Matcha + Milk Debate

Ryan · 0:00

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

Zongjun · 0:15

And today we're going to talk about I don't know, it should be about adding milk into Matcha, but it's really not about adding milk into matcha. It's about a group of people seeing that as such a taboo and using it as an excuse to bully other people doing so, and a group of people really enjoying it that are trying to use everything that they can buy and do an Internet upgrade upon adding milk into their drinks.

Ryan · 0:47

Wow, that was quite the introduction. So we titled that fine summary that Zongjun just gave. Does adding milk into matcha ruin it? And I, in a lot of ways. So there's a perfect encapsulation of a lot of this debate that's going on within the matcha Internet sphere, especially in light of the matcha shortage, which has really triggered a lot of people's opinions when people don't have access to the matcha that they want. Some of the practitioners that have been around a long time are seemingly.

Zongjun · 1:18

Horrified. Yeah, Yeah. But, but I I think the ultimate reason is that they are, they're, they're angry, not just horrified because of the usage, the the increased demand of matcha is heading towards a direction that they do not appreciate.

Ryan · 1:36

Yeah, I think that's the the the main issue. Yeah, and it's threatening. And so we sourced a bunch of opinions and we have some opinions of our own about the debate of adding milk or your non Dairy Milk of choice to matcha. There's the spectrum.

Ryan · 1:52

So on one end of the spectrum, let consumers do what they want. On the other end of the spectrum, consumers are destroying what makes a heritage and traditional product incredibly unique by introducing new flavors and basically treating it as an ingredient in a product versus just enjoying it on its own. And so this is the spectrum, and we sourced opinions of four different people.

Ryan · 2:16

We reached out to Marc from Ooika, Bryan from Matsu Matcha, Monique from Matcha Moments, and Cole from My Matcha Addiction to get a really nice mix of opinions, people in different cultures in different parts of the matcha business and focusing on very different things and to have explore different angles.

Zongjun · 2:35

But before diving into to their opinions, I think it's worth pointing out that we have kind of moved from a world of an abundancy mindset to a scarcity mindset. The matcha shortage is real. It started happening last year, in 2024. It's probably going to continue to happen. So this is a problem.

Zongjun · 2:53

This online discourse is important, and having a good framework to put around this topic is important, in my opinion, to explore these different perspectives and to take what can be like, actually, in my opinion, classified as kind of a dumb argument. Like no one has any control over what people do with this product.

Zongjun · 3:15

We don't live in like this perfect utopian world. Everyone has their own agency and can make their own decisions. All this judgement being tossed around, this is kind of dumb, and this whole conversation is just kind of dumb. But it's also kind of interesting that it triggers so much in everyone, even the people that think that this is kind of a dumb argument because they're seeds of truth across this whole spectrum, right?

Zongjun · 3:41

So I'll give a really interesting example from the world of high end Chinese tea. So, you know, over the past two or three decades, China has become incredibly wealthy with the rise of new industries. And you have this new class of newly rich people all over mainland China and in Hong Kong.

Zongjun · 4:03

And people became very interested in traditional Chinese crafts, one of which being tea. And there's a type of fermented tea in Chinese tea culture called pu-erh. It gets better with age. And some of the best pu-erh that has ever been made considered by most people is in the Communist era shortly following World War 2. So basically during World War 2, there is very little tea cultivation.

Zongjun · 4:27

All the tea fields were basically allowed to go wild and natural, and you had almost no cultivation or intervention for an extremely long period of time. And during the Communist collectivized Agriculture movement, there was a department called CNNP, which created three different products, Hong Yin, Lu Yin and Huang Yin, Red Mark, Yellow Mark and Green Mark. And these are considered some of the best tea ever made, and they will never be made again.

Zongjun · 4:53

Never again will the set of conditions ever be the same. It is absolutely a scarce resource and these teas I don't know starting about 10 years ago to present day reach unfathomable prices. You can buy like a 357g cake of tea. It's compressed tea or 300,000 U.S. dollars. That is insane, the prices, that and some, I think some auction records have even been smashed.

Ryan · 5:26

Mixing that tea with milk to make a bubble tea, it was unthinkable. So like, there's some real merit to removing the supply of such a scarce resource and how that is depriving other people of a incredibly important cultural experience. Now, I think in the world of matcha, it's way less extreme. I was listening to an interview from John Mackey, who's the founder of Whole Foods.

Ryan · 5:53

Someone was asking him what he thought about food waste because after he sold it to Amazon, but he's working on different projects. People were asking on like what what he's working on next, how much do you care about food waste? And he gave such a hot take that it like put me back in my chair. He says.

Ryan · 6:09

I don't think food waste is our number one problem. The one thing that people don't realize about food is that food is a renewable resource and we need to be focusing our efforts on non renewable resources. Not that food waste is not unimportant. It is absolutely important, but food is a renewable resource. Matcha is a renewable resource.

Ryan · 6:30

Matcha is a perishable renewable resource. No one's aging matcha for 50 years like they are with this fermented Chinese pu-erh. It won't be any good. So matcha has to be consumed within the optimal window. Otherwise, it is food waste because it's way past its prime.

Ryan · 6:51

So in a lot of ways, no matter how people are consuming and enjoying matcha, it's good that their demand, it has outpaced supply because it means you get less waste because drinking a stale product, time and oxidation have done its work.

Ryan · 7:10

And that matcha is in a lot of ways dead. So I think that's really important to think about as we talk about this, that there's an impermanence to this debate. The quote UN quote matcha girlies on TikTok consuming expensive precious matcha with Oatly.

Zongjun · 7:30

Who cares in what it we're recording this in February, in two months is going to be a new harvest. Boom. New matcha made that is now literally in the past. Yeah, yeah, totally agree. So like, you mostly think that this is a dumb argument and in a lot of ways you're totally right because we click the reset button all the time. Yep, it's a it's a really temporal. I mean, like the only thing that it really does is to increase the price of some of the better matcha. And these people are angry because they're now paying a premium.

Zongjun · 8:08

And I think that's that's really, you know, the problem here. And other than that, you can still buy the matcha next year, just getting the line earlier and maybe this time you buy more to have your own stockpile. But other than that, it doesn't share the same status as pu'er that you just talked about. Yeah, or truly scarce resources from non renewable sources, things that are really what's here is here and that's all that's.

Zongjun · 8:43

Left. But I think this is really a mentality that you have seen not just in matcha, but also in a lot of other fields too. Like in coffee, people naturally would regard latte as a inferior product. Like you don't use your best coffee bean to make latte.

Zongjun · 9:01

And in the world of wine, you know, adding Brandy into your wine to make it a fortified wine is also considered to be an inferior product historically. And, you know, like same theory or mechanism applies to matcha here.

Zongjun · 9:16

Like you are basically adding something that's not matcha into matcha drink and thus turning it into something that you know, people will find it not as pure I guess. And that way is thus in theory. I don't necessarily agree with this whole mechanism, but you know, you don't see this chain of thought unique to matcha, but you see that elsewhere a lot.

Zongjun · 9:43

Yeah, you absolutely do. And it's kind of this revolving door of toxicity of people judging other people. Like for new matcha consumers, it's actually kind of confusing. It's like you walk into a bar and there's a giant fight going on and like you don't know which side to stand on or what caused the fight in the first place. Or you walk into a bar and you order a matcha latte and you say oh wow this is delicious.

Zongjun · 10:10

But all of a sudden, like so like all the people around you start pointing their fingers to you and say you are wasting matcha. I go, what did I just do? I thought I just found a new delicious drink, but now I'm the bad guy. Yeah, I'm ruining this defiling Japanese culture. Really a form of, you know, gaslighting amongst the consumer community.

Zongjun · 10:33

It's, it's really bad. You know, it's really not just about adding milk. It's really not about it's about a group of more experienced consumers angry and trying to bully some of the newcomers. Yeah. And what we're really moving from are a bunch of early adopters into the mainstream. And these two groups of people care about very different things and they have very different, they drink much of for different reasons, they spend money on it for different reasons. Their practice is based on, for completely different value system in which they make these judgments and distinctions of quality and the way that they're

Zongjun · 11:12

preparing it, and both of which are, you know, totally valid. And actually, I, I, I think one of the biggest problems from the entry consumer level of especially in the matcha culture outside of Japan is the stupid term ceremonial grade that we've recorded other podcasts on. And if you haven't listened to those or if you don't have the full context, ceremonial grade is a made-up grade. It is not a grade.

Zongjun · 11:36

It is completely made-up classification anyone can call anything ceremonial grade draws their own line in the sand of what they consider ceremonial grade. For some people it's first harvest, for other people it has to be grown ground on an ishi-usu stone, for other people like it's completely different things and can have different levels of meaning. And a lot of people hate this term so they started making up their own grades.

Zongjun · 12:00

So now you have a sea of like completely arbitrary grades floating around for most new consumers entering the matcha space. You have this wonderful world ceremonial grade and everyone on the Internet is telling you you need to be buying high quality matcha and how do you find it?

Zongjun · 12:17

You need to look for ceremonial grade. That's what you do. And there's 10,000 articles online that will tell you how to distinguish ceremonial grade from non ceremonial grade. And they do like a dumb like paper test and say oh this one's greener.

Zongjun · 12:31

Which has all its own problems because matcha comes in different cultivars can naturally be more or less green. Color is actually a really bad metric unless you're controlling for cultivar and everything else. But the ceremonial grade has two dark sides.

Zongjun · 12:47

The first dark side is that there's some implicit indication that tea ceremony practitioners endorse it. Somehow it has the weight of Japanese tea ceremony and the institutions that serve it, like Urasenke and Omotesenke and all the other schools somehow endorse this product, which is absolutely not true. The other implicit indicator is that it's high enough quality to be consumed on its own only with water, because in tea ceremony they don't use milk.

Zongjun · 13:17

There is no latte in chanoyu, so it's saying that this is high enough quality that you can consume it only with water. Ironic thing is you have all of these vendors pushing ceremonial grade on to consumers and having it be.

Zongjun · 13:34

This is what you need for your latte. Yeah, enjoy it however you want. Mix it with water, mix it with milk. But if you really want the best matcha latte experience, you need to be going after ceremonial grade product. It's ironic actually, the number of people pushing a ceremonial grade product to be consumed with milk when the implicit indication of ceremonial grade is that it's good enough to be consumed only with water.

Zongjun · 14:02

And so the lack of regulation and these implicit indicators, it's actually a great hypocrisy there. There is a misalignment here in the use of this term. That's doubly negative. Yeah. And also probably intentional because the vendors wants to sell. So this you know, very, you know, you would say interestingly or sadly is that you know, the majority of the increase of new matcha demands comes from latte drinkers and you want to target that those consumers the way you want to target that you know anyone else. And you know, the way to do that is to, you know, tell them that this is the best matcha.

Zongjun · 14:40

And of course, you can use it for your matcha market. I mean really, if you take a macro lens and look at growth of new tea ceremony practitioners or even non tea ceremony practitioners that know what an usucha or koicha is and one to consume things only with water, you plot that growth chart next to new latte drinkers. You understand where the business opportunity lies. Yeah, I mean, the sad truth is those people will probably don't like Usucha or Koicha.

Zongjun · 15:10

Like if you force them to drink it, they probably wouldn't like it. Or maybe not at first. Do you need to build that consumer ladder to give them the right series of exposures to appreciate something? That's right. That's right.

Zongjun · 15:22

Like usucha and koicha honestly don't inherently taste good. I would be skeptical that a lot of people would try it for the first time and like default like it. Still to the this days, Ryan, like I don't enjoy most of the usucha like the the the level of usucha being delicious to me requires a very, very high quality standard and that's just not the case for most of the matcha nowadays.

Zongjun · 15:50

That's an interesting point. You have a self reinforcing loop with this mislabeled low quality ceremonial grade matcha being pushed onto consumers is actually better with milk. It's actually better with milk. It really is 1 + 1 = 3.

Zongjun · 16:08

It's a self validating loop. It is dead obvious to anyone who has any taste buds at all that it does taste better. They're actually doing some flavor improvement. And like if you don't have the context and if you've never had what most other like more experienced consumers would consider a higher quality product, a very umami rich product or expressive in some interesting ways.

Ryan · 16:34

But you're they are right, it is better with milk. Why don't we cycle to some of the interviews that we've been trying? I think a really perfect segue to coming off of this thread is with coming from coal and this idea of tea addiction and natural upgrade cycle.

Zongjun · 16:54

And on a very interesting point of view regarding on advertisement like how do you market your matcha ass? I think that's one very interesting point that Co made do. You want to give us the excerpt? Yeah, sure. So Paul gave a very long and thoughtful answer to the question and I'm just going to lift some interesting points from from his words.

Zongjun · 17:18

So here is a interesting line. So brands and advertisers have done an amazing job popularizing matcha in the US and other countries throughout matcha latte. It's a much more approachable way to drink matcha, essentially replacing coffee in a latte format.

Zongjun · 17:35

So it's familiar, it's comforting, and it's easy to adapt to. But this is where things get muddy. Now that people are hooked on matcha lattes, they're trying to figure out what kind of matcha to use. Naturally, when anyone buys something, you know, something good, something that they want, and they want to get the best, or at least the best they can afford in that category. The tricky part with matcha is that for lattes, you don't actually want the highest quality matcha. Instead you want one that's astringent or a little bit bitter because those flavors stand up to milk and sweetener better. So I don't think this is unique

Zongjun · 18:18

to Matcha. It happens in all kinds of aspects or space. Take gaming for example. If you are shopping for a graphic card and no one wants the lowest or the lower end options, even though it's cheaper, Even if it's perfectly fine for the games you play.

Zongjun · 18:35

Everyone wants the latest, greatest top of the line product even if it's not necessary for what they need. And with Matcha this gets more complicated because people often see terms like astringent or bitter and they got shield away.

Zongjun · 18:51

They assume those qualities are bad, and so they. Gravitated. Towards more premium, higher quality matcha. And that's not really what they're designed for. So very interesting point that Kohu made right here is that it's a, it's also a marketing problem, yeah. Like, you know, for, for, for these much, you know, instead of, I guess you know, instead of calling them bitter or astringent, maybe calling them as full body or, you know, pungent or potent.

Zongjun · 19:23

That might actually change a lot of people's point of view. Yeah, and actually this is something I've been thinking a lot about recently because you know, we're trying to source tencha for a mill that we're prototyping now that can mill matcha fresh to a very similar quality standard as ishi-usu used to and for us it's a it. I'm torn because what personally I'm interested in is what like I classify specialty matcha, single origin single cultivar and teas that express some unique process or some unique in flavor variations depending on terroir and all sorts of other things.

Ryan · 19:59

Like cultivar. On the other hand, right? The vast majority of consumptions in the form of a latte. And like our business models to go B to B with these mills and like you have to create matcha for everyone and at everyone at all points in their consumer journey. So how do we like, no one wants a culinary grade product for a matcha latte.

Ryan · 20:19

That term has been so abused and stigmatized. And you don't want that level of qualities I'm doing you need a ceremonial grade. That's how you get this nice bright green color, blah, blah, blah. So it is kind of a marketing problem and calling the implications behind culinary grade are just bad things that people don't like. People don't want to hear bitter and astringent, even if it's better.

Ryan · 20:48

And even if you look at things like espresso, roast and coffee or coffee that's designed to be mixed with milk, none of those roasters are writing bitter and astringent on the bag, even if it's descriptive, right and accurate, right?

Ryan · 21:02

They're writing other flavor notes to trying people to appreciate something. And it's something that the best food and beverage companies do in other industries is that there's a lot of focus on priming someone to notice something that they'll like more.

Ryan · 21:17

If anyone's ever had the experience of tasting something with a group and someone says, I taste this nice hazelnut note in this thing and you're like, wow, I totally get that, but I didn't get it. That is something that we would call below the level of perception.

Ryan · 21:34

You didn't notice it, but it's above the level of preference and the more things that you can call out that are below the level of perception but above the level of preference, That's what makes food subconsciously good, and moving that from the subconscious to the active mind can totally prime someone to like it more. Using terms like bitter and astringent, while accurate, might already be someone's expectations. Buying a culinary grade product or buying an espresso roast that would go into something more like milk. People expect coffee to be at least some level of bitterness and sometimes astringency and

Ryan · 22:13

same thing with most matcha products, but it's not helping people appreciate it more and finding those notes. Now what's important is that if you get those notes wrong, it's disingenuous. Now if someone does not get that note or a large percentage of that note, you're kind of mis sold to them. Yeah.

Zongjun · 22:32

But I I think also there's a problem right here is that they there is a very well established linkage between bitter and lower quality, right? Like bitterness is true, it's a reality. Like no matter how you call it or how you frame it, it's it's bitter in consumers mouth, but it doesn't necessarily mean it's lower quality.

Zongjun · 22:53

Like, you know, for all of the higher quality matcha out there, being called higher quality is really a legacy preference from the Japanese market. All of these, you know, hyper engineered, hyper fertilized, hyper pesticides, you know, high quality matcha tastes super umami, super sweet.

Zongjun · 23:13

But you know, there are a lot of those matcha nowadays being farmed with more natural, you know, nest pesticides use the more organic method. They are naturally more bitter, but they are also very high quality. Very complex. And very complex.

Zongjun · 23:30

So you know, like those matcha, you know, being, you know, like directly link with bitter thust lower quality. I think it's really a missing opportunity right here. Yeah, and it means different things to people in their consumer journey. So for example, we tried an incredibly high quality matcha blender in Tokyo called Tenmyo and it was bitter. And honestly without that bitter backbone, I don't think I would have enjoyed it.

Ryan · 23:56

It's like a Nebbiolo or a Barolo wine. Like there's there's certain profiles that need the stabilizing mechanism. Yeah, it needs the structure to bone to support the flavor profile the. Problem is, is when you're only getting bones, which is like some of the low quality quote UN quote ceremonial grade product that really does taste better with milk because the milk is adding the structure onto the bones, just in a very different way. But you know, Kohl's answer is really illuminating that it's really a marketing problem and every the problem with this is everyone is doing their job.

Ryan · 24:33

When you read between the lines of what Kohl's writing, the matcha companies are doing their job selling product, making money, promoting a traditional Japanese product. The consumers are doing their job, listening, learning to that education and trying to value and spend more money on the higher quality thing for the drink that they're preparing.

Ryan · 24:57

It actually makes perfect sense. It's a wonderful quote from Charlie Munger, the famous investor, and he said, show me the incentives and I'll show you the results. Very wonderful phrase, but that's exactly what's going on here. Everyone's doing their job.

Ryan · 25:13

They were following the natural path of incentives, so it's interesting. Yeah, this is one very interesting angle. Yeah, another angle that I found very eye opening and something that I don't think a lot of people spend enough time thinking about, especially in the United States, is just the sheer cost of matcha.

Ryan · 25:32

So Monique for matcha Moments is based in the Philippines and she wrote here in the Philippines, matcha is very expensive. The 20 gram can often cost as much as a day's minimum wage. So not that many people can afford it.

Ryan · 25:45

So when I first started drinking it, I treated it very carefully. So it's interesting, we talk about scarcity and abundance in terms of like net availability. But of course, net availability totally depends on what you can and cannot afford.

Ryan · 25:59

And if you're talking about the average consumer in New York or California, right, it's a very different set of circumstances, the type of people that can afford to drink matcha than when you go to a place like the Philippines or like Thailand, like average wages are very different.

Ryan · 26:16

This is something that Jev from MTCH also talked about on the podcast that when you go into MTCH, when we're in Thailand and we go to MTCH, before we go there, we typically eat lunch because you can't drink a lot of much on an empty stomach.

Ryan · 26:31

We spent half the amount of our lunch that we do when we walk into MTCH and like we're eating at like nicer like random restaurants in the center of like like Sukhumvit in Bangkok in prime city location, right? Even for like a normal nice delicious meal cost half of what a matcha does when you go into a store. Yeah, this is this is also a social, social economic issue. Yes, it's almost.

Zongjun · 27:07

You can draw an analogy between this and, you know, the spice trade back in the days. Some areas in the world people are just naturally as more capacity to buy more matcha and there's nothing you can do about it really in that case, which is very sad. Yeah, wow.

Ryan · 27:25

It's very sad. It was a very interesting perspective and how like respecting other consumers and their ability to whether or not they can afford things. It's kind of like a culture of affluence. It's like, like throwing this in like other people's spaces where I'm taking the $60.00 can that in any other context has a lot of interesting, subtle and complex flavors and probably covering up over those unknowingly.

Zongjun · 27:54

You know, it's like a type of consumption vanity. But, you know, it really, it's a really hard problem because, you know, naturally people from wealthier countries, they want to buy more matcha, you know, as a consumer.

Zongjun · 28:06

And naturally, for people in Japan who are producing matcha, they want to sell more matcha for a higher price. So the only misaligned interest right here are people who cannot afford more expensive matcha. I'm talking about the authenticity debate that we recorded recently.

Ryan · 28:24

It's a real shame. Like innovations such as a ball mill can actually produce really high quality product. And those elitists on the coast of the US and in other rich countries calling that not matcha and not authentic when it's like, let's say you're a lower to middle class person in the Philippines or in Thailand. That's like literally all you have economic access to. To call that not authentic is just like horrible like it really is.

Zongjun · 28:55

Yeah, yeah. But it it's produced by two very different farmers doing very different things at very different scales. And actually, we've met these people. They're both very interested in quality on one end. They're thinking about it much more industrially, mass agriculture quality perspective.

Zongjun · 29:12

But the number of times that they use the word quality is insane. And they can invest in much more expensive techniques like analytical lab testing, testing the amino acid content on HPLC in a lab. I mean, no small farmer is doing that or using an AI optical sorter to sort out different material.

Zongjun · 29:31

It's just using different set of technology, but they have the scale to do it and it's driving quality up and it's driving costs down South. To make this distinction is very unfair if you look across the socioeconomic spectrum of consumers. Really, back to my earlier point, you know, it's really not just about adding milk or using better matcha. It's it's consumer gaslighting.

Ryan · 29:53

It's one group of more experienced, wealthier consumer bullying a different group. Yeah. And in some ways it's a form of creating a form of social distinction and economic distinction. It's really elitism. It's. Self labeling. So Monique is also an Urasenke student and went into matcha and her matcha journey with that lens. And she made a really interesting point is that without a tea ceremony background, usucha can be considered a very foreign concept. And she wrote, I was influenced by chanoyu and got used to drinking usucha.

Ryan · 30:27

That's how I've always preferred it. Although I know many matcha consumers don't like that way of consuming matcha because it's quote UN quote bitter. And that, I mean, that's super interesting too. Like sometimes people who are deep down the rabbit hole of matcha kind of forget that usucha and koicha is kind of an obscure thing and that the first time most people try it, they probably are not going to enjoy it the same way that most people don't enjoy like tea. Look at the number of people that take two sugars and milk and tea across all contacts.

Zongjun · 31:00

That's interesting. Actually, this is a really interesting analogy to bubble tea. So like Hong Kong style and Taiwanese style tea was looking. Those were Asian consumers and Asian businesses looking to the West in Western tea culture in Britain and England of this idea of milk tea. And that pendulum swung back to Hong Kong and Taiwan mostly, which at least that's where these are like idea of like this bubble milk tea originated, kind of did their own versions of it, hyper localized it.

Zongjun · 31:35

And then that became super popular back in the States where you have all of these like Gong Chas and Cocoa whatever, and like newer brands like Tiger Sugar. It's kind of a pendulum that swings back and forth of cross cultural inspiration. Matcha latte and adding matcha with milk is kind of exactly in line with this type of cross cultural cross pollination of one culture.

Zongjun · 32:02

And it's just people who are on the where the pendulum used to be for these very traditional practitioners think there's an issue with it. Yeah, I think there's a very simple nature to all of this phenomenon is that they are delicious. People like it very.

Ryan · 32:18

Simple, easy explanation, yeah. But which brings a very interesting point that Marc from Ooika make is that, you know, adding milk to a single origin matcha makes it not single origin anymore, which was totally legit, you know, like, and I actually think that this is a very valid point and doesn't necessarily contradict to our opinion earlier.

Ryan · 32:39

There are some matcha were made to be single origin and to be a consumed that way and adding milk. It's just, you know, you're missing the point. It's like, you know, iPhone spending so much time and money and so many engineers trying to make their phone thin and then you slap a giant in the phone case on top of it like it's a it's an interesting point and I think I'm agree with with Marc.

Ryan · 33:03

On that, yeah. Or it's like buying your grandparents like a really high end iPhone and they only use it to make calls. It's just like not quite what all of the effort went into for its intended use case. So the intentionality of products matter right here and usage of product. Yeah, and something that Marc wrote about Ooika, let me find the line here.

Ryan · 33:25

Here it is. He says. At Ooika, we do not serve our single origin matcha with milk or with sugar. So they make a distinction between blends, which they can mix with some interesting flavor concepts ranging from like Dubai pistachio to mango to cherries to strawberries, right? Like it's really matcha as an ingredient and not covering up the single origin, single cultivar aspects, right? And I mean, that's specialty, right? When you venture into the realm of specialty is where you start enjoying the inherent variation that can exist from the fact that it's an agricultural product. Yeah.

Zongjun · 34:01

I think also back to Cole's point earlier is that this is really a marketing issue, right? Like specialty doesn't necessarily means higher quality or higher quality doesn't necessarily equals to specialty. You know, you can have perfectly higher quality matcha that is not single origin and you can use it however you want. And if a product was created to be appreciated as it in its single origin form, then adding milk. It's just really, you know, destroying the point. Is it or is it not?

Zongjun · 34:31

So this is where you get into not only intentions of the producer, but the intentions and skill of the preparer. You could make a very So I would say, let's use SU Ji San's competition, Great Asahi at one third place at the National Tea Competition as an example. That's a tea that's hand sorted with chopsticks. Like Suji San has spent like his entire life experience and his own hands making the best product he could possibly ever try to make.

Zongjun · 35:01

It is like the pinnacle of perfection, of continuous improvement of generations of inherited knowledge. And there's not very much of this stuff made. Mixing that with milk, I don't think anyone is going to argue you shouldn't be doing that. It is an incredibly scarce resource. But then where's the line?

Ryan · 35:21

So I had a really interesting experience in Chiang Mai at Chaseki with Tom. I guess it was about a year ago now. And they have this super interesting single cultivar Gelato series. And if you would have asked me before I tried these products what I would thought, think of mixing high quality Uji Hikari with milk in the form of a Gelato, I might have said, yeah, you might be destroying some things that make that product really good. And then I tasted it the best.

Ryan · 35:53

It was a perspective changing moment for me in the savory umami-ness being not masked but haloed by the milk. There was not a hint of bitterness and it was the most umami expression of matcha I've ever had with milk and it was shocking to me. It was like I have never tasted a combination of flavors quite like that.

Ryan · 36:25

It's kind of like having high end gyokuro for the first time and you get that like drop of mouth watering savoriness. It was very similar to this flavor. And I think it just comes down to scale. I mean you could take like Michelin star restaurants taking some of the finest ingredients ever made than crafting them into something special versus just someone like taking slop and plopping it onto your plate with very little care or intentionality. Then I find actually very similar matcha latte experiences at MTCH where people think that you need bitterness in the astringency to stand up to milk and then you can get make 1 + 1 = 3.

Ryan · 37:07

But some of these actually highly complex, highly umami, considered highly specialty product can be transformed into these very unique expressions. And I think it's very hard to do and I think the average person cannot do that very easily and it is a waste in most circumstances.

Zongjun · 37:27

But when it's not, it is incredible and reaches sort of the pinnacle of using matcha as an ingredient. Yeah, but also on the other hand, right? Like, imagine using the example you made earlier, sushi sounds, you know, unprecedented production of that batch of matcha exclusively to this incredible Gelato, and you have the capital to buy the whole production year of that year, and you turn that into Gelato entirely.

Zongjun · 37:58

And I don't think that's also acceptable, even though it's a wonderful sensory experience. So I think there is a very vague line to be drawn right there. And that's the right root of the conflict, right? That's what makes this conversation, if not fascinating from a topic perspective, fascinating from a sociological perspective, is that everyone draws this line in a different place.

Ryan · 38:21

And you have a lot of people, you know it. Matcha is a human endeavor, which makes it incredibly fascinating. And you know, you have all these hard line people saying that it makes matcha like way less authentic. But a point that Marc makes that's really fascinating and important to bring up here is that most matcha farmers have their own agency and they don't necessarily care. And as Marc puts it, and I'll read off of what he said, it's not, this is not controversial and it is common knowledge that Japanese tea industry will continue to shrink. And it's it's going to be up to the West to stabilize and grow the industry.

Ryan · 39:00

The farmers that are producing tea for 10 or 20 generations intrinsically understand that different cultures have different perspectives. And if these differences and preferences mean that they continue producing matcha, I'm sure most of them will be happy with it.

Ryan · 39:16

And that's coming directly from someone that works with tons of like multi generational small producers and like talks directly with them. Like again, the farmers, if you go directly to the source, don't really care. It's like some of all of these other people that get defensive of usually other people's culture are the ones that are being the loudest in this debate.

Zongjun · 39:41

Yeah. And to a lot of the extent, you know, there are a lot of farmers in Japan that don't have agencies. Like how can they care? Like their entire production is being procured by some larger blend houses and then get sold to a larger retailer and that's and then gets branded as, you know, all sorts of other things.

Ryan · 40:03

Like they cannot care if they don't have the urgency and they don't know where their products end up going to. And all they want is to sell more much for more matcha and sell it for a higher price. And that's their ultimate incentive. Yeah.

Zongjun · 40:17

And you know, something that not enough people talk about is that producers live on a spectrum too. But you have people that are just like money motivated. I'm sure like the very well capitalized winner really need to be thought of as businesses, especially in very high volume production areas like Kagoshima or Shizuoka, right?

Zongjun · 40:40

That's not always tea people that are quote UN quote tea people that are like really running the show and making the decision like they are businesses. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you have farmers that make incredible sacrifices to create an incredibly high quality product. So something that Bryan from Matsu Matcha wrote is say you were to use high quality matcha powder that is so subtly nuanced and it's super gentle, luxuriously smooth, naturally sweet up from the high quality tencha. Then using this type of matcha powder in lattes is really bad and disrespectful.

Zongjun · 41:17

I feel that it's disrespectful to the producers and the farmer and it's also just a big waste of what is ultra rare matcha powder. So I think the other spectrum is of these farmers is not all matcha farm. We can't classify the matcha production industry as one thing either. And you have like these large volume players making stuff for people.

Ryan · 41:42

And where it all gets muddied is kind of at the vendor level where everyone's pretending to source the best product. Not everyone can be sourcing the best product. Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's really interesting and you know, we know from primary experiences that when you taste things the way they weren't meant to be intended, you're not getting the most out of your tea.

Zongjun · 42:05

It's so Bryan also wrote. Cuz with these super high quality, subtle and ultra smooth matcha, adding anything to it will cause it to lose its flavor profile and will be a big waste. Consuming this in large quantities for lattes and as a trend might result in matcha enthusiasts who use these matcha powder for koicha and usucha to not have the opportunity to drink them the way it's intended.

Ryan · 42:29

I totally agree. It's really vendor's fault to, you know, done such a poor job educating their own consumers. A lot of these buyers are largely innocent. They just want to buy better stuff for their own consumption. But you know, better is very contextual.

Ryan · 42:47

It more premium, higher quality Asahi single origin matcha might actually taste, you know, worse in milk versus some, you know, okumidori blend. It's it's really vendor's wall to have done such a poor job informing their consumer what is actually good in their usage context.

Ryan · 43:06

Yeah. And the problem is too is that everyone assumes that, that a lot, I shouldn't say everyone, a lot of people and a lot of marketing in matcha assume that the consumer is stupid and they need to be told how to use things. And there's a not really much of a culture of experimentation and like this idea what we would call in Chinese tea ceremonies, gongfu or skill to make choices.

Zongjun · 43:30

And actually, if you really go to the most niche, most specialty, most rare high end matcha, I would argue from experience now that it is a waste to use high, ultra high quality matcha. As Usucha added that the best flavor expressions that you can bring out of the tea is only in the form of koicha. And now having tasted so many teas as koicha and then watered down as usucha and comparing those back-to-back, you don't get the full luxurious, smooth, subtlety nuance as a usucha. You only get those flavor expression as koicha, which really is the pinnacle of this high quality thing. And also what's interesting,

Zongjun · 44:17

interesting thing is that, you know, like those koicha, those ultra high end matcha is, you know, are they delicious? Yes, they are. Are they great? Are they expensive? Yes, they are. Do I want to drink them every day? Probably not actually. It's so intense and so memorable. And you know, frequently my stomach doesn't also respond very well to such intensity.

Zongjun · 44:43

But you know, like I think that's that's a natural solution to this whole high end matcha scarcity problem. Like if there there are teas that meant to be consumed in such a way that you can appreciate it most with less frequency. Yeah, there you go.

Zongjun · 44:59

You don't need to drink the best matcha every day, and you can experiment what works best, in which context, at the most optimal price for you and what you can afford. And that this culture of overconsumption is a problem at this highly intentional side of things where there is a scarcity, There is not really a scarcity of low quality, what we'll call average, quote UN quote, ceremonial crate matcha.

Ryan · 45:27

Have you noticed that anyone sourcing tea from Kagoshima or Shizuoka doesn't have a matcha shortage right now? I mean, they can be single origins, yeah, but it's really just different. Use and not to hate on those regions, it's just where the really industrial mass production lies. I mean, there's lots of great producers there too, and maybe there's a shortage of the really high end stuff, but like where you see this high use of technology for mass yield, you know, you see it in in these types of areas. I feel like we hate on Kagoshima and Shizuoka too much, especially for two people that have never physically been there all ourselves out.

Ryan · 46:03

But you know, like mass produced doesn't necessarily mean is just like that. Be perfectly fine with your daily usage. We've had a lot of those products. Some of them actually taste pretty good. Yeah. Although I am very against charging 60 bucks for a can of that stuff. Overpriced is the issue, but that's also vendors fault. Yeah, pretty soon we're going to be vendors too. Sam, we, we need to be careful here. We'll have very different perspectives when we're on the other side of the table.

Zongjun · 46:36

Yeah, we have bias too. Yeah, so such a complex topic and there was quite a bit to unwrap. So I think it's a perfect place to stop. And to conclude, huge thank you to everyone about contribute to this where we were sourcing perspectives.

Ryan · 46:52

So huge thank you to Monique, to Cole, to Marc, to Bryan. If it wasn't for this community that we have to source these perspectives, we'd have be literally talking in an echo chamber. It's just what I feel like a lot of these people with very strong opinions on the Internet blaming matcha girlies ruining matcha matcha girlies on TikTok actually I think is the most commonly used, right?

Ryan · 47:17

But you know, it's probably the matcha girlies on TikTok that are going to save the Japanese tea industry because that's where all the growth is. And without growth, you don't have any dynamism in an industry. Let's go, girls. Let's go seriously all new magic consumers. Everyone just needs to have more respect for each other and to have a greater degree of understanding and understanding this.

Ryan · 47:37

So anyway, if you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing Friends. Or if you have some strong opinion, please share to us. Yeah, please do share. Love to, you know, source even more opinions and put it out in the space and what we hope is a very thoughtful, considered set of perspectives and we'll see you on the next one.

Zongjun · 47:56

See you in the future.