantities from all of these regions. They called it the procurement redistribution.

Ryan · 25:41

So governments will work with all these private firms to do very targeted procurement from all of these, you know, less developed regions in China. And I think it's really showing some signs, like, all of these coffee shops are now featuring matcha. And even here in this county called Jiangko, which is a tiny county underneath Tongren, they were telling us that there were 60 tea shops being opened last year featuring matcha. Crazy.

Ryan · 26:10

Yeah, this is a tiny, tiny town. Actually, even but all across tongue and I feel like all you see is matcha, matcha, matcha when by the way, they don't they don't romanize it as Malcha. They they romanize it as matcha, which is an interesting choice.

Zongjun · 26:23

So Zongjun from a specialty lens, what did we learn about their product, their processing cultivars being used? Like what's interesting when you look at this as a specialty product. Well, for guicha alone they predominantly only use two cultivars. 1 is Jin Guanyin or Golden Guanyin Golden Buddha. The other one is Fuding Dabai, which is actually a baicha cultivar from Fujian.

Zongjun · 26:46

White tea called. White tea cultivar and they don't necessarily do any single cultivar products, everything is a blend, but they they taste pretty good actually. So I've been tasting matcha coming from Guaita in the past three years because they always have the booth in Canton Fair in Guangzhou and the quality and the taste of of their tea has improved drastically, especially after they start switching to this white tea cultivar and we got to see these tea first hand.

Zongjun · 27:15

They are like tiny bushes. This is a very new, very recent conversion, but it's really showing some signs of quality improvement. And the other thing is they primarily used raised tana or semi raised tana. They make these like tubes so that the shading material isn't directly covering the plant. And from a specialty perspective, that's important one because you can shade a little bit longer because when it's direct cover, the physical touching of the shading to the plant can damage it.

Zongjun · 27:44

But also it traps heat and it traps humidity, which attracts pests. So elevating the tana, elevating the shading material allows more free flow of air and it's it can ultimately end up shading it for a little. Bit longer? Absolutely.

Ryan · 27:59

And actually I forgot to ask them a very important question. What kind of fertilizer do they use? I'm not sure if they would tell us, yeah. That's true. But they might, you know, tell us some, you know, directional information, everything has to be you compliant. That's true.

Ryan · 28:13

That's true. That was the other. We asked them is everything indeed EU compliant and they said yes. So that actually I have a question for you Sam, just does Golden Guanyin have anything to do with Tieguanyin or is it just this the similar name it's?

Zongjun · 28:25

Just a similar name and everything here. I think Golden Guanyin is a historical local cultivar and they were using it to make black tea and green tea traditionally. We actually got gifted a can of maltian which only uses the bud of the harvest to make green tea and it's pretty interesting.

Ryan · 28:45

Really want to try in comparison to the matcha that they produce. Very cool. Yeah. It'd be a fun comparison. So it really feels like they're not that well set up to be a specialty vendor if they wanted to move upmarket. They don't have.

Zongjun · 28:59

I mean, Fuding is an interesting cultivar. The other one of this golden Guanyon I've never heard of. But they don't have a large array of interesting things. And it's not like as interesting a story of like hybridized Yabukita, locally hybridized Yabukita, for example.

Zongjun · 29:15

I think it's really a different mindset because we Zhou has that's the other very interesting thing has been historically supplying tea leaves to other regions of China to get to turn into their quote UN quote local tea, for example, Long Jing or Biluochun or all of these priced more valuable tea that can be sold for a higher price.

Zongjun · 29:37

There. There were a lot of like within the country. Tea laundering happened. In the original laundered supply region. Yeah, and We Zhou is definitely one of one of the top producer of those, you know, one laundry beliefs.

Zongjun · 29:52

It's not surprising that they're fulfilling this road in the laundry chain for Matcha nowadays. It's I would say their culture probably. Maybe the other really cool thing that I've never seen before, we haven't tasted yet, but we bought was high mountain matcha. So depending on who you ask, they'll define high mountain tea at different elevations.

Zongjun · 30:14

My standard, the way I understand it and the way I consider what high mountain tea to be is what the way the Taiwanese describe it, which is at least 1000 meters above sea level. And I've never heard of matcha being grown at 1000 meters above sea level.

Zongjun · 30:33

And they have it from Guizhou Tencha, Yeah. Can't wait to try it, but that, that's super. Cool. It was pretty expensive by Chinese standards compared to their it was more than double the price of their standard matcha lineup and matcha blend.

Zongjun · 30:48

So in terms of. Specialty if Guizhou is ever going to move into that realm, but it's questionable, but they definitely have very interesting terroir. Maybe the cultivar is not set up as you know, very interesting to begin with, but all these regions that we've been seeing, all these cloudy valleys that's hidden it's.

Ryan · 31:10

Beautiful in. All these mountains, it's it's magnificent, it's beautiful. Totally could sell a lot of tea on its own merits, on its own specialty principles. So Zongjun got me. Worried. Yeah, a police truck just when I drove by randomly parked in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road.

Ryan · 31:26

So another thing that we got to do today is do an activity that gave us very sore arm, very sore wrist as we participated in not one but two quote unquote air quotes here traditional Song dynasty tea ceremony. Really, really low expectations.

Zongjun · 31:42

I was very skeptical going into this. Sam, you want to give everyone a little context about why if you go visit a Song Dynasty tea ceremony, Tiancha, that it's kind of all made-up. Yeah, it's it's a revived culture. It's basically that for close to 600 years. So ever since the founding of Ming Dynasty, matcha basically got banned in China and the culture was lost. And nowadays you're seeing all these revivalists trying to bring back the idea of some dynasty matcha, but they're finding traces of certain cultural elements from all these literatures in back in the days that has documented a little bit about what some dynasty matcha

Zongjun · 32:23

or some dynasty tea ceremony used to be like. Predominantly from this book called the Grand Treatise on Tea that was written by one of the they call it the scholar emperor back in Song dynasty, Song Huizong. And and to be honest, if you actually read the book, it's not really a book I will call this is probably a compilation of a few paragraphs and it doesn't really give you a lot of details about, you know, this whole ceremony.

Zongjun · 32:48

So all of these, you know, like the cadence of pouring water into the bowl. And movement. Hand movements. And all of those are completely made-up. There were documentations about all these tea competitions predominantly trying to compete over the thickness of the foam or doing calligraphies on on the phone to compete, you know, like who paints the best, I guess with tea, those were true. But the exact criteria and the, you know, judgment of, you know, how exactly these competitions are, these art being done was also lost.

Ryan · 33:22

So. So yeah, we got to have a taste of the revivalist culture a little bit today. And it was. I was pretty fun, actually. I went in not expecting to learn anything about matcha and to just kind of sit through this and try not to absorb any of it because I know that it's all made-up.

Ryan · 33:40

But actually the the first lady that we learned this from actually had a lot of Kung Fu or skill. Predominantly in foam generation. Foam the and foam color so they actually so we sat through 2 and they did something so strange and it's so interesting that we have to talk about it. The way that they hold the whisk is like the angle back a little more towards you.

Zongjun · 34:02

So it's it's and almost like the bottom is hitting the bottom of the bowl, the bottom of the chasen hitting the bottom of the chawan, but you're hitting the wall to the. Side of the chasen is hitting the wall, the bowl and the hitting movement I think really generates much more movement, much more aeration to the tea. So something about some dynasty tea ceremony in general is that pale foam is highly prized and they're everyone's basically using shaded matcha, it's very green. I don't know who invented this, when or why, but both of them use first whisk a paste like a koicha, then you add in a little more water and basically

Ryan · 34:41

make an usucha, and then you add in a little more water to make a water down usucha. And then you whipping this foam back onto itself and you're not whisking for like 20 seconds. They have you whisk for like 4 minutes, like it's a really long time and I'm not exaggerating either, like it's actually a genuinely long time. And then when you think you're done, like as you add more water into it and what this does is it turns this foam from a bright green to a pale whitish green hue. And every time re whisk, it's like you're washing the foam and you're re churning it in on itself. And it gets paler and paler and

Ryan · 35:26

paler every time you do this. And I've actually read a paper that one of the reasons that matcha foam is so green is that matcha particles can exist on the inner membrane of each bubble. So the reason that matcha foam concentration and flavor can change so much depending on whisking ratio. If you whisk at a one to 10 versus 1 to 15 versus 1 to 21 to 25, one to 30, you're going to get different colored foams, but the foams are also going to taste drastically different. And if you use a very concentrated whisking ratio, you're actually, a lot of the matcha particles are getting trapped up in that foam.

Ryan · 36:04

So you'll get a very intense sip on the foam, but the actual usucha underneath is going to have overall fewer particles, which is a pretty important part of extraction theory, I think not enough people talk about. But if you essentially wash out all of these matcha particles on top, what you're left with is a very white foam. And then what you do is you take a little needle at the end of the T scoop and you take basically what is a koicha and you reintroduce the particles and you can, it's like you have a blank canvas and you can do some pretty fun latte art. And I discovered that Sam is actually pretty artistic. So you enjoy my piggy and my

Zongjun · 36:45

Kitty cat? Sam was pretty talented actually at making this latte art because once you lay it down too, you can trace over it like and, you know, create these very latte art looking things. Yeah. I actually learned a few techniques from this whiskey sour art that bartenders would that.

Ryan · 37:05

Makes sense? Yeah, they they use very similar tools. I would say that's what we did today. But that was a lot of fun actually. I actually really enjoyed it. I wasn't expecting to. And also a lot of the matcha that we were using was so bitter and so harsh, especially when you were drinking it as an usucha.

Ryan · 37:23

At least during these ceremonies, when you froth it up that much, it actually mellows down quite a bit, and you're doubling the watering down, you're doubling the dilution. And that's the other interesting thing that the lady told us is that the target ratio of foam to liquid is 70 to 30%.

Ryan · 37:42

So you want 70% foam and only 30% liquid. And you would want to just drink the foam, not the liquid. That's what she said. That's. What? She said. Oh wow. Weird. It's. That detail. So actually I, I, I think it's doing something, you know, not just to, for people to paint on, but also for flavor too.

Zongjun · 38:02

That makes sense. That's interesting. You're actually flavoring the foam and it's this very light, light flavor that that that makes sense. So I guess before we conclude this episode, 1 of the more interesting things about being here is the food and the local cuisine. Salmon.

Ryan · 38:18

I had a really fantastic dish we both had never heard of last night, which is essentially an upside down wok and everything is kind of cooked Korean BBQ style. And then they put like a granite bowl on top full of this fermented stuff and a giant scoop of lard and you dip all of this grilling stuff into this hot pot kind of thing.

Zongjun · 38:39

Very tasty. Yeah, it's very good. What's it called again? It's called log. There are many this type of cuisine in Guizhou. You know which they use very extensively fermentation methods over all these local ingredients.

Zongjun · 38:52

It's the they call it the sour culture, the swan in Guizhou, and it's really different from other places, I would say, especially from Guangzhou. So different, so tasty, so refreshing. It's been a while since I've had like a new cuisine in China. Almost competitive with the unagi from from Maichi, which I think might take the cake.

Ryan · 39:16

Unfortunately for the best food during tea sourcing, unagi was top. Wow, that's another benefit about all of these tea trips, or tea the adventurous, is that usually coming with some pretty nice, delicious local food too. Totally. Speaking of which, it is now 8:00 PM. We skipped lunch and we are very hungry. So I think it's a perfect place to stop as our mouths are watering and our stomach is is grumbling. But we hope you enjoyed this episode. Our goal here was to share context about what's going on here in China.

Ryan · 39:51

We were actually very near here. We discovered it was only a 5 hour drive away and we're currently waiting on one part to be finished before we initialize mill manufacturing. So we were like, we've got time, it's only 5 hour drive, let's go. So it was kind of a very last minute decision and I'm happy we came.

Zongjun · 40:09

Yeah. Yeah. I have a feeling that we're going to come back in the near future, probably sooner than we than we expected. I hope so. I hope so. It's really lush and beautiful here. And they got some pretty tasty tea at a very affordable price.

Ryan · 40:23

Yeah. Hopefully they'll sell us tencha one day. Maybe. We'll see. As of now, they said no. But now that you got this contact, Sam's going to rizz her up. Maybe they'll they'll sell us some tencha. OK. I'll invite her for a much of beer tonight.

Ryan · 40:36

Sounds good. All right. If you enjoyed this, please consider sharing with friend and we'll see you in the next nice one. Thanks. See you in the future. Bye.