Matcha Sensory

Ryan · 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is Zongjun. Hello. Hello. Who also goes by Sam and we're the Co founders of Sanko Matcha products. Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha, show startup stories and interview experts. And today we're going to do a little bit of a sensory test of some interesting combination of matcha. But what is sensory?

Ryan · 0:28

Yeah. What is sensory? So sensory is sort of the art and science of tasting, flavor and the experience, the primary experience, what we would call a primary sensory experience that we're all interacting with. Everyone says that taste is king, and it certainly really does matter, especially in like the current environment that we find ourselves in. There's a whole new generation of matcha consumers that are interacting with these products in a very different way. I'm learning about agricultural practices, learning about cultivars, learning about growing regions, but ultimately it's all about tying that stuff

Ryan · 1:02

back to the flavor. Whereas, you know, the former generation of matcha consumers for the last few 100 years, it was all in a ceremonial context and the exact taste of the tea wasn't necessarily front and center. So the sensory part was very hidden away by skilled tea blenders and tea purveyors and people that owned these blend houses and their job was just to deliver a product that tasted the same year after year after year.

Ryan · 1:28

And there's a lot of merit to that. But there's also a lot of merit in all of this natural diversity of flavors based on the cultivation methods called Vars, the growing regions, the fertilizer applied, and all of these things. And it makes sensory become much more important from like this back end quality control art and magic of blending to now it's something that we can all use and enjoy and it can enhance our experience and it allows us to justify paying more for a higher product because we're tasting things that we really enjoy. All of these founders that we've had on have these aha moments. They taste something and it just

Ryan · 2:08

blows their mind. I think my first tea from Yame was like a really like transition was really a pivotal moment in my matcha learning journey of just expanding like, wow, matcha can taste like this. It's like holy crap. So we wanted to record an episode talking about how we view sensory, how we've seen other people do it, and a couple of frameworks that might be useful both for consumers listening as well as much of businesses that need to do some type of flavor measurement sensory tests to make sure that their products that they're getting are the same quality and how to communicate the flavor of these different things to their

Zongjun · 2:48

consumers. And so as long as you want to talk a little bit about our background in sensory in general, that kind of sets the stage for our perspective. Yeah. So in our last company, we used to work for these AI platforms that basically quantified and measures how people perceive flavor across different, you know, language, different dietary background, different culture, you know, scattering all continents.

Zongjun · 3:12

And we basically use this technology to kind of trying to understand from a very, you know, quantifiable way how exactly people perceive different flavor differently and how that difference led to different preference of different flavor and flavor combinations.

Zongjun · 3:29

So we used to work on very complicated projects with formulators to trying to turn that description, turn those figures into actual formulation, actual samples or products. And people can taste and try and like or dislike, usually dislike if, but it's something that people already like.

Zongjun · 3:46

They won't find us. Yeah, there's a We've tasted a lot of bad products in our time. It might sound cool, like being a professional caramel ice cream taster for a day, but not after you've tried like 20 of them. That's really not that cool if you're a professional. Instant ramen.

Zongjun · 4:03

But yeah, some, you know, traumatizing moment for, you know, doing that for a very long time. And we always get asked about sensory. So actually, for the last approximately the last decade of my life, I have been thinking about sensory and explaining it to other people, as well as criticizing traditional methodologies and how, you know, using more advanced methods can yield far superior results. So we're actually like, I, I don't like to tutor on whore. We're weirdly qualified to talk about this topic. And because we spent so much time, energy and effort and the hours that we used to work were

Zongjun · 4:38

insane because it was a really high, fast start, high paced startup. I remember I've done like so many like 1820 hour days, like many days in a row. It was very challenging, especially with our Japanese clients. I just remember all the time saying laid up into the night, making sure that they got the support that they needed. So it's brings back some good and bad memories. But we were in AI.

Ryan · 5:02

Everyone likes to say in the current matcha landscape that they entered it before the matcha boom. And I'm very proud to say that we were working on that. I had started working on that 2014 way before this, like cha chi, TP moment and Sam. I think you joined in 2018. Yeah, it was a interesting time because this at the time, new technology really kind of revolutionized how people perceive and understand sensory from a traditional perspective. Like the the the art and science of sensory had exist for a long time.

Zongjun · 5:36

The whole modern sensory concept really started from 18 is developed to these days with very minimal changes on the understanding of how people perceive and understand and articulate flavors. So our technology really kind of, you know, solve the pinpoint of like if when you are coming from a different cultural background, different age, different socio economic status, different exposure to their own flavor. Like how do you make people essentially understand each other in terms of what are you tasting differently or what you're tasting?

Zongjun · 6:11

You are tasting something that's actually the same, but you're just using different ways to describe. So why is that important? Why do you need to know people's perceptual differences? That's super important. Like with this is actually you are trying to.

Zongjun · 6:23

What you are trying to do or what a lot of these people trying to do back in the days is just set up a language, a vocabulary set that people can essentially communicate with each other in terms of flavor. And without that vocabulary, like you you we are basically talking over each other and not nothing can essentially get done by the end of the day.

Zongjun · 6:43

Yeah, but if you're a food and beverage company, why does it matter so much? Why can't you just ask someone how much they like a particular product? Well, I mean like if you are a very tiny studio developing a lemonade for your local community, it's probably fine.

Zongjun · 6:57

But for a lot of these, like larger companies with the international audience, like sitting in the lab in New York City making a formulation of the new yoga, like you won't necessarily understand the preference of like some middle-aged female in Southeast Asia that you are speaking different language, you you like different things.

Zongjun · 7:18

And you're literally tasting different. Things literally tasting different things in the same product. So that's not going to work right? Like you are not going to create or like if you are insanely lucky, maybe you do, but frequently you run into situation that you are not going to create a product that it will be liked by that particular audience. So our AI at the time was basically like imagine like a Google Translate, but you know doing that in terms of flavor. So you perception and perception. So you can input your own perception into the platform and the AI understands both consumer cohorts in terms of their tasting habit, the language that

Zongjun · 8:00

they'd like to use and also like things that all the flavor combinations that they like. So they can translate what the New York formulators perception and preference into the target audience preference and perception. And using that layer of translation, we can tell the formulators to tweak the formulation ingredients to create something that people will like.

Ryan · 8:22

Yeah. So setting a bit of context. So if any of the Machu founders or even like consumers out there, research sensory methodologies to bring into their own practice, either for product development or for sourcing or for even just enjoying matcha as a product and then taking really good notes. The most common analysis or the most common method for tasting that you'll probably come across is something called descriptive analysis.

Ryan · 8:47

And descriptive analysis actually has a descriptive name. It's literally where you describe the flavors that you're tasting and you're not passing judgment on if it's good or if it's bad, and you're just quantifying it across some set of what are called attributes it.

Ryan · 9:03

So they might be something like bitter or sweet or sour or umami or vegetal. All are potential attributes. But because different product categories are so diverse, right, like if you're tasting something like wine versus something like coffee versus something like matcha, the frequency of different flavors can be very different, right?

Ryan · 9:23

To detect something like a seaweed note, it's probably pretty rare in a wine, but might be very common in something like a matcha. So this is where what we call lexicon development comes in. And lexicon is basically a predetermined set of words usually chosen by experts in a field that have they have decided that these attributes are important to the set. And there are always compromises when you're doing lexicon development.

Ryan · 9:51

It is a form of reduction. It's a form of generalization. There's always some like compression data loss. So let's do let's invert this problem. Let's say you're tasting A matcha and I give you a single attribute, bitter. You can rank it on how bitter you find it, or I can give you 2 attributes, bitter and umami.

Ryan · 10:11

Now we've added two dimensions and then you can keep adding and adding and adding and adding flavor, getting more and more and more dimensions. But still, let's say you taste a sweet scallop or oyster note. Or are you like the shijimi, these little tiny baby clams that they have in Japan?

Ryan · 10:28

You have the very umami shijimi clam. Let's say you taste that. Let's say you're very lucky and you get to taste this in a matcha. There's probably not an attribute for that somewhere. So it's still a form of data reduction and what they do traditionally to get around the fact that, let's say for example, I'm half American, half Korean, ethnically speaking, Sam is 100% Chinese, ethnically speaking, because of genetic differences, because of the fact that Sam grew up in Guangzhou and I grew up in Pennsylvania. And our two year age difference, you know, all of these factors can contribute to the fact that

Ryan · 11:03

we might literally might not be looking at the same painting, so to speak, when we're tasting matcha. So what you do historically is something called reference training or calibration. So for example, we would prepare a sucrose solution at some percentage sugar to water and we both taste it. We say, okay, we taste this, we agree it's a three out of five on sweetness, and this is going to be our anchor. And you can do this across many, many, many different flavors. And now what you've done is you've calibrated us so you're essentially treating a human like a dumb instrument. And that is, quite frankly, the

Ryan · 11:36

only way descriptive analysis is going to work in a logically consistent way when you're doing any form of. Analytical tasting. Tasting or data collection for matcha I'm so say you get together a group of 10-15 people and you ask everyone to rank across some arbitrary set of attributes that you have determined are important.

Ryan · 11:57

The variance that you see in that data or the different scores that you see for bitterness are not any form of right or wrong. They're just different because people literally might taste the sample or the matcha more bitter, and some people might take it taste it less bitter, which leads to some pretty challenging things in characterizing matcha. So like, what should matcha brands do? Like, should they be creating these little flavor charts to communicate the relative degrees of bitterness or umami or creaminess or vegetal?

Ryan · 12:29

And if they do do that, how do they decide what attributes matter? Like the ones that I just talked about, you know, you hear them tossed around a lot, but like, what do you think the probability is that it's going to encompass the whole flavor profile and that someone looks at that and agrees that, yeah, it it's about right?

Zongjun · 12:48

Yeah. Yeah, I mean pretty low is what I'm thinking. Like like for a bitterness 5 like first of all, like frequently like 5 out of what? Like what is the scale that they're using? Sometimes it's like very vague. That's the first way.

Zongjun · 13:02

Second, like even if you have a scale system to to inform people the measurement like you like people don't essentially you don't essentially know the sweetness or the bitterness tolerance of the audience that you're talking to.

Zongjun · 13:17

Like those data or those things are essentially meaningless. And what's probably only meaningful is that you have a portfolio of product and then you have a bitterness level 1, bitterness Level 3 and the bitterness level 5.

Zongjun · 13:31

And people can just locally compare those products and tell themselves, OK, this one is less bitter and this one is more bitter. So you anchor them in your own references. Yeah, in that particular context. But what happens when next year's harvest comes around and bitter Level 3 changes? Well, it will still be bitter Level 3 and it will still be Gokumukashi.

Ryan · 13:52

You know, it's a different product. Yeah. So what should companies do? Should they just give a bunch of tasting notes? Should they try to be very specific like cuz ultimately what we're trying to do is market products to consumers, how do we get and let them know what to expect?

Ryan · 14:08

So for example, I love hazelnut notes in matcha. When that hazelnut note shows up, I am like very primed to like it. And I actually really like seeing that in the description. But also if they're ranking the attributes of many different important flavors like bitterness or umami or creaminess and they're wrong, I feel lied to. And essentially, as a brand, you need to be extremely conservative in this because there is going to be natural variation in perception and you need to account for the lowest common denominator or risk a pretty large amount of cognitive dissonance in terms of expectation that's created by the label and the reality of

Ryan · 14:47

their primary sensory experience. Because I personally have ordered matcha that was sort of a budget everyday matcha that was advertised as not bitter at all from a really, you know, prominent US brand. And like, it was horrid. I don't know how anyone in good conscience could call that not bitter.

Zongjun · 15:05

Maybe you're just different, Ryan. Maybe. But yeah, I agree, it's really, really difficult. Like honestly, I don't have a good answer of a solution to that because it's not even just about the measurements of these flavor intensities, but sometimes the flavor itself. Like when you are using some kind of a very local description, like certain type of like what would you say certain type of clam or certain type of kombu or like even like hazelnuts.

Zongjun · 15:36

Like there are like some places or some area, regions in the world just not being, you know, that that's not really a common ingredient. Like they, they probably like that it's still meaningless to them. So yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's an interesting question.

Ryan · 15:51

I mean, like we kind of invented the solution to that, that we no longer have access to that technology. I wish we do. Yeah. But Even so, I mean, even if you're able to translate across languages, it's not like you have a digital product label where you can change it depending on, you know, where it's going. So it's actually a really tricky problem and. If you want to do it well.

Ryan · 16:12

If you want to do it. If you want to take it seriously and as a very sensory science perspective. So there's a couple of frameworks that we've seen and that I've really liked over the years. One of them is from Johnny Matcha and he describes like sort of the archetypal characteristics that other people like about certain cultivars. So he doesn't like give.

Ryan · 16:35

At least he didn't. This was I guess about a year ago when I saw this. He doesn't say my Asahi tastes like this, this, this and this. He said Asahi generally tastes like this and these are flavors that people generally like about it. So it's not top down, it's bottom up. It's just giving someone knowledge and context enough to appreciate it and to and make a judgment for themselves. So I think this is really cool.

Zongjun · 17:00

Yeah, it's enough ambiguity for people to kind of leave imagination for people to explore themselves or disagree, disagree with. Yeah, a specific tasting notes. I've like all of the matcha that we've purchased recently and I taste it. I like to taste it before reading the tasting notes. And I'm like, I don't know if I agree, But of course you can incept people too.

Ryan · 17:25

So that's the other piece of interesting magic that's done in the food and beverage industry in general is that you can cue people into certain flavors or different aspects and they're much, much, much more likely to, I first like, perceive and identify them and then say whether or not they like or dislike them. And so that's actually a huge risk when you're putting flavors on a label is say someone like me, I don't like grassiness and matcha.

Ryan · 17:50

If anyone's putting that on the descriptor, I might have not. I've not tasted it. But now that I've read it, I'm primed. And now that I'm primed, the probability that I will taste it and that it will become my reality is much higher. Yeah, yeah.

Zongjun · 18:04

And one way to kind of navigate it and we kind of been seeing people doing in the world of Scotch tasting is we frequently called those people poets is to kind of bury that inception into some very poetic and, you know, descriptive like scene.

Zongjun · 18:25

Like this Scotch tastes like, you know, the ocean currents striking on the piece of rock covered with like seaweed or like this. This tastes like as if I'm walking in the pine forest after a rainy day. Like this kind of very descriptive, descriptive, yet kind of flavorful, animated, flavorful kind of scene description. It's it's a different way to kind of insect people, but leading towards a more positive outcome of that inception. It's not like a direct inception like people tend to think about, like something more beautiful when you articulate a beautiful scene.

Ryan · 19:05

No, that's true. And it's a nice like honest way of incepting people too, because you see a lot of dishonesty in this type of marketing. Like it's not bitter at all or it's very umami or super creamy. And if it just doesn't translate in the cup and quite frankly for like, it might not be that much a brand owners fault. You know, maybe someone like bought it and waited two months and didn't get to it.

Ryan · 19:27

Maybe it was given to them as a gift, but it was a re gift and it was sitting in someone's cabinet for, you know, who knows how long. Maybe it was like really hot summer day and it got stuck in some warehouse when it was being mailed to them and it degraded very quickly.

Ryan · 19:42

Like, you know, you just don't know what's causing this type of variation, which, you know, leads to some potential risk. But I think it really comes down to just understanding your consumers and what they like and dislike, like what will prime them and be honest about it. If that flavor is not in the product, don't put it on. But you know if someone and you like know very clearly. A large part of my consumer base loves dark chocolate notes. Maybe that makes more sense to call it out because the reality is any one of these matchas probably has anywhere between 10 to 20.

Ryan · 20:14

Some of the more complex ones, maybe even more identifiable flavors where someone could quite honestly say and they go through a list saying I, I taste some, some woodiness, some earthiness, A slight mushroom notes and dashi, some toasted nori notes. It's creamy, kind of like unsalted butter. There's a little bit of lemon zest has a nice after taste, almost reminds me of hot chocolate or something like that, right.

Ryan · 20:38

Like it's there's a lot of different potential ways of describing this. So what do you think about flavor wheels, Sam? You see these all the all over, like specialty coffee and wine and all of and chocolate. A lot of people use flavor wheels, but what do we think about those? Good, bad, neutral.

Zongjun · 20:55

Yeah, I mean the wheel itself and for most contexts when people using it, it's still a form of reduction, right? You like, you only will have a number of axes on the flavor wheel for you to select and for you to to to interact with.

Zongjun · 21:11

So, So what we have done in the previous technology is that we introduce a secondary kind of description layer underneath the flavor wheel. So when you actually click into a certain axis and select the intensity of, for example, like fruity, you can actually input what kind of fruit are you actually tasting like do you like that flavor or you not, or it's a neutral flavor to you.

Zongjun · 21:34

So that's kind of difficult to to rendered when this wheel is printed on the sheet of paper or on your package. Like it's just not possible. One of the real weaknesses of these wheels, too, is they attempt to do some form of categorization. So the worst forms of categorization are color. Colors are not flavors.

Zongjun · 21:55

You cannot have a yellow section, a red section, a green section, a bronze section. I mean, you do hear sometimes like flavourists and people who work in the industry talk about the concept of a green flavor or a brown flavor, but like, what does that mean? And especially what does that mean to someone who's not in industry?

Zongjun · 22:16

Probably people have very different ideas in their mind. But also you don't want to pigeonhole yourself because there's a lot of flavor expressions that have really different tonalities. So something like what's a good example? Even something like caramel, right? Caramel can be very sweet expression. It can be an incredibly butter expression, even a very very dark caramels, almost burnt and have more roasted characteristics of caramel.

Zongjun · 22:43

You can have salted caramel, which have more mineral characteristics and coming from the salt, and you can have various forms of smoked caramel, perhaps depending on the ingredients that it's coming from and the sugar, the butter being used. And you can have like all of them above, just in different intensity.

Zongjun · 23:01

Yeah, absolutely. So like why does it just have to exist under one particular category, you know, when one category could be something like roasted, but the other category could be a very like dairy forward expression of caramel?

Zongjun · 23:15

Yeah. And sometimes like flavors like egg, like really you, you it's kind of really hard to categorize that flavor, you know, based on a very generalized flavor category. Salty, or is it like meat? Is it like a pastry? It's.

Zongjun · 23:34

Like salted egg. Or salted egg, like salted egg. Or is it like a super soft like onsen egg that's still runny? Very different expressions, all the same word and all the same ingredient. Yeah, yeah. Like when people are using like a single flavor or like like egg or like caramel to describe a product or a flavor profile, people like sometimes don't understand the flavor itself is also a very complex flavor combination itself.

Zongjun · 24:05

So it's almost a little bit, how do I say that? It's almost like a tautology, like people using a complex system to describe another complex system, which is something that we frequently run into. It's like calling matcha tea like.

Ryan · 24:20

Yeah. Actually. Or calling a tea matcha. There I actually call a lot of matcha tea like and what that means to. I know exactly what it means in my own head. I don't think it's anything close to what you might think, Sam, or what anyone else might. I kind of get what you mean, like, but well, I also don't actually know, yeah.

Zongjun · 24:43

So it's, it's it's very tricky. So I think these flavor wheels that are more consumer facing kind of like the Specialty Coffee Association SCA flavor wheel for coffee, you know, there is their utility. Absolutely. Like if you want to prime consumers to notice subtlety and nuance in a product's flavor profile, you can read through that list and you it's much more likely that you'll identify a flavor if you read it. Oh, it's like, Oh yeah, exactly.

Zongjun · 25:12

It tastes just like this or Oh yeah, I definitely get that raspberry note in it. And now I really like it even more. But I wouldn't have thought about it because tasting is work. Like the cognitive load on identifying and articulating your primary sensory perception with anything is a lot of work.

Zongjun · 25:30

We used to say there is no Zen in sensory. Really high like cognitive load. And if you do like tastings for a few hours, you leave like exhausted. And we used to do this all day with consumers. Like we've trained, I've trained probably close to 10,000 consumers on how to articulate their perception and preference of, you know, all sorts of different food and beverage products and you leave at the end of the day so tired.

Zongjun · 25:55

I can't tell you how many like sensory reviews I've done and then have out of how many products. But you know, we really encourage everyone to be true to themselves and not try try to pick some reductionist methodology or necessarily even try to invent their own wheel beyond what how it's helpful for you.

Zongjun · 26:13

And you really have to think about the utility. Descriptive analysis has a very specific utility. It's to understand and to replicate data of different products so that anyone can taste it who's gone through that training. And if they tasted again blindly, they're going to give you the same results as if they tasted again blindly as the same results as someone else in another part of the world. And then you can start like, you know, changing the chemicals or the flavors in that sample. And then you can pretty reliably understand and see what the difference is.

Zongjun · 26:47

Descriptive analysis really is not necessary for most brands and it will take you so far away from your own perception because you'd have to go through that form of reference training and it will take you even further away from your consumers' perception. And then you have things like deductive tasting, like you see the wine people do where they try to guess. They taste for information like, oh, this tastes like Pinot Noir, this tastes like Burgundy, or this tastes like this or that, or this tastes like it went through this type of fermentation.

Zongjun · 27:17

And that's very useful if you're sourcing. It might be very useful if you're blending or involved in agriculture. But again, it has to have some end objective. So there is no such thing as sensory for the sake of sensory. You need to have some goal in mind, whether or not it's communicating that flavor to the consumer. In which case we think it might be even better just to learn what their preferences are, taste it, and make sure that you're highlighting the things that they will like. Can literally be that simple.

Ryan · 27:45

Yeah, make it simple. Actually. The amount of time people will actually spend on reading the sensory attributes on the label and also all understand all the flavor wheels that that that that people set up for their own product is probably very low. Yeah, and understanding their use cases as well, like there might be reason why someone wants bitterness or doesn't want bitterness or wants complexity or doesn't want complexity. Like you just don't know, like the decision matrix that's going on in someone's head and that matters like so much more than putting on some arbitrary flavor wheel where we don't know what you mean.

Ryan · 28:22

Why bitterness is level 5, for example. Yeah, like it like it because like I think this whole discussion actually needs to be move around intensity, which put another way, will it still taste good if it's diluted, which is the case for most lattes, Americanos using as ingredient?

Zongjun · 28:40

I think that's super interesting. I think some level of bitterness. Bitterness is a pretty strong dis preference. So some people might avoid it. And then at the high end, really articulating potential flavor notes that you think that they will like that they'll find in these cans that might highlight or be characteristic of those particular flavors.

Ryan · 28:59

Honzu shaded or shaded for a really long period of time, like 40 days. What about that specific can stood out to you when you decided to make it part of the selection? And it it's much more authentic to your own sourcing about that product to like deconstruct your decision to bring this to market and what you love about it.

Zongjun · 29:22

And if you frame it this way, not only is it more authentic to yourself, you're not telling anyone that this is the best and you should taste it. And it is the best version of umami and the best thing in the entire world in Japan, which is like what everyone else is saying at the moment, like it's a, it's a, it takes you further and further away.

Ryan · 29:42

And it's also a bit more nuanced than saying this is specifically for latte. Why don't we say this is a high intensity matcha that can stand up to dilution both with milk and ice, or this was specifically formulated for milk. And this is what we did to get this outcome that we wanted. We wanted some bitterness, but we also didn't want it just to be bitter.

Ryan · 30:04

We wanted it to express creamy flavors and give this real sense of verdant freshness. And that is characteristic of this Uji matcha blend. And not only did we do this, we worked with the chashi to make sure that those notes really shine. Whether or not it's an oat milk, cow milk, almond milk, soy milk, doesn't matter.

Ryan · 30:21

We've tasted it and we think that these this is what we did and why. And here's what we hope that you enjoy. It's something that I think would be be much better to see instead of saying, Yep, latte one, it's too reductionist. I think we're a lot of times underestimating, underestimating the interest or potential interest and intellectual capacity of the consumer and what they want and showing intention.

Zongjun · 30:48

Or, and like if you do have the opportunity, go talk to your consumers, go learn about their preference. One thing that we really kind of learned throughout the way after doing so many product testing across different countries is that people's difference, like taste difference is enormous.

Zongjun · 31:05

Like we used to kind of in order to calibrate the AI, we need to use a standard set of product with very similar formulations across different continents to have people taste that set of products so that you know, the AI can understand, can have the anchor to understand people's preference and their perception in different cohorts and. Results were wild.

Zongjun · 31:26

It was wild. Like one of the soda product that we use, like poke, like even some of the very basic flavors like if this is sweet or if you think this is bitter or not, can be widely different across different countries.

Zongjun · 31:41

You go to like Germany every The first word out of everyone's mouth is sweet, too sweet. I don't like it. And then you take it to a place like Philippines or Thailand. The first word that they say is bitter. Yeah. It's pretty interesting.

Ryan · 31:55

It's very interesting, like people can be so different in a very fundamental way, which is something that we want to encourage you to actually go talk to your audience and just learn what they like or dislike. You might have some very interesting discovery. And This is why I think the specialty matcha movement should and will be a local movement.

Ryan · 32:15

I believe that all of these traditional companies and blend houses in Japan do a very good job creating really well balanced products that are probably liked by most people and they have access to some of the highest quality matcha to create them. But they're still from a very narrow demographic profile with I would characterize very little curiosity or understanding of international consumers preferences beyond the fact that they like lattes and what they think, even what they think tastes good in a latte really just might not translate, which is why this really needs to be a local movement. Yeah, yeah.

Zongjun · 32:50

Like health, You know what, What, what people sometimes don't realize is that, you know, when you're tasting a latte, you're not actually, you know, just tasting, you know, the difference of the tea, the difference of milk really makes a humongous difference. You know, like the for, for the formulators in Japan, the type of milk that they're going to use is probably be very different from the milk that you can get access to locally. And that will really have, you know, a different flavor impact on the final product.

Zongjun · 33:18

So like, you might actually accidentally just end up buying a matcha that was made from matcha latte, but it's not suitable for your local milk, which is totally possible. Totally possible. So to end our sensory episode, we thought we would do some sensory.

Ryan · 33:35

One of the first things is a recent discovery that I really wanted to share is that I We have been doing matcha sensory exclusively on Usucha and we were very quick to judge some matcha samples in the past and we have the same ones actually newer harvest now. I was doing some random experimentation at home. It was a really hot day.

Ryan · 33:57

I was running out of the matcha that I liked, so I was low on stocks and I I found one that I had tasted. It had been open for a while and I really hated it as usuchai. I thought it was bitter ploying, super intense, very unpleasant in a lot of different ways. And I dumped it in a glass of ice water. The bitterness like almost evaporated, metaphorically speaking, and it was delicious.

Ryan · 34:24

Like what temperature and dilution does to matcha is like really non linear in the flavor profile transformation. It was like literally a different tea. So we're going to do that actually with the exact same tea. And Sam, I'll get your impressions. We're going to prepare it as an usucha and then an iced americano and we'll get your impressions. All right.

Zongjun · 34:45

Maybe not quite right. All right, so I just prepared 2 samples in front of you. One is Usucha, standard ratio, 2 grams to 60 mils, normal temperature, water on 75°C, and I made a diluted version. This is an Okumidori, no fertilizer, no pesticide, tea from earlier this spring from Wazuka. So Sam, why don't you try the Usucha first? All right, so this tea is very creamy, very, very floral, bitter, some stringency tastes, but it's kind of sharp, still has a lot of green, kind of a characteristic grassy, and the foam is even a little bit soapy, so. Yeah, I got a similar notes.

Zongjun · 35:24

It really has quite a bite. A bitter and astringent bite, but super creamy. I got a sweet pea note that it has a bitter after taste, but kind of in a pleasant way, similar to like an Amaro and kind of bitter after taste that kind of forms a sweetness, has nice body, but definitely has this tonic bite. I think the average matcha consumer who is used to umami bombs or used to no bitterness at all would probably not like this in the same way that a, let's say a normal latte drinker might not like a plain espresso.

Zongjun · 35:57

So let's try this diluted with ice and we're back. So did you taste them? Well, the bitterness certainly vanished. Very, very, very low bitterness got some hints of nuttiness and some very light creaminess and some hint of seaweed. But overall, the flavor profile is really kind of reduced into into a dilution I feel like.

Ryan · 36:21

That the profile is just incredibly different. It's very, very different. Especially with the bitterness. Like I think everything that someone who would have hated this is usucha. Everything they disliked about it would have disappeared in dilution with ice.

Zongjun · 36:36

Certainly. Certainly. So I got a light cashew note, no bitterness at all. I got found it very creamy, very light, ephemeral and got a little bit of sort of the unsalted butter sweetness. Yeah, I can get a little bit of that too.

Ryan · 36:50

But it was a very light drink. I mean, we, we're not using very big cups, we're not diluting it that much. And we use 2 grams of tea. So it's a pretty normal dilution ratio, but it just shows host the magic of this preparation method. And like if the majority of your drinks are being served iced or diluted, which is like a lot of cafes, we highly recommend expanding beyond Usucha as sensory unless you can build a very strong mental model personally about understanding what it tastes like undiluted versus diluted or hot or cold or water versus milk.

Zongjun · 37:26

So it's a pretty difficult. Very difficult. The transformation honestly is enormous. And it's not that like predictable, like I don't, I didn't taste anything related to the flavors that I got diluted with ice in the normal usicha. So actually, I think we need to embrace a little bit of a culture of waste.

Ryan · 37:44

But I think matcha is so precious and so scarce that, you know, we don't want to taste a lot of samples back-to-back to back done in many different ways. And I'm not saying we should waste matcha, but just like the coffee people are not afraid to throw away samples after they're done, we should be the same. Like we're professionals in this industry. We should all treat ourselves as if we are professionals. And part of that is working through doing the sensory evaluations.

Ryan · 38:10

And you cannot reasonably ask yourself to consume like 10 to 15 grams of matcha in a setting that would be required to taste through everything, especially in very different form factors, in a genuine and honest way other than just taking usucha and dumping in a splash of milk. Like it can tell you some sensory information but it's really not the same than properly measuring it and understanding the actual drink that is getting created and delivered to the consumer.

Zongjun · 38:39

Absolutely. I mean, like just the sheer amount of caffeine that you are going to intake by consuming so many samples at once, it's not necessarily very healthy. And there's also this idea of taste fatigue, like after tasting too many samples at once in a very short period of time, you are actually not going to be able to taste the difference and. Yeah, Typically we recommend it caps out at around 6:00 to 8:00 samples.

Zongjun · 39:05

You don't want to do that many more because distinguishing them becomes more and more and more difficult. Obviously it really depends on how experienced you are and how good you are picking up subtlety and differences between samples.

Ryan · 39:17

So, but even across 6 to 8, it's a lot of matcha and you cannot drink all of it, reasonably speaking. So I think it's totally fair that as this profession grows of sourcing and blending and creating specialty matcha products, figuring out the the sensory for sourcing, figuring out the sensory for quality control and consistency, figuring out the sensory for how we describe these products to consumers. It's a really, really important work. And we should not be too afraid to to pour a little bit of matcha down the drain in service of this greater mission, I think.

Ryan · 39:55

Or just invite one of your friends to come over. Indeed, yes, If you can get a large enough group, even better. Or. We're going to do a fun exercise. I have been really obsessed with blending recently personally in my own practice, and we're going to do some eventual episodes about matcha blending, but I'm giving myself a personal challenge.

Ryan · 40:13

I've got a decent amount of matcha to work with here where we're doing this tasting, and I'm going to have Sam tasted blind as Usucha, my blend against tenju. My favorite blend used to be. From Marukyu Koyamaen and see if he can identify which is which and which one he likes more.

Ryan · 40:34

And I fully expect to lose. Please don't view this as me challenging someone who's been doing this for probably twice the amount of time that I've been alive. Well, and also, who am I to, you know, judge the outcome? It's really my preference. So actually I have a lot of advantages. So I'm going to try to blend in the same style to achieve the same flavor profile outcome as what this product has to offer and what we've tasted.

Ryan · 41:01

But I have have a huge advantage in that I know Sam's preferences so. That's interesting point. Oh, it's almost a personalized land. Versus some 80 year old chashi grandpa. So let's see how I do. I'm going to ask Sam to go into the other room and I'm going to prepare this and we'll see how I do. All right, fun.

Ryan · 41:18

All right, and we're back. So I've prepared two cups for you here, Sam, and I'm going to start you off with cup #1. There you go. All right, I'm actually quite excited about this. So I believe we're using the same Tenju that we have opened about a week ago in Japan.

Zongjun · 41:36

Indeed, at the time I remember I was very disappointed about this particular Tenju from this batch. Tenju has ever been occupied a very special place of in my heart of my macho tasting journey because it was really my conversion. Blended product from Marukyu Koyamaen. Yeah, about a year ago, like I remember how the really fresh kind of like a olive oil note when we freshly opened that can back, you know, when this product was half about the price.

Zongjun · 42:05

Half the price. Less than half, actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now like I, like we, we, we bought this 200 gram can for 12,000 yen. Yep. So about 90. Bucks, OK. And it tastes like a different product when we opened it in Uji.

Zongjun · 42:20

So I'm going to try to find which one is which. So just by judging the color, one matcha is certainly like brighter green than the other, but the greener matcha has a slightly larger bubble than the other one, larger and thinner bubble. So that's all very interesting.

Zongjun · 42:40

So I'm going to try the first one, which is greener and the bubble is larger. You mean more fine as I'm staring at it The First off, what do you taste? The Mystery cup #1 What do you taste? It's definitely not super umami driven.

Zongjun · 42:54

A little bit more structure and nice bitterness. Interesting floral notes. It's almost like walking in, you know, a flower field, like a lot of white flower honeysuckle, some hint of like woody notes. It's leaning on the green end of the spectrum, but definitely not grassy, so pretty good.

Zongjun · 43:14

How would you describe like the umami or the creaminess and the depth? Umami I gifted A2. It's definitely like less umami than some of the, you know, umami bombs that what we will call and creaminess. It's pretty creamy. OK.

Zongjun · 43:33

And after taste and like. Pretty long lasting after taste and there's definitely kind of like a bite into it. It's, you know, not as like, I guess like very soft, very rounded, very oily compared to some of the other Uji tea that we have tried. And on the balance scale, would you describe it as balanced or imbalance?

Zongjun · 43:53

Yeah, I would say this is balanced, very balanced product. Like a more harmonious combination of flavors. Yeah, and definitely more structured. OK, so number two, number two and I'll ask you the same question. Some immediate flush of umami and nori. The texture is super fine, very creamy like it's so like soft and juicy.

Zongjun · 44:16

It's almost chewy. Like, I think this is tencha, but it's also tastes different than the tencha that I had about a week ago when we opened the can. When we freshly opened the can. I think this actually improved, at least to my preference. I can get a hint of like the olive notes. It's more of a kind of like a meaty pickled or preserved olive versus a olive oil, which is what I loved a year ago. But this is.

Ryan · 44:44

Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Well now I feel less regret paying 90 bucks for this for this can of matcha. So you I guessed them properly. Actually just staring at them it's pretty obvious. But how about how it compares to your preference? For my own preference, wow, now it's kind of hard to say. I will certainly pick your blend. If we're comparing to the tencha about a week ago, OK, But now I will say it's close to 5050.

Zongjun · 45:11

But in terms of you know, how interesting or how characteristic these matchas are, I would pick your blend. But in terms, but in terms of like an objective like quality assessment, you know, kind of perspective, you know, tend to definitely taste more expensive and higher quality.

Ryan · 45:31

Yeah, when we talk about quality, quality really is a social construct, and the best people at evaluating anything and when it comes to a quality perspective are really good at separating preferences from quality. So what does that mean? A Brewer for example, who makes beer might hate IP AS or stout beers, but they definitely can taste the difference between a high and low quality 1.

Ryan · 45:54

So what is going on in their minds if they can make the quality assessment even if they don't like it? But really what it is, it's a guess about what other people would consider high or low quality. Sometimes it could mean balance, sometimes it could mean the present or absent of certain flavors.

Zongjun · 46:11

But it is a socially, it is a social construct. Very much so. And especially in the case of tea, not just Japanese tea, but also Chinese tea, like people always talk about, I can taste this processing into certainty. Like the processing is often the indicator of the quality or the intervention of human, you know, craftsmanship in a certainty.

Ryan · 46:36

And that's oftentimes the indicator of the price or the value of that tea. Indeed. And actually when matcha first got introduced to Japan, you know, Japan was looking a lot to China and particularly looking a lot to TCM, our traditional Chinese medicine for different herbs and plants have different medical remedies and effects, etcetera. And it was actually tea was considered highly prized because it was bitter.

Ryan · 47:00

Like preferences in Japan have literally changed away from bitterness in this very tea CM idea of this herbal health like random leaf into something that is much more umami driven that you know, it's gone along with other parts of Japanese culture as well with all the dashi and the nori and the kombu and all these various things that are really heavily have strong umami presence. Yeah, it's a very interesting and perfect reflection of general or average Japanese dietary preference. So I totally agree actually that the tanju tastes higher quality as we're sitting here tasting this. But I actually think when it

Zongjun · 47:40

comes to preference, it's probably a flip of the coin for a lot of people, which one they would end up preferring more. Actually, the umaminess might be a little too strange, a little too foreign for a lot of people who have less familiarity with Japanese cuisine and these these types of flavors, I think.

Ryan · 47:57

Yes, indeed. I mean we're talking about higher quality from the lens of the evaluating Japanese matcha with the Japanese standard. But if we're talking about, you know, from a different perspective or from the consumer preference wise, you know, it's almost a meaningless to talk about the quality. Yeah, absolutely.

Ryan · 48:15

So I'm going to share my blend components that I used. I did a 2G dose. I did half a gram of honzu Asahi from Uji proper. I did half a gram of samidori too, from honzu samidori also from Uji proper. I did .7g of Okumidori standard conventional agriculture. That's where the green color is.

Zongjun · 48:38

The deep green, yeah, less of a, more of a deep green, less of a brilliant green. And I did .3G of a Yabukita that we have sourced from Hubei in mainland China. But this Yabukita was overseen and is basically produced by a Japanese company in China.

Zongjun · 48:57

And this is extremely expensive by wholesale standards. It costs over 350 U.S. dollars a kilo, which is madness for. Chinese matcha by Japanese wholesale standard, even like very expensive material. So it's but it's indeed, it's very good. You know on its own it lacks some umami, but actually it's a pretty good tasting creamy, interesting, not very bitter like probably blend component and it's approximately 15% of this blend which brings the cost down. So we're comparing a $90.00 retail product and every component of this one that I blended is use the retail price other than that 15% of this Chinese matcha and it would cost about 20 four U.S. dollars.

Ryan · 49:47

Retail is what the is inside this. Oh my God. So it's a little less than a four times price difference. That's what we call a business opportunity. Indeed. Wow, that's very surprising. Well, the Hubei Yabukita is on its own, like the color was impeccable, like really, really shiny bright green color. And the foam was also impeccable, like very velvety smooth foam.

Zongjun · 50:17

It's just lacks some complexity. I mean like the probably the intention of the purpose of the creation of this tea was to be used as a blend component. Almost certainly, and apparently a lot of this goes back to Japan. Yeah, they really view it much more of a high quality raw material perspective. But wow, this is actually it gives us a lot of hope. There's certainly a potential of interesting and high quality tea being created in China.

Zongjun · 50:45

Yeah, really big time. I think this is actually probably the best Chinese grown matcha that we produced and it's impeccably milled. It must be ishi-usu milled because the texture is either that or whoever is operating this ball mill or jet mill really knows what they're doing.

Ryan · 51:01

Or maybe it's ishi usu, we don't know. Well, actually we've seen footage of that ishi usu being used in. China and apparently we've heard complaints from Chinese producers that they can't get ishi usu as well. Same issue for the Japanese people, but I think it's this is definitely, we actually know for a fact that this is grown and overseen by a Japanese company that's outsourcing production to China and importing a lot back.

Zongjun · 51:26

So who knows, this might be a part of your blends that you enjoy when you go buy tea retail in Japan. Yeah. I don't think we should call stuff when it's not, but this on its own is really interesting and delicious, especially from a price to quality perspective and when you consider other people's preferences and you really have to think about what you're paying for.

Zongjun · 51:48

No, I mean, tencha, still objectively higher quality. So we're going to do one last very interesting sample. It is Asahi from Uji proper, grown by Taishi San and his family and one is Honzu Asahi. That's conventional agriculture.

Zongjun · 52:03

So there's some use of pesticides and fertilizer. And then there's organic Asahi from same region, processed at the same factory, probably in a different batch or actually definitely in a different batch. And it is organic.

Zongjun · 52:17

So limited use of pesticides and organic fertilizer. So kanreisha. Kanreisha, so different type of shading. So the Honzu Asahi is like the Super traditional with the rice straw on top. And the other one is these black synthetic cloth canopies clothes and that cover it. So we're going to see if we can taste the difference and you know, use this sensory to describe it. All right, and we're back.

Ryan · 52:41

So we just prepared 2 samples. Standard usage, 2 grams to 60 mils of water. One. They're both from the same farmer, same season, mostly all controlled variables as far as we know. The difference is that one of them is organic and kanreisha, the other is conventional Honzu Asahi.

Ryan · 53:00

The color is already kind of a giveaway 1 is very, very like bright green and the other one, you know, it has a slight yellowish hue on the phone. So you know, my first gasp will be that one is the organic. Yeah. And also we know that the difference between kanreisha and honzu shading. Honzu shading typically yields a lighter tencha in color, and then the kanreisha which is typically quite a bit more dark. Yeah, there are a couple of theories that goes into why you know these two methods resulting to different very different color of the tea bushes.

Zongjun · 53:34

Some people will argue that, you know, the kanreisha is absorbing a certain, you know, a different spectrum of light versus honzu. And some other people would say that the way that honzu scattered light on, you know, onto these tea bushes is inherently different than kanreisha. So we we don't know.

Ryan · 53:53

It's scientifically, scientifically for sure that you know, these are the reasons why, you know, all these tea bushes look different, but they certainly do look different, and the tea certainly do look and smell different.

Zongjun · 54:06

Yeah, indeed. So I guess we'll start with sample one. We set this up blind, so we don't know which is which. Sample one is the darker 1. Sample 2 is the lighter 1, so we'll start with the darker 1. Sample one. Oh wow. I'm almost certain that this is the organic.

Zongjun · 54:20

The initial punch of bitterness kind of just, you know, very obvious. I mean, we're using very high quality water, controlling for many variables, but there is definitely a noticeable bitterness. It's also very creamy as a nice after taste.

Ryan · 54:36

Right after the Binaness, you have this burst of floral notes, very, very nice kind of white flowers and a little bit hint of like honey notes. Something that I do notice though, is that the texture of the matcha itself is a little bit grainy, and something that we've heard is that when you're doing ishi-usu milling, organic tencha tends to not quite mill as well as conventionally grown tencha.

Zongjun · 55:03

Yeah, the production yield between organic and convention is quite enormous. For with milling efficiency with. Milling. We've heard that some stones are like half as fast. So that's very interesting like that. So what what happens that you end up having these matcha powder getting stuck in the mill surface for longer period of time than conventional tencha. So I wagered that is probably the reason why this this matcha looks a little bit yellow or yellower than the conventional. One, some more heat in the mill longer potentially. I mean, we don't know.

Ryan · 55:38

And it also could be too that this, the tencha processing and steaming times might be slightly different because certainly the organic, from my understanding, when you do organic agriculture, you'll get slightly thicker leaves.

Zongjun · 55:50

The plant needs to be just a little more strong, resilient and robust because you're not spraying pesticides onto it. So it's got to build up its natural defenses and which naturally makes it a more robust plant versus the really soft, young tender leaves that, you know, don't have to worry about pesticides because you're doing conventional agriculture.

Ryan · 56:10

Yeah. So people, so people probably end up, you know, steaming the leaf a little bit longer than conventional thinner leaves. Yeah, which supposedly also actually not supposedly it does deteriorate the color a bit less composed to very light steamed tea typically also makes it less terroir expressive and the cultivar you taste less the longer that you steam. It's like roasting.

Zongjun · 56:32

Roasting coffee exactly. Like if you roast coffee really darkly, it just starts tasting like roasted coffee. Similar thing for Japanese steamed tea. The longer you steam, the more it tastes like steamed tea. It's a homogenizer. Yeah.

Ryan · 56:45

All right, let's try the next. Which we believe to be the Honzu Asahi. Conventional agriculture, which it is almost certainly is. The defining characteristic of the tea is definitely umami and creaminess. I had almost described this as an umami bomb.

Zongjun · 57:01

Actually, it's a pretty intense umami. Yeah, like it's this very, very like upfront, like Nori and almost like clam juice kind of. Oh. Clam juice is a great reference. Yeah, it's very, very, very pronounced. And you know, the powder is certainly finer then they will get it.

Ryan · 57:19

Yeah, it's buttery smooth. It has a really nice after taste. Not only does it have intensity and body that's coming from that umami, much higher body like less like structured matcha doesn't have the bitterness that the organic one does, but the after taste is very interesting and intense. Absolutely.

Ryan · 57:39

But for all of the flavor notes and also the mouthfeel, you do like kind of still getting the very like overall soft kind of structure versus a organic 1, you do end up getting like a much more structured flavor profile.

Zongjun · 57:54

Indeed, indeed. But we keep hearing from many different people all across the industry about Japanese people and foreigners who who study this. Is that the single greatest, the single most important thing that determine matcha quality is fertilizer.

Ryan · 58:10

But I think you really taste it in these samples. The conventional agriculture, by our understanding of Japanese quality standard, is just objectively better. Yeah. Like if you really internalize this kind of a reality, you know, you you almost need to treat fertilizer as part of the recipe of creating matcha.

Ryan · 58:30

It is, you know, a very, very influential part of creating a flavor profile of a certain matcha. Like when we think about a fertilizer intuitively, we think about, you know, like in other crops, it's used to increase the yield. It's used to kind of make the plant more resilient to the climate.

Ryan · 58:50

But in this particular case, when we are looking at matcha, it really has a tremendous impact on the flavor profile itself. So you almost need to treat it as part of the recipe, like as part of the ingredient that you know that creates a matcha. Yeah, and there's a cycle too.

Zongjun · 59:07

So the more fertilizer you add, the more pests that it attracts. So if you want a lot very nitrogen rich soil, everything loves nitrogen, you attract a lot of pests and therefore you need to spray and there's a cycle. So not only when you're doing organic agriculture, you're typically applying less and different types of fertilizer.

Zongjun · 59:26

Oftentimes they're less nitrogen rich, but you're also not spraying, which means that the plant has to adapt in various ways, which shows up in the even the look. If you look at organic tencha versus conventional tencha, it looks like more rigid, more brittle, less tender and soft.

Zongjun · 59:44

And you can tell not only when you look at the matcha, but you can tell when you look at the tencha. And it's pretty obvious. And it mills quite differently. And it ends up also probably creating more defense mechanisms that taste bitter, whether or not be caffeine or other compounds that really change the taste.

Zongjun · 1:00:00

And you know, I would wager that you know this organic Asahi. From Uji proper, if you put this in a blind tasting next to conventionally grown Okumidori from Wazuka, for example, for a standard preference test in the United States or you know, most countries outside of Japan, I think the conventional agriculture from Wazuka would win that blind preference test simply because this organic product is just too bitter for those people's preferences, I would wager.

Ryan · 1:00:27

Yeah, but if you dump them both into, you know, a cup of milk, it will not be, it will not be the same story. Yeah, probably the stronger one would come through, but there's a lot of interesting flavor interaction going on between these two samples too, because the presence of that fertilizer and whatever it's doing to the flavor profile outcome of the conventionally grown tea, it's a lot more subtle than nuance.

Ryan · 1:00:49

When you don't have that dominant bitter note, I think you pick up quite a bit more subtlety and nuance that can get lost or masked by the presence of really high degrees of bitterness, which can end up being a pretty distracting element for some people, I think.

Zongjun · 1:01:04

Yeah. Certainly. And I mean, after all, like we we're talking about all these, you know, cultivation methods, all these cultivars, all of these interesting stories or even like gossips behind all of these, you know, production maneuvers of different types of matcha. But it all comes back to sensory. It all comes back to their impacts on the flavor profile. Like all comes back to like if you can taste it or if you find it to be pleasant or unpleasant or if you find it to be interesting.

Zongjun · 1:01:34

So I think this is like a very important part of this whole, you know, this whole specialty matcha movement is that we are trying to access this whole matcha industry, this whole matcha product from a very unique perspective, which is the flavor itself versus some other angles that has been historically taken by for example, chanoyu.

Ryan · 1:01:58

Yeah, 100% because I mean, it's our primary perception with the product. That's what every time you have a sip of matcha, you're not just taking a sip of matcha. You are literally creating memory, memories and deep preferences. So it's a hedonic pleasure.

Ryan · 1:02:13

But when you start layering on all of this other stuff, it turns into a very interesting story. You know, some some people would call that like connoisseurship, for example. But when it comes to sensory, I mean, there's so many reasons to do it.

Ryan · 1:02:26

One is the sheer pleasure of enjoying the subtlety and nuance and different flavors of a product just for your own raw appreciation. Regardless of context. You're just enjoying this thing that's in front of you and appreciating its beauty. Not its visual beauty or the beauty from like, music or the beauty of touching something.

Ryan · 1:02:49

The beauty of its taste in its pure, most primal and elemental form. But sensory can also be used to do sourcing or quality control. Did this batch taste the same as it did last time and did all the attributes that I care about?

Ryan · 1:03:04

Is it approximately the same bitterness, Approximately the same umami, Approximately the same creaminess? So it's a very different type of sensory, which is a very different type of sensory than, let's say, for blending what's going on in a chashi's mind as they try to replicate blends from year to year to year? Pure descriptive analysis is not going to work. You need a very different methodology. As a consumer, I can taste like a certain cultivar from this tea.

Zongjun · 1:03:28

I can taste a certain processing method from this tea. There's is this intellectual level of hedonic pressure. And deductive tasting. Yeah, the which is very interesting and which is what I enjoyed quite a bit from tasting other, you know, specialty products like wine, like Scotch, like chocolate, like coffee. This is something that people take great pleasure and take Gray.

Zongjun · 1:03:50

I would say time and effort to explore all of these, you know, interesting landscapes beyond just the pure like animal hedonic pressure that we can get from a a product. Yeah, absolutely. And like even what we were doing here between these two Asahi samples, trying to taste the difference between honzu versus kanreisha or different fertilizer regiments or pesticides, no pesticides.

Ryan · 1:04:15

Like it's very interesting. And I think the reason that it's important in general is that if you are able to acquire these references, you can learn and then you can start understanding your own preferences at a deeper level.

Ryan · 1:04:27

The problem with just enjoying things in the primal, hedonic way where you taste it and you like it is you're not doing any learning. How can you replicate that experience of what you like or explore your own preferences?

Ryan · 1:04:41

It's kind of like wandering around in the dark, but by tasting fertilizer, by tasting growing region, by tasting milling method, by tasting how old the trees are, You can start developing a much more complex like waypoints to build your own mental map of what you like and how to find it versus just being told it's ceremonial grain, just being told it's Fuji matcha.

Ryan · 1:05:06

We're just being told it's top grade Gokumukashi, very rare, very expensive. Some June. Yeah. I mean, basically you're learning like the possibility of what AT can be like all these parameters that ultimately will have an impact on the taste of the matcha. I think that's what's the most interesting and valuable part of all these deductive tasting is that you're learning like, where are the white space?

Zongjun · 1:05:32

What are the possible combinations that I can layer on to create something that I probably haven't, you know, never tasted before or maybe you'll never been created before. Like this is something that can really unleash a lot of imaginations for people to do innovations upon. So for anyone out there who's a little frustrated by the end of this episode by the fact that we didn't give an exact solution for how you should do matcha sensory, we feel you. And to be honest, we're still actively figuring it out. Because if there is no one size fit tool, it really depends on what it is you're trying to do,

Zongjun · 1:06:09

whether or not you're trying to call out the flavors that consumers are going to like most on a packaging. Trying to understand what flavors a consumer may or may not take. At least trying to have your own mental model for with these different cultivars, region processing styles, shading durations, harvest methods, what they taste like, like it's a really depend or trying to make your own blend and you need different tools for different objectives. And there actually is no one good way of doing anything. Like you need to find a system that works for you. And it's very possible that the chashi system might not be that adaptable for you because you

Ryan · 1:06:47

don't have all those, those references, because Sam and I could sit here and describe these as all different types of Chinese tea. Like we can say, oh, this one has a very baojong note. It has a, a sweetness very similar to a, a Jing Mai sample. Poor song poor that I tasted 3 years ago and you would have no idea what we're talking about.

Zongjun · 1:07:06

Yeah. If you don't know those other teas. Again, it's tautology, right? Like you're using one complex flavor profile to describe another, which is really like that doesn't translate to other people. But if it works for me and identifying every time I taste this baojong note in a particular sample that has these characteristics, it helps me build my own framework for understanding what it is and I'm tasting or not tasting. It doesn't benefit me because I have no idea what you're talking about, right?

Ryan · 1:07:36

So it's pretty complicated and I think, you know, the chashi's have done a pretty good job basically forming their own culture, their own subculture in a way they can understand each other similar to the wine people and the vocabulary, the shared references, the shared everything.

Zongjun · 1:07:51

And you build up the shared language and understanding connecting process to some flavor sensory outcome where there's some type of, let's say, cultural calibration going on. So this movement is way too new for us to have any definitive ideas. If anyone has a particularly good method for deductive tasting matcha to accurately predict things like shading style or cultivar, we would love to hear from you. But I think this is going to be something we're all going to have to build together and form our own culture around. And because even at the moment, the hardest problem is actually just finding these references

Ryan · 1:08:26

OK, anything labeled Ujicha is like basically telling you nothing about the product when it comes to these types of things, even though it's labeled a single origin. Yeah, absolutely. But you know, we just did a round of sourcing in Japan, and the good news is, you know, there are still a lot of untouched terroir out there for us to explore. Maybe the uncle doesn't speak a word of English, but the rest are ease.

Zongjun · 1:08:51

You know he would greet you with some delicious cup of gyokuro and sit you down. And then you can start using in Google Translate. So, you know, a lot of opportunity here and pretty interesting, but you know, sensory is really, really, really important and we.

Ryan · 1:09:05

And us coming from a quite experienced, I would say sensory professional, professional or analysis background, we are actually not better than anyone else in this realm because this is really experienced based kind of industry or landscape.

Zongjun · 1:09:25

We're no more experienced than others. It's quite exciting, actually quite interesting. It's finally something new. We have some experience with descriptive analysis, like we're pretty good at like listing off a bunch of notes that we taste, but then like linking them back to things like, you know, it's an active learning process.

Ryan · 1:09:43

So, but I think really the most important thing is to understand what your consumers like and then, you know, use sensory as a tool to make better things for that. That should be the ultimate metric that we're all creating feedback loops to improve upon, is to create things that people actually want to drink and like, and nothing else literally matters. Or creating anything that's interesting. You know, it doesn't have to be like, wow, like amazing, tasty, delicious, but you know, on a sheer intellectual level, like there are a lot of these new combinations that just yet to be discovered because like from,

Zongjun · 1:10:18

you know, a sheer, I would say like quality or like, I don't know, like hedonic pleasure. Like there are some very clear peaks out there, like for you to climb, right? Like a Narino Rd. in Okanoyama tea garden, like that's priced and famous and it's like so well known like and it's right there.

Ryan · 1:10:39

Like if you have enough access, enough guanxi, enough money, like you can taste it. It already exists. You can just walk up to their shop, like Shichimeien's shop in Uji, for like actually not very much money, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's already there.

Zongjun · 1:10:56

But what's interesting, at least to me, is those unknown peaks, unknown to high grounds for people to climb, for people to climb, for people to explore. And I think that's really the core value of a specialty product movement is to explore the unknown. Peaks defined by other people like that's the consensus within Japan, mostly controlled by old Japanese men. But what about all the teenagers in California? Or what about the incredibly rich and sophisticated culture of appreciating matcha and Thailand or in other countries like preferences are very different. What are their peak of the mountains? What have they not tried that

Ryan · 1:11:37

they would find incredible and that can be unlocked by blending, can be unlocked by much of being grown in new in different places, people trying shaded cultivation with new and interesting cultivars, different types of processing machinery, all sorts of things that kind of get vanished away when they disappear into these blended products.

Zongjun · 1:11:56

Not that we have any problem with blended products, but to learn and to do sensory properly, you have to be able to go back to these references. Absolutely. To learn the taste. So anyway, our call to action is taste more matcha. Take great notes, try to develop methodologies that work. If you find a really good one, please reach out, Yeah. Share Share your experience.

Ryan · 1:12:16

Share your enjoyment. We'd love to have do an episode on like different people's methodologies for how they approach doing this type of their own sensory analysis and the outcomes that they've gotten. And so if you enjoyed this, please consider sharing with friend and we'll see you on the next one.

Zongjun · 1:12:31

See you in the future. Thanks. See you in the next peek. Yeah.