Mythologizing in Matcha

Ryan · 0:06

Hello and welcome to Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my co-host Zongjun who also goes by Sam. Hello, hello and. We're the co-founders of Sanko Matcha products. So we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey, matcha, share startup stories and interview experts.

Ryan · 0:21

And today we're talking about the concept of mythologizing matcha, and mythologizing in tea more generally. So I was recently listening to a podcast about Chinese tea. I'm really also into Chinese tea. And so, Sam, it was about pu'er and this concept of mythologizing a place or style is, you know, it's really common across all tea.

Ryan · 0:50

And sometimes some places, there's some regions, there's some methods get mythologized so much that it kind of eats all the oxygen in the room. So some really classic examples from the Chinese tea world are like Gushu trees.

Zongjun · 1:05

If you go to like some random tea market in China and you're shopping for tea and like you, you know, Gushu is probably in your vocabulary, it means old tree or ancient tree. It should refer to trees that are over 100 years old.

Zongjun · 1:21

But sometimes it can be of even a little less maybe or 70 years old. You go around and everyone's trying to push you. This is gushu cha, Gushu cha. And it feels very similar to like Fuji, for example. Like there's just these names that just you and terminology that like people are educated to learn and know and look for.

Zongjun · 1:44

There's a lot of fakes. So for example, within gushu tea, most of the gushu tea that people think that they're buying probably doesn't come from 100 year old trees. And we know at least legally and structurally when you're buying Uji matcha, it's not coming from Uji.

Zongjun · 2:00

It doesn't need to be processed in Uji. It's kind of riding off of this thing that has been mythologized so much that it's where the demand concentrates. It's a center becomes a center of gravity for demand and education. And it starts creating these interesting, what I like to think of as doom loop cycles.

Ryan · 2:21

And you know, Uji, this is going to be part of in my Uji matcha piece later. But like, people want Uji matcha. And because people want Uji matcha, like consumers want Uji matcha, there's an incentive for vendors to find Uji matcha and write about Uji matcha.

Ryan · 2:36

Learn about the place of Uji in reference to terroir of Uji, the history of Uji. And it just creates this like concentration of focus. And the reality is, is that Uji produces 37 tons of matcha a year and across the four prefecture zone it represents about 1 to 2% by volume.

Zongjun · 2:58

So most of the tea that all of this mythologizing is being dumped into is actually incredibly scarce. There's like not very much of it that's actually made and even less of it that is saved for a single origin product. So this is something that affects, you know, all parts of the tea world. Yeah, and honestly, I don't think it's just tea. It's so prevalent in other places too. Coffee, wine, kind of see this pattern happening in all sorts of products, artisanal products, specialty products that's being sold beyond its agricultural or consumption value. Yeah.

Zongjun · 3:38

This is, you know, a romance, a marketing story mostly that people construct so that you know, they can essentially, in reality, the goal is to add a higher price tag or else trying to sell a concept of scarcity for a certain product.

Zongjun · 3:55

Like if you really look into it, like these are all just different facades of ceremonial grade, like all of these names that people looking for. It's a it's a tendency like people wants to look for like labels that signifies a higher quality product. And for most of the consumers, these labels are knowledge. They end up learning when they get into a product and, you know, symbols or indicators they will be forecasting if they would indeed getting a better product compared to something else.

Zongjun · 4:29

Yeah. So like gushu, you know, or something like a mating Uji or Uji cha or even, you know, you see this kind of geographical relationships between, you know, higher quality. And it's not just Uji, right? Like in pu'er too, like people associate a certain area with high naturally higher quality.

Zongjun · 4:48

But in fact, you know, it doesn't necessarily being the case. Some some xiaoshu in very famous region called Manzung, which you know it's tea, has been historically sold for, you know, 10s of thousands of RMB per kilogram on average. So xiaoshu referring to small trees. Small trees and gushu or qiaomu referring to larger trees. And then beyond qiaomu, you have gushu, which refers to ancient trees.

Zongjun · 5:16

So you have all these, you know, terms that are essentially not regulated at all. There's no way for consumers to verified is, you know, a tease indeed come from a different size of trees just sitting in front of you for you to decide if it's up to your quality or if you're willing to pay for that price. It's it's actually quite interesting. And somehow it has also sometimes evolved into a test. Like if you do not have the capability of taste the difference between a xiaoshu and a gushu or a qiaomu, then you deserve to pay the higher price.

Zongjun · 5:50

They call this a intelligence tax in Chinese. It's very interesting. And, but, but, but I think the ultimate reason for this phenomenon to exist is that it's marketing Vendors need a romance, a story to sell a product with better profit. And consumers are looking for these romance to either convince themselves to pay for a higher price or, you know, tell their friends that, you know, this is a interesting product that I acquired recently and, you know, share the product and the story at the same time.

Ryan · 6:23

It's really good at creating the desire. If you go back to like, like if you think about mythology and myths in general, right? Like there's usually some sort of lesson baked in. There's usually some sort of like origin story. Like if you go back to Greek mythology about the way things are and why they're like that and, you know, different moral lessons.

Ryan · 6:42

And, you know, it's a way to tapping into sort of humankind's greater past and connection to other people from the past. I mean, my really interesting thing about Matcha, like let's just cherry pick one mythology or over mythologized thing within macho is that Zen Buddhist monks used it for meditation. And this was like part of the reason where how it came to Japan.

Ryan · 7:05

And monks have been using it for centuries to meditate and to stay focused and to keep calm during meditation. But you know, when you really dig into it, like if you go back to the Kamakura period and those records, when T when it first entered Japan was gaining its first footholds, some of the earliest writings about tea in Japan was how good of a hangover cure it was. And like one of the past kings or emperors, I forget his name was like heralding it as a wonderful hangover cure. But like, that is not a myth that very many people are interested you can hire to like this is what Zen monks. It's some secret mythical herb

Zongjun · 7:46

and tea that Zen monks use. Like it's it's such a more interesting story than hangover cure for someone who drank too much the previous night. Actually, functionally, I've seen this story being used by some, you know this Japanese drug stores like they sell all these kind of hangover cures on the shelf nearby your favorite Ajinomoto sleep aid.

Zongjun · 8:08

One of the product was a matcha hangover cure. Really. I bet they recycle the story from that from that tell. And like, you know, most of the, you know, matcha's mythologized past about connections to tea ceremony and Sen no Rikyu and Hideyoshi during that period, you know, also like it was really just vanity.

Zongjun · 8:30

It was this thing that you got together with a bunch of other people to talk politics and with really expensive tea ware. And like, you know, the Japanese have done actually just such a good job. Even chanoyu has done such a good job mythologizing all of the.

Zongjun · 8:46

Best parts everything like. Everything gets all the like the grits and the grime other than the wabi sabi just kind of gets plastered over in these narratives. But yeah, it's almost like anti wabi sabi if you think about it, like all these bromance that they talk about relating to like the tea where sitting in the room.

Zongjun · 9:05

Or the inclusiveness everyone's equal. And so you have to bow down by the little out the the little door when you enter a tea room, like it's so much more vanity than substance. Most likely when you dig into these histories like there were no women allowed in those rooms.

Zongjun · 9:22

So I guess the people that were allowed in who were in theory equal. But whether or not it looked like that in practice, when you know, the owner of the the tea house who brought together this gathering showing off his equivalent of $10,000 tea bowl he got from Song dynasty China, you know, it's it's yeah, it's very, you know, the so mythologizing kind of makes sense for like, you know, it's a nice story to tell someone that doesn't know the history, doesn't care about the history, that wants to feel connection to something larger than themselves.

Ryan · 9:53

But where it gets in the way and where the real problem over mythologizing is, is where it attributes success or quality to the wrong things. And I think Uji matcha is a wonderful example. If you take the four prefecture zone for what can be considered Uji matcha, it's about a third, maybe it's a slightly less, but about 1/3 of the matcha produced in Japan can be called Uji matcha.

Ryan · 10:20

There is a extremely large percentage of that material that is incredibly mediocre and it gets to ride on a famous name. So we're talking about Uji, Uji, Uji, Uji and how it's incredible. It's not even Uji. You can argue maybe it's a processing style, but that processing style can be really like reproduced elsewhere.

Ryan · 10:42

There's some really interesting stories we know of tea farmers, an actual Uji that brought that had farmers from Kagoshima come up and do kind of an understudy to shadow them to learn how to, you know, learn from them and bring those techniques back to Kagoshima. So there's all sorts of this cross learning that's going on in the industry.

Ryan · 11:00

So like, not only is it disingenuous if you're thinking about it, this single origin product and even a little bit as a style, but it just allows it it. It's not because it's from Uji that the matcha is any good, and it's not even from Uji. And the deeper you go, you realize that if you like stack rank, the things that make matcha taste good, you know, the first, the list is probably like fertilizer and then maybe like cultivar and processing and shading style. And you could argue maybe the handpick stuff and there's some stock rank and maybe there's some disagreement on what the stock rank is.

Ryan · 11:37

But the actual soil, the actual dirt, the actual microclimate and micro terroir, whatever word you want to use doesn't actually explain quality. So you have all of these vendors all over the place talking about Kagoshima volcanic soil or like really mountain natural tea in Shizuoka or Uji matcha and these beautiful river, our basins and riverbeds.

Ryan · 12:03

River tea. We're mythologizing so heavily that even if it were true that the matcha is better because it came from Uji and that there's some magic in this land and terroir, it doesn't explain why it's actually good. It's good because those farmers have so much knowledge and skill. They take care of the plants they're only harvesting once a year.

Ryan · 12:26

They use incredibly high quality fertilizer and it's like the center of gravity where you have, you know, a bunch of different producers that are able to share knowledge and they've been doing that for what, 500 years? It that's why it's good. It has really nothing to do with the terroir. If someone who didn't know anything opened a new plot, Uji the matcha probably wouldn't taste very good unless they were able to tap into it like the secondary terroir. And nothing that's over mythologizing to the point of misattributing quality is such a huge problem because people learn the wrong lessons.

Ryan · 13:01

It generates demand in the wrong places and the entire much industry. Even if you look at ceremonial grade like what a stupid term and like it's generating demand in the wrong places. It's supposedly good enough for Japanese tea ceremony use, but it has says there's no underlying truth. It doesn't explain the quality like it's it's you're just making up reductions in complexities and stories to sell the product.

Ryan · 13:30

That's the goal. Yeah. That's so that's why it happened and that's why it's it's so successful. It's very effective. Yeah. In reality, you know, like if you even if you, you know, debunk and demystified, you know, one term, people will invent another.

Ryan · 13:49

And essentially, consumers are pulling this invention out because they need it too. Yeah. And, you know, like it, like Asahi will probably be the new term. Or like, you know, a certain type of fertilizer or shading time will be the new term probably like if you, if you keep just debunking all of these, you know, marketing jargons and you are just, you know, pushing a substitute of the new one in the future.

Ryan · 14:20

And, and for Uji is particularly difficult because like, it's, it's not really just a place, it's not really just a style. I'm thinking this out loud, but I think in reality, Uji is a system. It's, it's a, it's a tea making system for Japanese matcha and all of these regions surrounding Uji like Mie, Shiga and all of these places, they cannot live without Uji.

Ryan · 14:48

And you should, I think 1 should really consider they are a extension, a very organic extension of Fuji itself. Because like they are supplying Wuji tea makers or Muji tea brands, they are being told how to make matcha because this is what those Wuji plant houses or tea makers need.

Ryan · 15:09

These are suppliers for you know, wuji too. I mean a lot of them are doing what you know what them being told by Wuji farmers it's. There's like some contract in place. They're like, we want this fertilizer recipe and this and this.

Ryan · 15:26

And and they cannot sell like tea themselves, like all of their produce productions get self funneled back to Ooji and it is Wuji. And and if you really think about, you know, the impact of Tawa, it doesn't really matter for for matcha that much like with the usage of fertilizers and shading methods and Shia gate and post processing, theoretically you can recreate a very high quality Asaki honzu Asaki in like me, But but no one is doing that because like no one is going to pay for a higher price to make that cultivation sustainable. This is where Uji is just basically one big black hole. It's a big black.

Ryan · 16:08

Everyone has an incentive to keep it going. I think it's a it's it's constructed. It's being constructed that way so that Uji is the crown drew of like Uji tea, like actual Uji Uji. But all of these other places, you know, they are like also Uji, right? Like that other than the land being situated outside of Wuji city, like they are everything Wuji but themselves. The cultivation method.

Ryan · 16:37

You know that the essential market, the procureurs, the final product will be planned probably sometimes with Wuji tea too, like tea from Wuji like they are, they are part of Wuji as well. If you consider consider the whole system as one entity. Yeah, it's just a really a shame that so many people apply a single origin framework.

Zongjun · 16:58

But I disagree. I think the I think the industry would be much healthier. I think the solution is through like the name Uji, like we got to have more places, more names, more farmers, more regions to make this so that people can actually understand like. I totally agree.

Zongjun · 17:17

I'm just talking about the status quo. Yeah, status quo, I agree. But the problem is, is then you have this awful incentive loop. Consumers want to uji because that's the only thing they know and people want to sell uji, so they create content and educational content around uji matcha, which is very easy to pick from because of its rich history. There's a lot to talk about.

Zongjun · 17:38

Like I couldn't be even begin to tell you about the tea that's happening in me a the tension. But you can produce there, you can buy it. Difficult to buy? It very difficult. As a single origin product, right? So like just obtaining that and like lift, pulling it out of that orbit of Uji would be so hard. But it funnels on itself because that's what people want. That's what people make, and that's what people well, what? And that's what people make.

Zongjun · 18:02

And I would argue that there's, at least for now, there's no MI A style tea. There's no MI A flavor. For tensha maybe, I think the other tea maybe, but. Other tea maybe? Yeah, like but but but for tensha, for matcha. There isn't a a single origin idea in MI A to begin with. They're just another supplier for Uji. Yeah, largely speaking.

Ryan · 18:25

I mean, you do start to see more and more like separate farmers and like Nara. I'm talking to someone in Nara at the moment that is keeping us as a single origin product. And they're selling their own tea. They're selling their own tea, but they're also very weirdly selling Ujimacha, which is much cheaper than the Nara tea and like. Oh, that's a good strategy.

Zongjun · 18:47

I'm. Trying to figure out like, what is this Fuji team we're selling? Because it's not from Fuji, I'm sure. I think it's a really good strategy. Like when it comes to quality, the first thing that the consumer will notice and associate with is the price tag. If you're selling something, you know, more expensive that than a thing that already has a quality kind of concept in consumer's mind, consumer will probably naturally think that, OK, this thing is probably even better.

Ryan · 19:18

I don't know, I want to try. Yeah. I think it's a very good strategy to break the quality ceiling and the price ceiling. Yeah. It's an interesting strategy. It's but also it looks like single origin framework also being miss applied by the Japanese when you're looking through like a wholesale price list and says Nara Nara, Nara Nara uji, uji uji.

Zongjun · 19:41

Like what does? Like how am I supposed to interpret what that means? Like it's and then it feels very invasive to ask these questions. Yeah, it's, it's interesting. I mean, ultimately, you know, it's, it's it's a marketing issue for the farmers too. And and also, I would say it's like like poor went through the same trajectory like it was at the time in the very beginning, just poor tea because all Team United gets sold and trade in a place called poor.

Zongjun · 20:16

And later on, you know, like people start to have these satellite markets in different tea mountains. Then you have like Monkhai tea, you have E Wu tea and you have all these house which are, you know, kind of like these blend houses or proto tea houses. Yeah, exactly back in the days.

Zongjun · 20:39

And then, you know, like, and then, for example, EU, it's a name of tea region. It's also the name of regional tea trading center. So all of these sub regions, they take their leaves and they all got funnel into EU and get sold as EU tea. And, and, and you know, like, and slowly like all of these other regions become more famous. You have, you know, 1 gong, you have Mahe, you have bokota, and all of these places start to gain their own thing because they acquired agency to sell their own tea and process their own tea later on.

Zongjun · 21:13

And the current Japanese system, I think it's just so that the system is so baked in with processing capability that the farmers are really having a hard time to break free. It's the the processing constraints is the soil for this weirdness of, you know, like not being able to do a more confined or more granular geographic concept.

Zongjun · 21:39

Or a more true concept. Or more true concept, but you know, like it's difficult. Like even if you have, you know, a farmer in one village that trying that that's trying to, you know, build their own regional brand, you know, their tea will probably still needs to be sent to like Ogu to get processed to get shiage and the tea will indeed be like transformed the remake in that particular region.

Zongjun · 22:06

So like it's, it's, it's it's difficult to kind of separate, you know, like other, other regions influence because like as we also learned that different shiage factories, they have different, you know, chiage flavor or processing flavor and.

Zongjun · 22:22

During the refinement. Days because of their machineries because you know of you know the the the style that the factory runners like the machine to be run so they they actually end up producing some very unique factory flavors on top of the you know the farmers creation.

Zongjun · 22:42

So it's very difficult to separate all of these influence or factors when you are talking about single origin and everything just. Gets murky because everything is over mythologized onto a very simple concept which doesn't explain any of the quality. Yeah.

Zongjun · 22:59

But then it's also very convenient, right? To mythologize or to to take one collective right of a big brand like even if like even in in Uji regions like Ujitawara, Wazuka, right, they, they all, they, it's very convenient to all get into this bandwagon because you know, the processing a lot of these things are indeed happening in the very central location that, that there are a lot of, you know, cross influence and a shared characteristic between all of these places maybe in a. Growing market.

Ryan · 23:32

But if the matcha market ever shrinks, which you know, I hope it doesn't, or that the demand for medium quality matcha like what we would consider to be like average quote UN quote ceremonial, great matcha is being able to produce half the price in China where there is no, what would be we would call organoleptic difference. There's a sensory difference.

Ryan · 23:54

If you taste it blind, you're not able to distinguish quote UN quote Uji ceremonial grade from one that's grown in Guizhou or Jujiang. Every Cafe, every B2B environment would do so much better to source the one that's half the price. Unless they I don't.

Ryan · 24:10

Maybe some Japanese associations where they want to source a product from Japan. But for the vast majority of cafes is actually the responsible business decision. And in this type of over mythologizing then you are working where there is much less demand and the people that are in the middle will kind of get screwed.

Ryan · 24:27

The French wine industry has some interesting parallels here. People in France are drinking less and less wine. The French government actually spent close to €200 million last year destroying French wine and converting it into industrial alcohol. That was how much overproduction was being done in France. And Bordeaux in particular, particularly is getting hit very, very hard.

Ryan · 24:54

And if you're from like a famous region in Bordeaux, like Graves or Street in New York, you're OK. There's a famous name to write. There's good chateaus doing interesting things and they're still able to sell it. But if you go to regions that no one's heard of, like Cote de Bourg, and that don't have a very good reputation like Cote de Bourg does, an average bottle Cote de Bourg at a grocery store in France, it's like 3 or 4 euros.

Ryan · 25:18

It's very cheap. This market is like totally evaporated like no one the demand is for like these much more granular things. So they're in like a very interesting form of structural decline. So let's say that the Chinese are able to beat the cost equality ratio so hard against the the Japanese, then you know Uji will probably survive. But what about a mediocre producer in Wazuka where 40% of the tencha in Kyoto is made?

Zongjun · 25:47

Or maybe Wazuka this fine, you can still call it Kyoto matcha Kyoto tencha. Yeah. But what about Ashiga? Or like regions where you really have never seen it as a single origin then for that? Reality Uji tea is going to be more valuable to them to.

Ryan · 26:04

Them to. Everybody that that will be the only concept that will survive through this turmoil, this flush of what if demand. For that Uji tea goes down like then what do you do? It's going to suppress the prices of everybody. Yeah, it's totally.

Ryan · 26:23

Possible. It's totally because it's all. Riding this semi commodified term. It's, I think we are a little bit overestimating the difficulty of even building a brand or a brand of a place to begin with, maybe for a. Lot of.

Zongjun · 26:39

Regions, there's just not going to be enough interest in the market to make it a sustainable brand. Like like like your wine example is actually perfect. Like all of these could be very interesting sub regions. They're just not enough demand to support their existence.

Zongjun · 26:55

Yeah, and there's not. Enough money to eventually cycle for them, for the quality to improve. I mean, all these contract tencha producers in these varying regions, right? They're just told what to do by the Kyoto companies who they signed wholesale contracts with, right? Like and they're probably don't.

Zongjun · 27:12

Those wholesale companies probably don't want them to make honzu asahi. They need good decent like filler bulk tea, just suffice the majority of their blends. That's relatively consistent year over year. But they're not making the special fertilized honzu.

Zongjun · 27:29

Whatever you know it, it's it's so different and it is what? We saw it's just seas and seas of Yabukita and Okumidori. Okumidori like synthetic fertilizer knotted like it's, it's good, but it's not great. And there's going to be some turning point where most likely the Chinese figure out how to just do it much better and much cheaper where you wouldn't be able to distinguish them in a blind test.

Zongjun · 27:55

And the only value that it has is that you can have this Uji name, but it's not good for consumers because like you're still misattributing quality by the fact that you were able to label it Uji matcha. It's it's like you're paying for this thing that's not reflective and you're educating people on these things. It's not actually reflective of what makes a high quality product.

Ryan · 28:21

Yeah. It's difficult, but delusion. Yeah, but. It's what the market is most in most cases. So tea is a business too, right? Yeah, tea is a. Business and most people in the business are trying to earn the business of selling tea.

Ryan · 28:35

We're actually pretty weird position let's and I'm sure if we were on the other side of the table, we would we wouldn't be have any incentive to say these things. But I was at the Berlin Tea Festival last year and I listened to the CEO of Aiya. Aiya is a very interesting company. I need to do a deep dive, research, deep dive into them. They are one of the largest companies in Nishio, but they are the quiet powerhouse behind the majority of the matcha industry.

Ryan · 29:05

I've been told by someone who works at the the Hamburg office of Aiya in Europe that they're the largest matcha producer in the world in terms of the amount of volume that's produced. And they do tons of white label product.

Ryan · 29:18

But the CEO of Aiya Europe and give a talk at the Berlin Tea Festival, and one of the attendees asked a really interesting question she had. She must have a lot of insider knowledge or something, but she was asking about his thoughts about Guizhou matcha and whether or not his thoughts are about all of this Chinese matcha and tencha that's being produced.

Zongjun · 29:41

And he's like, it's like wine. It's like you could never have champagne out of champagne. China will never produce the same product. I was a little bit flabbergasted to hear that answer from him where this over mythologizing of Japan was coming out. And it's just not intellectually honest when you really are an expert about matcha, right?

Zongjun · 30:01

Like you realize that is not what determines matcha quality. We've had so many experts on this podcast that say, quote, you could theoretically grow great matcha anywhere. Yeah. It's. Really not too large driven. It's not terroir.

Zongjun · 30:14

Driven. It's mostly coming from the fertilizer and all of the process. It's like literary really the most processed tea I can think of. So most human intervention, most processed, most energy intensive, especially with the cold chain and keeping everything cold and not degrading. And she just took the answer what I was. I was kind of shocked because I didn't think it was very intellectually honest from someone that is supposed to be, you know, a world expert in matcha. But the other was this huge irony his that Aiya is one of the earliest investors into China, specifically into Zhejiang province in China in the early

Zongjun · 30:51

2000s, setting up subsidiaries, making matcha. They have a lot of the matcha that you see in the states is probably coming from Aiya that's in the middle land. And Abby, the matcha scientist just put out a reel. She got a tip and did some taste testing and you know, she she's pretty sure that the Dunkin' Donuts matcha comes from Aiya.

Zongjun · 31:12

So they, they also supply some others and I, I wouldn't mention it because I don't want to violate anyone's trust, but it's, I mean like. It's it's just over. Mythologizing of Japan, but the rides on Japan's fame first.

Zongjun · 31:30

Their tea brand, Their tea manufacturer they're trying to sell. They're trying to sell. Tea and for now, you know, Uji tea is like the product or the the brand name that you can sold your product under with with the largest premium, so to speak. And you know, if in the future, like Yusha Matcha becomes like the new, like rock star Tawat and that, but that Aiya would like talk like all these new stories about Yusha. And we heard, we heard some gossip. That Aiya just set up a new factory in Kyoto Prefecture so they can buy that tencha from the four prefecture zone and do their shiage and milling in

Zongjun · 32:10

Kyoto Prefecture. I think it's somewhere north or something. Boom, you have a new, you've minted a new Uji Matcha factory. Yeah, they're. Marrying the system from producers. Coming from Nishio and there's also something called the blend rule where you can have some, you can call it something something blend like Uji matcha blend which can contain up to 50% other tea, but not regulated.

Zongjun · 32:34

No rule that I can find and I've done a lot of searching that stipulate it's it has to be a Japanese product. So it's very possible and we know that there's tencha flowing and I don't know if Aiya is doing this, but honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a lot of quote Uji matcha blends that contain Chinese tencha. Now we're calling it Uji matcha saying it's special become it comes from Uji or the heritage of Uji. But the people doing the processing don't need to have any heritage in Uji.

Zongjun · 33:08

They just need to set it up geographically in Kyoto Prefecture. So in the case of Aiya, right, they're taking Nishio in Aichi prefecture knowledge and processing, which is a very interesting matcha history to which we want to cover at some point putting it into Uji.

Zongjun · 33:22

I would probably, as far as I can tell, legally bring in Chinese tencha to call something an Uji matcha blend. And the crazy thing is if you care about quality, it actually doesn't even matter. Like they can probably create a very good tasting products. Yeah, no.

Zongjun · 33:42

And so it's. Uji is just so mythologized to the point where it clouding out all of this other stuff. Yeah, it's a. System. It's a system really is a system. It's a history. It's a cultivation system. It's a processing style system, it's a brand system, it's an ecosystem system. It's.

Zongjun · 34:03

A meta system. There's so many. Layers to this onion. Yeah, yeah. Where I have a. Problem is where it feels very deceptive and I'm, I'm not talking about any specific company right now, but like I'm talking with a lot of people trying to source tencha and talking to people in Japan and people get very cagey very fast and like asking, does it come from uji grown tencha in some cases feels very inappropriate.

Zongjun · 34:27

But this ambiguity, this vagueness, this lack of transparency often feels like someone is trying to profit off of my ignorance. And not just mine, but really everyone's ignorance. I wouldn't be surprised. You know when random matcha finders go to find single origin uji matcha that they ask is this from uji?

Zongjun · 34:49

They just get an answer yes, and there's no way that the person that answered yes like, like I, they would just have to be stupid not to see through what question they were actually trying to ask. Yeah. Yeah, especially when they're. Trying to Orient everything a single origin I think. The solution to the problem is very difficult. We talk about how like intertwined everyone is to the system right now and how everyone is actually indeed benefiting from having the system in placed. We like talking about more granular geographic regions will certainly make it more interesting and valuable as a consumer to learn about a

Zongjun · 35:30

product. But from a business standpoint, it's not viable for most of the farmers and there is no alternative ways for them to, to, to, to make their farming practice and business sustainable in the future for the time being, you know, and creating more granular geographic concept, you might actually run into, you know, just creating another Uji, you know, paradox.

Zongjun · 35:54

It's if there's no regulatory entity or law in place, you know, you're just creating another Uji by the end of the day. It's like what Yani is kind of going to be right now. And that this, all of these regions sets just get lumped into a larger concept that's easier to sell tea and you know that.

Zongjun · 36:13

And I don't think it's unique to Japan either. Like this happens in China, in Korea, in all the other regions, not just tea as well, when all the other products too. Like if there's a lack of regulatory entity and law or even there is people who try to find loopholes too.

Zongjun · 36:28

Like look at the Riesling being made in Germany, but the grapes are coming from Bulgaria. Like people find all these loopholes to trying to work around and make money, essentially. And business, I would argue that is really the foundation of tea. Like if there's no business, there will be no tea. Yeah, you need the.

Ryan · 36:46

Mythologies to create the desire to create the demand. And it also can't be too complicated because the reality is most consumers just don't care. Yeah, but they could. I mean, the but there's possibility for a specialty market could be huge.

Zongjun · 37:00

Yeah, look at coffees. Too few of them. Yeah, but you could. You could make the you could make the same argument about coffee 20 years ago. Who cares that it comes from this plot in Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica or something? Who cares about the processing difference between natural and wash processed coffee, right?

Ryan · 37:17

Turns out that like $20 billion a year of people care. Yeah, but coffee is a little different, right? Because like terroir actually matters, it matters more. Well, processing matters a lot too. Yeah, processing too. It's not not not a complete parallel comparison. Well, honestly.

Zongjun · 37:35

I think within matcha the the the overemphasis of terroir is important, but actually it's just more human stories, more farmers, more people doing these innovative techniques. I mean, look at Tsuji-san, like even Tsuji-san's matcha I think sits kind of on a league of its own.

Zongjun · 37:52

It tastes pretty different actually than some of the teas from the even the other Uji matcha farmers. If you taste Furukawa Seicha, especially their organic products, it has a very distinctive taste which is really different than Tsuji-san's.

Zongjun · 38:11

And then if you go to like Taichi-san from the Shimizu family and try his tea in Uji, it also tastes very distinctly different. Product variability, even within the same cultivar amongst the Uji farmers is just such an interesting study of, I don't know, like art like interpretation skill method. But I would much rather learn about, you know, Taichi-san's processing difference than Tsuji-san's versus Furukawa's. And you know it, if they're willing to. Share and I think you.

Zongjun · 38:43

Know part of the the way that this gets solved is you just there's so many interesting stories and people with like very specific points of view. I want to taste points of view. I want to taste someone's like passion. I want to taste their organic fertilizer.

Zongjun · 38:58

I want to taste their experimental cultivar they're interested in. I want to taste the results of their natural no pesticide, no fertilizer farming right like it. It's all different points of view and it could be much more human centric versus terroir centric. I agree.

Ryan · 39:13

I agree but there still be the the risk of mythologizing people too or cultivation methods. Like look at the biodynamic in the wine world. That's. True, you have these like I want sort of mythologizing sitting on top. I I want.

Ryan · 39:28

My my Asahi seedlings to a grow from a rhino horn in the fourth days of moon. You know, for the longest. Time. I thought biodynamic just meant like, it's a biodiverse, like it's not just a monoculture. And then I went on a tour with my girlfriend.

Ryan · 39:42

Yeah, it's wow. Wow. This is like it's a cult. I don't know that it might be be a bit of a strong word, but only spraying chamomile on a Tuesday under a full moon is a little anti scientific, too anti scientific for my brain. That's great that you believe those things. I am not convinced that it makes the wine taste any better until you set up an experiment.

Zongjun · 40:07

So, yeah, so. But that's true. But I mean, that's also just an interesting story to talk about. And there is real demand for that kind of stuff too. Yeah. Yeah. I. Agree. I mean, by the end of the day, I'm I'm not again mythology and romance, but it's great or nice that we can have the knowledge or validated information to see through some of these romance.

Ryan · 40:29

But I think the necessity of romance is there is a necessity of romance or mythology to exist for tea to be a sustainable business. Yeah, but. I think my problem is when it comes to misattributing the wrong things. Like it's.

Ryan · 40:44

It's like false education. You just got to. See through all the weeds, otherwise you'd be your intelligence tax a lot of people are paying. Well, actually it's unfair because like, let's say that you have this concept of intelligence tax onto it.

Zongjun · 40:58

Like there's not enough information out there to usually sort through this as a consumer. That's true. That's true. The verifiable information is very scarce. It's very. Hard to sort through the garbage from garbage misinformation from mythologizing and like what is a perspective versus truth?

Zongjun · 41:18

Like it, it, it's a really, it's a lot to untangle. It's like it's, I think it's unfair to consumers. Actually, I think it's just a sign that we're in an early industry that this like all the wrong things are being mythologized in my opinion, Right, Right.

Ryan · 41:34

And I think that there'll be some, you know, hopefully there'll be some correction, right? And I think it's just going to be a very local movement. It's, it's your local barista that you trust. It's your local matcha cafe that you know, and you're like, you know, you taste through all of these different things and you start realizing what makes great matcha great, right?

Zongjun · 41:53

And it's. Not that some random kind of uji macho is the best, I mean and. Hopefully this kind of mentality will be the new norm for a large enough consumer community that you know it becomes sustainable for the farmers to convert or to confine into this new system. Because right now, from a purely a business standpoint, this new community is not providing enough buying power to pull the farmers from the other side to this side. Yeah, that's.

Ryan · 42:22

True and reliable buying power, yeah, a lot of structural barriers, which we always go back to. But it's I hope, I hope that this industry can change, which is what we feel like this the ending sentence in every podcast we're doing all. Parts we're trying.

Zongjun · 42:41

To we're trying to, we, I mean we would love to see a lot of the industry switch from macho to tencha. I think that will be a huge component because when you're starting to deal in tencha you default or a one step back in the purchasing system. So it's you know you get a little closer to the agriculture into the stories and the potentially the farmers etcetera.

Ryan · 43:04

So yeah, I don't know. So it's an interesting. Future well it's at least for now I feel like it's a forgeable future still we're still very early in in in this movement and you know futures is for us to written yeah my.

Ryan · 43:23

Call to action for anyone listening to this episode that has any, you know, leverage or power in whatever part of the ecosystem you fall in, whether or not you're a consumer or matcha brand or Cafe. Like it is that we stopped mythologizing the wrong things and that we really questioned some assumptions about what actually makes great matcha great. And matcha is the like of all the tea that's produced anywhere in any country, I'm like pretty confident to say that it is by far the most amount of like processing human intervention and skill.

Ryan · 43:55

And the fact that we attributed to this tiny little town and South of Kyoto as being the reason why it's so good almost spits on the face of all these people who put all this work into making this fantastic tea and that we are all drinking.

Ryan · 44:10

And it's writing this name. And it's just so unfair and it's misattributing quality. And I was recently went into a cafe where I live in a different neighborhood where I live in Paris. And I went in and there's all these cans of Uji Matcha it says.

Ryan · 44:25

And what the, the, the tag set was Uji comma, Kyoto comma Japan. Anyone who reads this in France is thinking this is a single origin product and it's organic. And I am almost, I would say 100%, but 99.999% that can does not come from Uji. And if it did, it should be triple the price because organic matcha that comes from Uji is exceedingly rare. And it would cost way more than the €30 that they were charging for that.

Ryan · 44:59

And like that can is riding off of this name, but it's also not writing, just riding off of this name. It's an eraser. It's erasing all of this work that actually made that can taste good and sit there like on that shelf. It's it's it's that that's the part that bothers me. So I think consumers should start being more discerning, trying to like pull truth out of the industry. Like you're labeling this is single origin. Like does it like doesn't come from Uji-grown tencha, but same thing for the cafes and vendors.

Ryan · 45:35

Because people just don't know. And the industry has no incentive to correct anyone's knowledge about this. The only reason you could be interested in this is so you want to get serious about tasting place, about tasting like an untangling and really making judgments for yourself about what's good and not good. And that's a really small group of people right now. But if we all start collectively questioning these and trying to form our own judgments based off of objective truth, we can breakthrough some of these, what I'll call nonproductive myths that are erasing what makes great matcha great. And and that's the people I

Zongjun · 46:12

think it's a great. Place to end, although I I don't totally agree with this call to action really. Why it's a? It's a very complicated and so sticky system that everyone is making depending on their livelihood and living out of the current Uji bandwagon.

Zongjun · 46:36

And if we were ever to change the system, we need to show them a alternative way to to be sustainable for them, for the farmers that I'm talking to. Otherwise, like this call to action, it's not going anywhere. It will not go go to anywhere like people will go back to Uji because there is no alternative for them to survive or to make money.

Ryan · 47:00

I don't know. There's no good way to doing it. I don't have a solution either but I mean like it's just slowly going to be more granular but the each more granular level is just going to be another Uji. No, but at least.

Zongjun · 47:13

It's mythologizing the right things. It doesn't have to be a place. It can be a person, people, processing style, or they can be talking. About bullshit, right? You know, like after my Laotian trip, the mindset or the idea of tea is a business has never been so obvious to me. It's really the root of anything. Like if something is not commercially viable, then then it's nothing.

Zongjun · 47:45

In order for any changes to happen really, we or the collective, collective, we has to come up with a commercially viable plant or a alternative path for everything to, to, to essentially work. You know, I actually, I think one of the largest romance or mythology for tea is that tea is just tea that people can enjoy, that people can drink and people can, you know, like, like, like and feel good.

Zongjun · 48:13

But but what tea really is is a business. There's there will be no tea if there's no business like everyone is trying to make a living out of, you know, this very plant and, and obviously consumers are paying for it too, right? But for this business to work.

Zongjun · 48:31

And if there's no, if this circulation of money doesn't happened and that it wouldn't, there will be no change for that to, to become the new norm. Because like right now, for Uji to work so well for ceremonial grade to work so well for all of these mythology to work so well is because they are adding lube, they're adding oil, they're adding fuel into this grand circle of money. And we're thinking that, you know, money is sturdy, you know, like it's keep money or business away from this pure drink. But without money, there will be no pure drink. There will be no, you know, chawan or, you know, tea that you can enjoy.

Ryan · 49:17

So true. So. It's the very fact that you can enjoy, you know, a tea thousands of miles away from its origin. It's because the whole system lives on top of a, you know, modern system that's riding on capital flow. Yeah. It's the oxygens and we saw the case of Nishio.

Ryan · 49:41

Nishio is one of two teas in Japan that had GI protection, I think from 2015 or 2017 all the way through like 2022. And they formally withdrew GI protection because it priced their tea three time or two or three times higher than the other teas of the region because they were had to use certain production methods and only use tea grown in those parts of Nishio and I think slightly around Nishio.

Ryan · 50:10

And with that withdrawal now they can like make it more economically viable because like that it there wasn't enough mythology to support the Nishio farmers as a Nishio only thing. They had to bring in other material and more efficient methods to make it financially viable.

Zongjun · 50:30

Yeah, it is. Like a onion, right? Like the deeper you go is just more refined and more granular mythology. But, you know, it gets you probably a step closer to the truth, which is, you know, progress. I will call that. Yeah, but. Dismantling systems that work and that everyone has an incentive to keep going is almost impossible. But you know you're right.

Ryan · 50:54

Without money, there is no tea. Fertilizer is not free. The people that pick the tea aren't free. The tencha processing equipment is extremely expensive. Like people are buying out loans. I mean, constructing these new facilities and investing in growth, then you could even I would argue that even the business of tea in the way that money gets exchanged through these wholesale relationships between farmers and the blend houses through the auction systems is actually also just part of the culture. But in that culture, you can draw a straight line through through the history of making tea actually matcha almost. We're going to talk about this

Ryan · 51:28

more on on the this series around Uji Matcha, but Matcha almost died as a product. It was a state controlled monopoly in the Edo era. You'd have special permissions to do shaded cultivation for tencha. It was controlled by very few families.

Ryan · 51:44

Those families controlled both the blend houses and the power at like local City Hall. They had a ton of political power to keep this incredibly controlled and all of this tea, The way the money flowed was from the feudal Lords all the way down through the tea farmers who were given political power, economic power, social power. And when the feudal system got dismantled during the Meiji Restoration in the 1800s, overnight the entire industry's money and cash flow stopped.

Ryan · 52:16

It's a miracle and a very interesting story which we'll get into about how that shifted and how this whole industry survived, but it almost nearly died because the money stopped flowing. It's it is also part of the culture, all of these things and the evolving definition of what was once a very single origin product into this, I don't know, crazy one syllable that gets slapped on so much tea.

Zongjun · 52:45

And like that story is super interesting and it is a story of mythologizing a place, a history and, you know, really endlessly fascinating. And you're right, mythology actually has great utility and I just don't like the fact that in some cases you're being told a story to like something more.

Zongjun · 53:05

It's just let's praying on people's or just. Pure lies, Yeah, in a lot of. Cases with a lot of this marketing, it's like there's this thing that you don't know you like yet and I'm going to tell you these set of stories.

Ryan · 53:18

Hope that you will like it because Zen monks once used it or these bamboo chasens are the traditional way that these tea ceremony masters whisked this matcha. God forbid you used an electric whisker. It would be blasphemy. Cultural appropriation.

Zongjun · 53:34

All of these mythologizing and judgments should only drink tea grown in Japan. So important. It's just praying on like people. If you just connect the incentives, it's actually very dirty. What's going on underneath. It's very like malintent. It's not a pleasant thought when you start connecting the intentions to the mythologizing, to the production to the sales. They just want to.

Ryan · 54:04

Make more money, that's all. And, you know, spreading. Culture or under the guise of spreading culture is not a good way to spread culture. I think that's true. That's. True. That's a real cultural appropriation. That's so. True.

Zongjun · 54:19

Those are the real violators of cultural appropriation who are making all of these connections. The thing that you know best has a seed of truth, so it's for their own culture. I think that's a great place to stop. But over mythologizing is something that we all should be vigilant of. And it's very important to understand where our beliefs come from, what we think is important and why we think it's important.

Zongjun · 54:42

So it's a very important tool for understanding ourselves. And sometimes, you know, something deserves to be mythologized as much as it is. So we we also have to, you know, exercise judgment and all of this. And we're not the experts either.

Ryan · 54:55

I mean, we're learning. This is to document our learning journey. I pay my. Intelligence tax, Yeah, we paid. Our intelligence tax many times over, but the tuition is well worth it to get closer and closer to to what feel like a closer to objective truth.

Zongjun · 55:11

Anyway, thanks so much for listening and we'll see you in the next one. See you in the future. Take care.