Next Level Specialty

Ryan · 0:06

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, this is my cofounder Zongjun who also goes by Sam. Hello. And we're the cofounders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah, we love this podcast to discuss our learning journey, matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. In the past week or so, we are in this wonderful city, Kyoto again and visiting farmers in Uji, and we got actually invited specifically to visit this award-winning tea farmer Suji-san in Uji, who is one of the very few farmers who have received Emperor Award, but the only living farmer. And he's frequently cited as the

Ryan · 0:45

most awarded matcha farmer producer in Japan and hence the world. Very, very cool experience. A person we've heard about for years, I first heard about him after Johnny Matcha and then indirectly through Kettle and Kettle's website and book. And then Marc from Ooika and tons of other actually specialty matcha vendors have developed a relationship with Suji-san. And it was we've heard this name and heard about his agricultural practices.

Ryan · 1:15

He was one of the few people that we decided we were not going to reach out to because Suji-san is infamously difficult to get a hold of because so many people come in for inquiries because he's gotten so famous. And so we decided to kind of play cool, wait and see.

Zongjun · 1:33

We were like, you know, the the most likely way that we'll get in as someone at some point and will hopefully give us an introduction. And that's what happened. We got very lucky. Very lucky. We're very grateful to our friends that we've met in Thailand.

Zongjun · 1:48

Yeah, big appreciation. Thank you, arigatou gozaimasu, to Khun Pop and Yusuke-san, who are the owners of Kodo Tea Space in Bangkok, who invited us to join this wonderful journey. Suji-san. And they put together an educational trip. So there were a lot of people there, probably a group of seven of us or maybe eight of us.

Zongjun · 2:10

And they help with interpretation and we were just able to ask a lot of questions. It was really unique about this experience is that both Khun Pop and Yusuke-san are really good at getting very nerdy very fast with people.

Zongjun · 2:26

And there's this pretty interesting dynamic that happens in Japanese tea, but it also happens in Chinese tea and Korean tea circles. Whenever you're trying to go deeper and deeper about a subject is, you know, a lot of tea people, farmers, producers, quote UN quote, tea masters were masters brewing or different types of ceremony.

Zongjun · 2:43

Try to adjust everything to where you're at, right? So in sometimes it's kind of almost an unfriendly interaction where you're kind kind of gauging, OK, how much do you know? How much do I know? Then seeing where you fit. And then you kind of adjust your conversation that way. You can imagine that like being it like at a very fancy wine restaurant and they ask you like, what do you like to drink? And they kind of gauge your level of knowledge or experience off of this.

Zongjun · 3:10

So a lot of this is going on both explicitly and implicitly. And in a lot of the better interactions, like you, it's very, very implicit. It's very, very subtle. And we were actually talking about that with them afterwards.

Zongjun · 3:23

It's like unlocking a level and with someone like Suji-san, who is so familiar with the agriculture and is considered really one of the top masters in the entire tea, masters in the entire world, not only for matcha, but just in tea more broadly, and he only makes matcha or tencha.

Ryan · 3:39

You kind of have to unlock those levels, right? If you go in asking like, what do you think about the matcha boom, that is an inherently less interesting question than talking about soil types and quantities, the implications of different types of fertilizer, really special nuances of traditional ways of processing. So we got to go very deep, very fast. And to be honest, we've recorded, I think it's about AD episodes on the Specialty Matcha Podcast. And we've interviewed a lot of people and we've been doing a lot of learning over the years as we as we as we've done this podcast and I'd say in the past

Ryan · 4:19

three or four months, we've been in kind of a learning journey plateau. And we were actually getting a little bit bored. We kept rehearing the same information over and over. Everyone's talking about the same origins, same cultivars, the same producers.

Zongjun · 4:34

And we didn't really feel like we were learning. Yeah. And it was actually a little bit boring to some point that we were doing some sort of our own exploration into some of the less known Tawa regions in Japan to see if there is anything interesting over there.

Zongjun · 4:53

And for some places, it was quite disappointing, to be honest. Yeah, just seas and seas of Yabukita. And maybe like 10% of that region grew Seimei. Yeah, and that's it. But you know, the farming technique is very homogeneous.

Zongjun · 5:08

Everything goes into the wholesalers or the local options and it was just not interesting. Yeah, we're not learning anything new. And that was very worrying because like for any specialty movement to be able to flourish, you do need a soil of different people doing interesting different things in different regions.

Zongjun · 5:29

And that's like the foundation of anything that that people can build their, you know, interest can seek different directions or depending on their preference or their curiosity. But that was not, you know, very confidence inspiring when we were doing that. So we got a little bit, you know, bored, a little bit disappointed, but.

Ryan · 5:48

It was. We're too naive to make that assumption. This. Trip was very eye opening. Very eye opening and actually, to be honest, very humbling. We almost titled this episode. We had a couple of humbling experiences just at how much we don't know and how much how many more things there are to learn that are just incredibly interesting.

Ryan · 6:10

So we wanted to share that First, we're going to talk about our experience meeting Suji-san and everything that we learned at that experience. And then we're we're going to talk about an interesting experience that we had on our tour, a factory tour with Marukyu Koyamaen.

Ryan · 6:25

And we ended up learning quite a few things. And we're actually pretty surprised at what we found and a lot of their answers to our questions. It did not meet our expectations for what that was going to be like. And then last, we're going to talk about a fantastic experience at a wonderful tea house in Uji. Aisa Nakamura, Yes.

Zongjun · 6:47

This place is incredible. You know, I used to say, you know, Uji really doesn't have that many good places to drink tea and this like was hard reset. But we not only got to learn a lot there, but what is going on there is absolutely insane from a cross cultural influence on how other tea cultures are impacting the way Japanese tea producers are preparers. Tea houses are approaching tea and that was totally unexpected. So we're going to talk about our experience there. So to kick off with Shuji-san, we get there and the very first thing that we Start learning about is the soil. Types.

Zongjun · 7:25

It's not just about a soil types, but like the the the mineral composition of different soils and how are they going to impact the flavor or the health of the tea bushes. Yes. Which was very, very interesting. We're going to really get into the details here and just literally read through our notes and talk about what we've digested.

Zongjun · 7:45

So you can almost think of this as note sharing, but we left this feeling like, wow, there is so much to know about fertilizer. And then we were talking with with Khun Pop afterward. And she was like, yeah, this is like 5% deep. And it was all stuff we had never heard before. Knowing that there's like 95% more of this knowledge underneath the iceberg is really exciting. Almost a little terrifying.

Ryan · 8:11

Yeah, very terrifying. It really makes you reset how much you think you know. So what's the first thing we know? Well so there's broadly speaking there's two soil types that matter within Japanese tea cultivation. There's clay based and there's more like sandy soil and clay based is usually has worse drainage but generally leads to more full bodied tea and easier to preserve a lot of the nutrients in the tea.

Ryan · 8:38

So even whether or not it's clay based or sand based greatly impacts fertilization practices and how the method and how fast the different fertilizers can spread. And ultimately how suitable the soil is to farm March, to farm matcha because matcha is such a, you know or I should say conventional farming of matcha is such a fertilizer intensed.

Ryan · 9:05

Farming practice, Yeah. So it's like a delivery mechanism. So like an equivalent in the human body might be something closer to like bioavailability. What is going on and what is the methods of how easy something is to digest and how it gets to you?

Zongjun · 9:19

And so that that was super interesting. And when we were in Bangkok with a koto tea space, we did a cupping, a pretty interesting cupping of three different yabukitas. I think they were all from Shizuoka and two of them were from clay soil types or excuse me, two of them were from sandy soil types and one was from clay soil type. And they had relatively similar processing. And the goal of this cupping goal is vertical tasting was to sort of understand the differences body and texture that those had.

Zongjun · 9:48

And by far the clay soil type had a quite a bit more noticeable rounded fuller flavor than the sandy soil types, which were a little more, had some harder edges and kind of emptied out in the middle in terms of the drinking experience.

Zongjun · 10:04

And what was super interesting is that a lot of Shuji-san's fields are actually sandy soil pipes, which really surprised Khun Pop and Yosuke-san who the first time they tasted their tea, they were like, oh, this must be clay soil types because of how uniquely rich and Shuji-san's matcha is like famously rich and he's won the national tea competition many, many times and all of these crazy awards. And it really kind of checks every box for what is considered high quality tea.

Zongjun · 10:32

And actually something that's absolutely crazy to learn is that he is a first generation tencha farmer. So he's 6th generation tea farmer, but his father was making gyokuro mostly from Yabukita cultivar. So in a single generation, he switched it to all of these cultivars and to tencha and won the highest awards that are exist in the category. So his ability to quote UN quote, talk to these tea plants, communicate with these tea plants, understand what they need and how flavor is driven.

Zongjun · 11:07

He is like a world class master at this. Yeah. Well, like, it's very interesting to see his approach in farming because in many ways he's like a scientist. He sends all of the clay soil samples to lab to test the exact mineral composition of these different soil types in his teeth.

Zongjun · 11:26

And he specifically optimized his fertilizer recipe for different soil types in his tea garden and also in combination or in consideration with the specific cultivar that's growing on those soil types. And where like which position of those tea gardens is on the slope that are either sun facing side or not sun facing side which has different connotation of sunlight exposure? And apparently if we go really deep, the local Uji geography, like if you look over the course of millions of years of how the soil types ended up being with like they are, it's actually like sometimes different fields

Zongjun · 12:07

can basically sit on a knife's edge, where like half of the fields can be extremely iron rich, for example, and the other half is very not iron rich. So even within the fields that we were in in Shirakawa Uji, there was quite a bit of variance within the visual field of looking around at just the soil types. The only way that he was able to know that was by sending all of that off to a lab, which is kind of crazy. Yep.

Zongjun · 12:35

And there was a very short geology lecture that Yosuke-san given to us after the meeting with Shuji-san is how the geological formation of Uji and also the whole Yamashiro region, you know, as a whole, you know, has a very complicated connotation of like ancient ocean and also like the formation of Biwa Lake. And how a lot of these kind of marine creatures or shellfish precipitate, you know, their, you know, their carcasses, which are very calcium rich into the soil. And how the like ancient coastline has a connotation of the soil type.

Zongjun · 13:17

That's right now, you know, terroir in the Yamashiro regions. That was very surprisingly, you know, interesting segue of where where, where can we extract information and also like where can we? Draw in other disciplines and the knowledge bases.

Zongjun · 13:33

Knowledge bases to understand the current status of TNG. A natural question to ask is like why is iron content so important? I had no idea before this. It's pretty interesting So one of the most important mineral, what a very important mineral for to take into consideration when fertilizing is manganese. So the more manganese you add of course to a limit, it makes the tea plants really strong, it strengthens the tea plants and the more iron you have affects the absorption of manganese. So if you have really high iron content soil, you need to greatly increase the concentration of manganese to actually get the proper amount

Zongjun · 14:15

into the plants. But if too much manganese, it's going to affect the taste of the tea, apparently it makes the taste empty and less rich, according to Shuji-san. So it's actually a pretty delicate balancing act. It's not like you can just say I'm putting this concentration of manganese and applying this much across all of the fields, right? Some of them might have way too much and some of them might not have enough if you don't actually know the iron content of your soil.

Zongjun · 14:44

And so it's really an art and a science. And you don't want to overdo it because if you're going to have, you're going to have tea that doesn't taste as good because too much manganese makes the tea too strong. And in doing that, I don't know what the mechanism is.

Ryan · 14:58

You didn't explain it. Maybe, you know, it spends too much energy building up other parts of the plant and not on the young tender leaves. I have no idea. And that would be like a complete random guess for the causal mechanism. But if you don't put enough, it's really bad for the plants as well.

Zongjun · 15:13

And also fertilizer as a whole cannot be overdosed. And there was this like really great quote from Sudhisan and Ryan, you can translate. So there was a very kind of yellowing color bud and cluster, like first and second leaf and bud. And we went in February.

Ryan · 15:33

So like there's really not that many buds, which is a little interesting too. And he looked at it and it looks a little emaciated, and it was kind of weird, pale yellow color. Yeah, which is actually still quite confusing to me because that can also be a sign of the temperatures too low, like a cold damage to the teeth.

Ryan · 15:53

But he was pointing at some leaf being yellow as cold damage and that specific leaf as over fertilized and. How he knows the difference is a great question. No idea. So even like understand and this is all goes back to communicating with the tea plants and learning how to communicate with the tea plants.

Ryan · 16:13

So he said the when you look at this yellowing by it's having a direct connection with what's going on in the root system. And the quote that was translated for us, which I really love is, you know, this tea is over fertilized.

Ryan · 16:26

And the analogy was it was eating too much too fast and didn't digest. Yeah, it's obese. And so you can absolutely over fertilize. And it turns out there's actually quite a bit of nuance to how you over fertilize what and when.

Ryan · 16:42

And it's not just about putting things in the soil at a particular time. The rainfall greatly affects the way that fertilizer makes it into the plant and the temperature. And the colder the temperature, the slower the intake. So environmental factors actually play a pretty major role in the dosing.

Ryan · 17:02

And you know, they say that matcha, the more you talk to people who are experts in matcha cultivation, the more you realize that it's not actually very terroir expressive. The reason it tastes delicious is because of an enormous amount of human skill. And you know, on this trip we were saying or the people in our group were saying it's really like maybe 5% terroir expressive, but 95% it was someone's blood, sweat and tears that made it taste that way.

Ryan · 17:27

And just reading the weather and reading the plant and understanding where it's AT and what it needs and what the temperature is going to be, what the rainfall is going to be, is all the art of getting that fertilizer into the plant.

Zongjun · 17:40

Yeah, there are some just crazy practices that Uji farmer has been doing in their unique understanding of farming practices. Suji science basically in his garden every single day doing the shading and harvest season to just check the condition of every single tea leaves.

Zongjun · 17:58

And we have learned that some farmers when they were doing natural farming, so without pesticides, they will be just sitting in the tea garden catching insects. Like that's like next level commitment. Yes, it is like you really have to be in touch what's going on in your tea garden. We also learned something very interesting just about cultivars in general.

Zongjun · 18:20

And apparently Asahi cultivar is really just a pain and it is super, super, super sensitive. So anytime you have delicious Asahi from someone, it was like massively more work to make that plant happy to produce great tea than other cultivars.

Zongjun · 18:37

It doesn't like it when it's it doesn't rain enough, so it's not very drought resistant. It can very easily be over shaded. When you're doing shaded cultivation, it can very easily be over fertilized and it can also be very easily light damaged.

Zongjun · 18:55

And actually one of the first times we were in Uji and visited a tea field with an Uji, a lot of the Asahi cultivar plants did not look like they were doing well. And they put up these blue tarps, like these blue mesh tarps, not to shade the plant, but to protect it from the sun.

Zongjun · 19:11

And Asahi is one of those cultivars too that has pretty bad rooting problems. So whenever there's kind of two ways you can, you can put tea in the ground and plant it into a garden. One is from seeds where you take the seeds and those seeds end up growing a taproot structure and they can dig pretty deep. Or you can use grafts or clones, or you take a cutting, you take it off, it starts to go roots and you put it in the ground. So almost all Japanese tea cultivation now is all using these cultivars.

Zongjun · 19:40

And Asahi is one of these cultivars. They're all genetically identical, but they all have different levels of rooting problems compared to zairai seed propagated tea. So Asahi is famous terrible in terms of its its rooting. And apparently I think they were saying Uji Hikari has much better rooting performance.

Zongjun · 20:00

So we might start to see more and more Uji Hikari being planted over Asahi because it's much easier to grow and has relatively similar taste characteristics. And Uji Hikari is currently like winning all the competitions.

Zongjun · 20:13

So there's a pretty strong incentive, I think, for people to start to grow it. And actually because of the name, like farmers in Uji like to use Uji Hikari as their representation to submit to competitions, which is very interesting to learn. So the other interesting thing about Asahi is that we learned how the leaf kind of gets heavy and then gets like this kind of like dropping down shape as it was reaching into maturity or as a symbol of the tea is well fertilized and very. Healthy.

Zongjun · 20:45

And very healthy develops this very like interesting Sheen under the light that that was very unique, unique compared to other cultivars. And it's slightly drips down, like it's certain pointing up at a very high angle.

Zongjun · 20:59

It's a little more horizontal to the plant, but still slightly up. And he was saying that's a very good sign that that plant is doing well. That Asahi plant is doing very well. So pretty interesting visual indicator. He was also talking a lot about how he chooses different tea or different fields or different trees for a competition for competition grade tea. And apparently they don't really start tasting very good at their peak until they're about 10 years old. So when you're going from cultivars, typically you can start harvesting after three to five years that they've been in the ground, but apparently you

Zongjun · 21:32

have to wait another five years before it's really reached its peak. And what's really unique about Suji San in Shirakawa is that he renews his trees every 20 years. And this is just unheard of from everything that we've heard from everyone. That's which means the really like production years or a tea land in Sujisan's farm.

Ryan · 21:54

It's just 10 years. Yeah, that's. For competition at least, yeah. For competitions, or maybe even nice. For competition, yeah. That's like unheard of, very extreme. And so I mean, this is true not only for for matcha, but for other types of tea as well. Younger trees generally are considered more fragrant. So you'll hear a lot in like Chinese tea culture and appreciation circles that, you know, gushu or ancient tree or old trees are really, really great, especially within the context of something Yunnan or other tea production areas. And this is true, but it's also not, it's not always true across all types of of tea.

Zongjun · 22:32

Shui Xian, for example, in Fujian. Those producers generally also prefer very high fragrance tea. And also younger. Trees in younger trees, so they do a lot of like ripping up very frequently to make sure that the age of the trees is always very young.

Zongjun · 22:50

And interestingly enough, there's two guards. A lot of people complain about this in the Chinese tea appreciation circles. The old guard, which you know, more of our friends associate with the old garden, the new guard actually really like older trees and deep minerality because the older those trees get, the more mineral they are.

Zongjun · 23:09

And there's an old, there's a perception of an overemphasis on high degrees of fragrance and that everyone is just optimizing for more and more aromatically expressive tea. But you can also have older trees that just have this incredible minerality, a little bit deeper and less expressive.

Zongjun · 23:28

So there's a lot of, there's just different preferences, at least in China. And in Japan as well actually like not in matcha but also but in other types of tea like sencha and and the Wazuka like people do prefer older trees for like these T types. You can't and even a little bit matcha. There's some producers I think in Ujitawara that specifically talk about their 100 year old trees that they still do shaded cultivation on and they're all zairai or seed propagated. We had one of those teas about a year ago. It is just incredibly fragrant and incredibly mineral, has just this wonderful.

Zongjun · 24:06

It's a very intensity, definitely has some bitterness to it, but it is just incredibly complex and deeply mineral and super interesting. The next level specialty. But this is but this is also one area that we have a problem with in all of Japanese tea appreciation at the competitions is that it has farmers optimizing for very specific types of profiles like a 100 year olds.

Zongjun · 24:32

Zairai from Ujitawara that's organically grown like almost by definition, could never place anywhere close to what they consider to be the top of the top of the top quality in the way that these teas get scored. But of course, it's all about control. And what's super interesting is just what you can do when you have deep knowledge of the plant, right? Like you're kind of driving a car and you're steering it towards certain flavor profile outcomes. And really it's just all about perspective. And Suji San's tea is just some of the most rich, incredibly complex tea that you can find in Japan, and it's highly priced because of it.

Ryan · 25:11

All over the world. Yeah, it's. Really about like what you are optimizing for and what criterias you care about. And it's the difference of building a luxury car versus a race car. Fuji Sounds Tea is definitely a very fast race car.

Zongjun · 25:25

It's a perfect analogy. We also learned a lot of other things about fertilizer and the new byproduct that goes into fertilizer. So some of the things that are commonly talked about in general, not just at Tsuji Sun but in other places, are things like sesame oil byproduct, like the leftovers when you press oil is a common fertilizer.

Zongjun · 25:44

Probably the most common one is rapeseed oil or canola oil. After you press those seeds, those like cakes are frequently used and composted and basically turned into fertilizer. Different types of fish, rice and rice straw are commonly talked about. And we recently learned that people use. Meat and even meat, yeah, meat and bones. It was pretty interesting.

Zongjun · 26:08

And one of the things that Suji someone is talking about was actually sugar cane byproduct. So in sugar cane processing and apparently and that byproduct is pretty easy to apply and become, it can become incredibly amino rich or amino acid rich after it's fermented. So a lot of these products, you know, the rapeseed oil byproduct is not really the fertilizer, it's the result of the rapeseed oil byproduct getting broken down, fermented, composted, digested by local yeast and fungi and bacteria. And those fermentation, that fermentation results in the actual fertilizer that the plant absorbs. And it turns out that the

Zongjun · 26:53

manufacturing of MSG is actually common that uses sugar cane because it's very amino rich. So basically applying MSG to the soil. Yeah. So when you take this byproduct, it's super easy to absorb glutamic acid, which is, you know, MSG after it gets fermented, but apparently it is very, very, very easy to over fertilize. So it is like a precision instrument. You really have to know what you're doing and to understand where the plant is at, what the weather is going to be, how cold it's going to be, if it's going to rain, to determine how quickly the plant is going to absorb that. And this is just for one

Zongjun · 27:34

component of fertilizer. And some of the other interesting ingredients that Suti San use are fish from Brazil or Russia and soybeans from the States. It's a very actually very globalized recipe. Yeah. We asked him how the fertilizers changed over the decades. How has your fertilizing practice changed? And he said we'll just have much more options now. Yeah, it's globalization.

Zongjun · 27:59

And for any new types of fish that he end up acquiring, he will actually eat it and taste it. And he said that one batch of fish from Russia was apparently too salty. So it didn't end up using them. And apparently fish in general is fertilizer has a quite a few problems because it adds salt to the soil.

Zongjun · 28:21

So you can very quickly deteriorate your soil quality if you're over aggressive in fertilizing the fish because it leaves residual salt behind. And we learned that the smaller fish like anchovies, etcetera, and mackerel, you know, are much more salty than the larger fish. So that's even a consideration of how much goes into Uji. Son's philosophy for fertilizing is he will not put anything in the ground that he doesn't eat himself, which I think it's a very nice, healthy, healthy, yeah, action standards. We also learned about more industrial types of fertilizer, which he does not use, but he was talking quite a bit. And we've we've heard of this

Ryan · 29:05

being used in more mass plantation based higher volume places that use ammonium sulfate, which is incredibly fast acting. Yeah. And the timing for using it apparently is super important. And if you overdose it in my parent, the books of the tea plants. And you're really only supposed to put it on right when the shoots are coming out for it to take maximum effect. It's basically energy shot.

Ryan · 29:30

Yeah, it's like a 5 hour energy for the plants. Ammonium sulfate. Yum. That must smell good. Yeah, that must smell. That smells so bad because you have both sulfur and ammonia. So another major thing that we talked about were actually were sort of terroir. What they would talk about terroir and the impact of sunlight and in orientation to where the tea plant is on a hill or in a valley, UV light is highest at sunset. So if a mountain is blocking the light at sunset, it's actually much better for matcha.

Zongjun · 30:09

So it's a pretty quantifiable, easy to reference thing for how matcha can be affected by, you know, the natural local landscape. It's just the orientation of the sun and sunset and whether or not it's getting hit with that light. And also the best of the best composition is that the tea sits in some sort of a valley so that the sun exposure is really minimized due during, you know, every time of the year. That's actually what part of the reason why Sudi Sun specifically selects some of the tea plants, the gardens in the region. So there's a lot of secondary implications to fertilizer too. We were learning that a lot of

Zongjun · 30:48

the organic fertilizer is applied in the spring and something like grapeseed oil cakes or canola oil byproduct cakes. You also have to be very sensitive to it because if you put too much, it generates a lot of gas during the fermentation and it's very it can really damage the root structure. So all of these things have a lot of secondary implications as well or things like gas can.

Zongjun · 31:14

So it the analogy that they use is kind of like having an Olympic athlete. He actually is a pretty interesting philosophy. He doesn't necessarily want very, very healthy tea plants, which is why he changes from every 20 years, which is an insane standard.

Zongjun · 31:29

He wants to push them right up into the edge so we can maximize fertilization, maximizing money, keep the plant as healthy as it can be, but as performant as it can be. And this is the true art of fertilization is keeping it exactly up at that point. And that's really what it takes to win all of these competitions and be considered some of the best match of produced in the world.

Zongjun · 31:53

And learning all of this for like we know that fertilizer was important, learning this philosophy behind it and you know, we're only touching the tip of the iceberg is just next level specialty. Like we just did not understand that. To me it was like you have some secret recipe, like a secret like formula for Coca-Cola or you know, pick your random like secret recipe product and you sprinkle it on the ground twice a year.

Zongjun · 32:17

It's like raising like 10,000 children and they all require different things from you at different times for different reasons. Yeah. And we I also learned that in the early days, Sushi Sound only has zairai in his field. And at the time for him to be able to, you know, understand the tea plants and control the fertilizers, he had to send multiple batches of his tea leaves into the lab to do multiple testings to understand, you know, each zairai or zairai clusters and apply it fertilizers accordingly. So that was really crazy and also like, it's quite understandable why a lot of people, including Sue Designs, switched to cultivars later on.

Ryan · 33:05

There was this mysterious 30 year gap between cultivars start to becoming a thing versus everyone starting to convert into cultivar farming, which we still trying to understand or get the stories behind all of these conversions in the early days. Yeah, it's very unclear how that entire industry switched from all seed propagated zairai.

Zongjun · 33:26

The implications of that is that the genetics of each plant is different. So cultivars are a form of asexual reproduction. You're producing clones, zairai, matcha, basically sexual reproduction, all of those. Each individual plant is unique. So if you walk through a zairai field, the leaf size, the leaf shape, how serrated the leaves are, how glossy they are, if they curl, if they don't curl when they're ready to be harvested, when they put up new shoots, how deep the root structure goes.

Zongjun · 33:58

All of this is unique on these plants look very different from one each other from one another typically. And the annoying part is you can't just harvest all at once. Or if you do, half is quote UN quote overripe, half is under a third is overripe, 1/3 is under ripe and maybe a third is about perfect. I'm so, you know, back in the days like 100 years ago when everything was zairai.

Zongjun · 34:18

There are a lot of operational implications because you you have to really know every single tree in your entire field and determine when it is best to be picked. And you have you need to have the like the labor power pre arranged to pick those teas. So I bet that's also part of the reason why so many people end up converting into cultivars is like back in the days there were like the labor power involved in the tea industry. Uji was in the thousands.

Ryan · 34:46

Now we only have a handful of macho farmers left in the city of Uji and which makes, you know, a prearranging labor to pick team much, much harder. There was a big wave of cultivar conversion in the 70s, and that could be the reason or tipping point, like why so many people people end up, you know, ripping their zairai and converting. Into A and there's a lot of implications about that. Like you hear about other industries like coffee, where a lot of coffee varieties are very sensitive to certain viruses such as rust, where there's sort of the systematic thing where all the best cultivars are

Ryan · 35:25

suffering from all these diseases, which puts the future of sustainability of coffee in question. You hear similar stories about the Cavendish banana. Almost all the bananas that are cultivated in the world come from the Cavendish. Are Cavendish bananas.

Ryan · 35:39

They're cultivars. I mean, it makes everything incredibly fragile. And what's interesting about Uji is some of the greatest matcha cultivars ever to exist, such as Narino, such as Ujihikari, such as, such as the Asahi all came from Uji Zairai, which means they all came from these while or not while they all came from these sexually reproduced fields. And when you RIP up the entire city of Uji Zairai, they're like taking the pop genetic diversity in the population from let's say like 100% to maybe less than two. Like I don't think anyone has any zairai left. Like the the mother trees, I think maybe they save but we just lost a lot of genetic

Zongjun · 36:25

diversity. Although we recently learned that there's still some zairai left in the Okonoyama tea. Garden Yeah, we actually we had the chance to meet Horii-san from Shichimeien and have about a 20 minute chat with him. And we were just endlessly talking about the change from zairai, how he discovered Narino, how they discovered Okonoyama cultivar. Horii-san actually a part of this old catalog from his father notebook Notebook that documents the discovery of Narino and Okonoyama cultivars back in the days and they were all like code numbers.

Zongjun · 37:02

And we got to see it when it was numbers and this table had like, I don't know, maybe 12 different columns the numbers. Like numbers of butts on each tree. Each day. Each state and the weight of each spot. The taste, the shape, the look, the color, the yield. Like it?

Zongjun · 37:20

Because when you're deciding what cultivar you want to pick, you really want to be sure it's good. And it was a point system, so everything adds up to a certain score at the end. And then you know, now Narino was one of the highest scored a Bush in the in the in the notebook, in the table. And so is Okumidori.

Ryan · 37:38

Was Okumidori. And there were a couple other rows in that table that also had a very high score. I'm like, what are these? Apparently one of them is just a Yabukita. I wonder how good that can. Be it's pretty interesting, but it's pretty sad because who knows, maybe when everyone, you know, these fields have been cultivating. These IRI fields have existed for hundreds of years and you know, the plants that aren't suitable to survive and that climate die and the ones that are are good. And back in the day, the Chashi's, the tea blenders were kind of stewards of the field and they would go around to each tree and tell people when it was

Zongjun · 38:17

ready to be picked. So they really got to know each plant. And this is one of the origins of the shiro and mukashi naming conventions. A lot of tea is called like hatsune mukashi or something something mukashi or yame no shiro or uji no shiro or something no shiro. And a lot of the Because the zairai trees were so genetically diverse, some naturally produce lighter tea than others. And shiro means white in Japanese. So apparently the chashis would go around and label some of the trees.

Zongjun · 38:52

These are shiro trees. They're like a light tree. And those were batched separately during tencha processing. So these chashis who got to know these fields that were cultivated for hundreds of years and from the Edo period all the way through today or all the way through the 70s, represented an enormous amount of genetic richness, of genetic diversity, which was all lost.

Zongjun · 39:16

So we're so really trying to uncover this, the more we talk and meet and get to know these farmers. Yeah, that's one of the interesting answer to the question of why someone something, some tea is named as something something no shiro or something something something no mukashi. There are many other theories, but it's it's all very interesting how a lot of these kind of norm that we take as granted today can be like not documented at all by anyone, which is.

Ryan · 39:46

In the words of David from Tezumi, no one really knows what's going on with this poetic naming convention. If you go to Uji today, they'll say Oh no shiro or shiro names. Blends are for usucha and mukashi's for koicha. And that might be true for like 2 vendors but then it just doesn't hold true. So the whole thing is very confusing. But anyway, there is a lot of dark genetic diversity lost during this for sure.

Zongjun · 40:11

Maybe some of the Research Institute did preserve some of it. We hope we don't know. We keep asking to go visit. And they're very nice. They get back to us in like 24 hours every time I e-mail them. One of these days we will finally visit the center where we can ask to look through some of the records and maybe see if a lot of that was preserved at these research centers in Kyoto.

Zongjun · 40:32

But we did try asking Suji San about this transition. Actually, I'm not sure He he, he didn't elaborate very much. But actually that's when we learned that he was the first person to grow tencha. And they were just growing Gyokuro before his father's generation, mostly from Yabukita and I think. Yeah.

Ryan · 40:48

Well, like you mentioned, you know, all these tea institutes exist in different prefectures in Japan and I guess that's kind of lighthouses in the darkness in the seed of cultivars like all of these institutes do preserve a lot of these thyrides in different regions and they are kind of like the genetic pool of the local tea landscapes.

Zongjun · 41:10

And as they keep propagating new types of cultivars in the future, we can experience some new possibilities, hopefully beyond what we are used to drink today. And actually they were part of the driving force and the pusher of farmers converting to cultivars in the early days as well. And a lot of these institute's offering free lectures to teach farmers how to farm specific cultivars, or they would let farmers to experience certain cultivars and talk to the farmers about their experience and learn from them and keep optimizing for the new cultivars. So there's some very interesting dynamics between the academia and the farmers and also the

Zongjun · 41:53

consumers or the Tashi's or the tea brands, which forms the whole very complex ecosystem of Japanese tea as a whole. Which is always changing. Something else that we learned that was interesting when he was explaining that his father is mostly growing Gyokuro. Is that actually all the way through the Meiji period, I guess until his father's generation, one generation ago, is that Gyokuro actually was sold for a higher price. It was an economic incentive.

Zongjun · 42:19

And we've read this before. So you know, a lot of the macho production, it was so insanely expensive in the Edo and towards the end of the Edo, which is around the mid 1800s, that a lot of farmers and a lot of tea companies, tea blenders, Chashi's went out of business during the Meiji Restoration because it was largely sort of a patron of the arts model.

Zongjun · 42:42

If you can imagine like in Venice, you had like the Medici family and they would sponsor all of these different artists. Imagine if the Medici family just fragmented and some of them got very poor. And all of these relationships with the funders, if you look at how the money flowed and there were a lot of downstream consequences of the Meiji Restoration after the fall of the shogunate and which really disrupted the tea industry. And we were reading some old books, accounting this history. And not only a lot, a lot of them go out of business, but it's shifted the industry.

Zongjun · 43:16

And apparently Gyokuro is much more profitable to farm Uji. And that was the case until relatively recently, which is pretty interesting dynamic. You can now everyone's switching to tencha. You can sort of still see that, you know, mentality being or the a legacy of being part of the current day's Japanese perception of Gyokuro.

Zongjun · 43:37

Like it's still considered as the pride of farmers in a very large way. Like farmers will talk very proudly about their Gyokuro, but they quite infrequently brag about their tencha because a lot of them just go straight into large procurers and they end up in either large blend houses or auctions. They remain basically nameless in the end Prop. Yeah, they become a component and potentially A swappable component because the blends are never the same interchangeable component.

Zongjun · 44:09

Something else we learned from Suji San is some really good references for understanding taste. And this is something we talked about in our episode. It's all about the references, understanding the causal mechanisms for how, Sir, how and why certain flavors happened.

Zongjun · 44:25

So these are from my notes that I were incredibly useful tips. So after taste is he was telling us is optimizing for good after taste is really autumn applied fertilizer. If you do not apply enough fertilizer in autumn, typically it means you'll have a worse after taste and the first sip umami that you get is typically from spring fertilizer.

Zongjun · 44:50

So that lasting, wonderful taste is the art. You know, six months before that tea is even harvested and applying fertilizer and the initial sip is spring fertilizer. And specifically, March and April are the most fertilizer absorption of tea plants.

Zongjun · 45:09

Those are sort of the busiest days of any tea farmers in Uji, I guess. And picking time apparently is really important for controlling for astringency. So if you miss the optimal picking window for any cultivar as it's being shaded, apparently if you get that wrong by a day or a few days, it has a pretty major implications on how astringent that tea is. So tea that was really picked really perfectly right on the right day really leads to, you know, fantastic tea quality. And this is something that it's a tea farmer and Goku show for a Kawasaki Cha up to about on their Instagram post. Really great account to follow,

Zongjun · 45:49

by the way. They really have break it down everything that's going on in the garden with as the seasons change. A lot of great official documentation. Wonderful visual documentation including some of the fertilizer being broken down by microbes and you can see rows and rows and tea and it looks like there was snowfall, but it's not snowfall.

Zongjun · 46:10

White mold. It's a white mold as it's breaking down and it's that local microbial flora that's breaking down and creating the fertilizer, which will then get later integrated into the plants. I guess that's part of the argument of trying to argue that, you know, fertilizer is part of the terroir, really is created by the local environment by the end of the day.

Zongjun · 46:34

Yeah, actually, you know, you can say that much is very terroir driven if you take into account like second order terroir like not what people primarily think of, but if you think of like the human skill and culture of being able to have this knowledge to make the product and it's like the local microbial flora tunnel and. Specific local ingredients for the fertilizers. Arguably, it matters less and less now because it's such a global world.

Zongjun · 47:03

You can get access to almost any fertilizer anywhere. And these different products like they're using Brazilian fish. Well, Suji-san is exceptionally has exceptionally globalized access into fertilizers, but the some farmers in Shiragawa and also Gold Coast show that we have talked to they only use local ingredients for their. Fertilizers.

Zongjun · 47:24

So it's really all like mostly blood, sweat and tears. But if you count take into account like the human factor, you can say it's very terroir driven. But arguably this quality of tea can be grown anywhere. And even in the beginning, you know, say the Kuhn Papa is very surprised that it was sandy soil because typically clay soils are yield much higher quality, very full body teeth like she's experienced in other things. And that it's just a testament to how like the incredible craftsmanship that Suji-san is doing to impart those flavors in spite of the soil quality in certain places. And it's about the decisions you

Zongjun · 48:03

make in the field to really maximize that potential. So we only got to spend one single afternoon with Suji-san and we already learned tons and tons of new information from him. We left there a little overwhelmed a little. Overwhelmed, to be honest.

Ryan · 48:18

Well, hopefully we can keep meeting him in the future and learn more, but it's just like like such like you realize this is such a tip of a iceberg by the end of the. Day like you hear about fertilizer being an art and like a skill and like all of this effort goes into it, but until you like really understand like this level of sophistication that goes on to creating such an amazing product, like you just don't fully appreciate it. And actually this is something I wish that the whole specialty matcha industry could do better is to describe like this level of insane effort that goes in to produce these flavors. Yeah, I agree.

Zongjun · 48:58

And very unfortunately, you know, this is one thing that a lot of the tea farmers do not want to be too transparent about is their fertilizer recipe. Suji-san was being very, you know, honest and transparent to us, but you know, like it's I wish this can be something that's, you know, more widely available to consumers because like it's such a important factor or ingredient to the flavor profile of any matcha that's being farmed or conventional farming of matcha.

Ryan · 49:28

I'm. Actually a little skeptical of claim that a lot of farmers are very cagey or secretive about their fertilizer recipe. I think that, you know, maybe between each other they don't talk. But I think if you show enough interest and ask enough questions, I think people will start talking and like having that be such an early conversation topic.

Zongjun · 49:48

When we went on there and everyone was just asking more and more questions, we kind of unlocked that level showing that, yes, we understand what you're talking about. We appreciate what you're talking about. And then we just kept being told more and more and more and more like it's all about unlocking these levels.

Zongjun · 50:04

And I think the reason, you know, you wouldn't tell it to someone who's not at that level is the answer. There is no fertilizer recipe. There is like 10,000 flavor, There's 10,000 fertilizer recipes. And it just so happens to be based on like 10, maybe more than 10 different factors, dozens and dozens of factors from the rainfall to how much you did last year, to how salty that batch of fish is, to how cold it was to the soil type, to how much iron was on it. Like all of these.

Ryan · 50:35

And this is supposedly it's just the tip of the iceberg. It's really next level specialty. That's true. Way too much information. There is no such thing as a fertilizer recipe. There is no one fertilizer recipe, and if there is just one, it's probably not very high quality tea because they're not taking any of this stuff into consideration so it would be not super interesting or specialty. Oh no, I just want to learn about the fish that's indeed went from Russia or Brazil.

Ryan · 51:03

That it's endlessly fascinating. So sort of on the opposite end of the spectrum. So this we're talking about probably one of the most famous quote UN quote single estates and in all of Japan for producing matcha. We also visited the largest and one of the oldest blend houses in Japan, Marukyu Koyama and you can schedule, you can ask to get a factory tour. I think this is the fourth time I have applied on their website for a factory tour and we've never gotten in. And this trip they were like, oh, you can come after. Actually, it was rejected first and then we got an e-mail saying it was an error, we can come for

Ryan · 51:40

the tour. So we got lucky. So have low expectations for getting in the first time you apply. But we got in and we finally got to see it and I had heard good things about this tour, but it was very different from my expectations.

Zongjun · 51:51

It went way deeper than I thought. It is definitely an introductory tour, but we actually ended up learning way more than I thought and they were able to answer the questions in greater depth. We didn't go there specifically to learn about Matcha. I was really interested to learn more about Marukyu Koyama at all of the shortages, all the counterfeit, the soon as the most drama is associated with Marukyu. That's when we all realized there was a matcha shortage. When they put up that famous Instagram post and blog posts saying that they might run out of matcha before the end of the year.

Zongjun · 52:24

That's where it all started. So a couple of my notes from the tour is they spent a lot of time talking about traditional processing techniques for making tencha and specifically shiage processing. So taking a more crude version of tencha like aracha into millable tencha on an ishi usu. And one of the things that they were talking about all this hand sorted stuff and I was like, are any of your products still hand sorted?

Zongjun · 52:49

Do you use these techniques or are they only for competition tea that's not commercially available? I mean, it turns out one of their most famous products, one of the most famous blends in their standard portfolio is called Tenju and it is hand sorted.

Zongjun · 53:03

So all of that tencha processing is hand done and then it is hand sorted leaf by leaf by someone with chopsticks, which is kind of cool to know that they keep that alive and that it's commercially available. Currently are doing the harvest season or doing usually doing summer.

Zongjun · 53:19

You can apply for internships to help hand sorting all these things. So if you're feeling very inspired to help make tencha, currently that opportunity is available. I don't know if you have to speak Japanese. So another thing that we've been talking a lot about on the podcast is this concept of the name of Ujicha and how Ujicha really isn't a single origin product. It refers to a much broader thing. So if you look at the trademark definition, it can be from any tea from Mie, Shiga, Nara or Kyoto Prefecture. And we asked like, is this just Ujicha? Is it just Yamashiro region which is the surrounding towns around Uji like Wazuka, Ujitawara,

Zongjun · 53:59

EDA, Kyoto, Nabe, Joyo among others? And they said no, no, it's from four prefectures and they weren't even very shy about that. I was kind of shocked like we source our teeth from four prefectures like that. Was it like very factual?

Zongjun · 54:13

Something I wanted to also get into. So there's ten different mainstream Marukyu Koyamaen blends and I'm very curious about how and why they're 10. Why are there 10? There always been 10. Why did they add a new one like and they weren't able to really clarify like the OR justify the existence of all of these plants. There's probably is some historical reason, but it's not publicly available.

Zongjun · 54:40

Actually they were telling us a few generations ago there were only was it 5 or 6 matcha in their portfolio and two of them still exist in today's you know, tanned product portfolio which shares the oldest history. I think they are you can and Unkaku, but the portfolio just keeps rotating and expanding over the course of time and a lot of the products are actually end up getting named by either a high priest in important temples or by, you know, iemoto's of different tea ceremony schools.

Ryan · 55:17

So that was all very interesting, like very unique way does I guess doing guanxi management with some of these high status society SAT house. Anyone who is not the For the uninitiated, how would you describe what guanxi management means? It's a Chinese word.

Zongjun · 55:35

It is a Chinese word, but, you know, a lot of people probably have heard heard of it already. It's, you know, maintaining social connections basically. It's like networking, but way deeper and more genuine than the semantic connotations of English of quote UN quote networking. Yeah, I heard this subtle.

Ryan · 55:54

I think at the career fair university, we were being given some generic advice to quote UN quote, water our network and like reach out to like 10% of our LinkedIn connections a month and just say hello, how are you doing? How are your kids like very transactional watering my network. She is crunchy and crunchy management is like that but actually meaningful.

Zongjun · 56:19

Yeah, yeah. And you know, the matcha and chanoyu has been such AI guess a platform or a gateway for people to, you know, doing social network in Japan in of the past few 100 years. It was really at some point the only safe space for samurai or, you know, warriors or these generals in Japan to talk business amongst each other because you have to give up your weapon before entering into the tea house. So that's part of the, I guess, matcha as, say, a telescope into the constellations of complexity of social elements of Japanese history.

Ryan · 57:01

Yeah, no, for sure. And it's interesting too. I was talking with an industry friend about, you know, the implications of adding a product to a portfolio and I made a really interesting point and it kind of half answers the question that I was trying to ask.

Ryan · 57:16

The tour guide is like, why did these products exist when you only had six products and you had 7th product? Like what is the reason beyond like maybe wanting to build connections of having someone name it? Why did you decide to make that new taste and the 8th and the 9th and the 10th? Like why weren't this other six good in like what was the impetus like in the just because there's so much interest, like what I'll call historic specialty interest there like understanding these poetic and they like you don't know the cultivars and back in the day weren't even cultivars. They were all zairai, right?

Zongjun · 57:52

But the scale of blending is probably even more intent in the way that tea gets batched and harvested and then blended. That would be a really interesting thing to learn. Yeah, actually we did learn about something very interesting is that back in the days there are these special events hosted by Tashi's to invite important clients, usually summarize or very important high status people into their venue to select specific blends that they created.

Zongjun · 58:22

As you know, they're commissioned. So that's that was very interesting. And they have all these like very cute and, you know, well created illustrations of that specific scenes being had in the factory that we get to. See, yeah, that was very cool.

Zongjun · 58:37

And on that tour you get to see these historic scenes and things like that. So actually, in some ways it's very possible that each one of these products is actually a personalized blend to meet the preferences of a single individual. It's certainly the case for the iemoto endorsed products. It is a personalized blend to meet the preferences of what is almost always one man.

Zongjun · 59:02

And this is actually where specialty matcha and our rant about like more like inclusive approaches and how all the flavor profiles and quality decisions are for the understanding of what old Japanese men consider good among themselves and not paying enough attention to what's going on in the way matcha is being used in the rest of the world.

Zongjun · 59:24

Which is actually what the last part of this episode is about that our last experience. It really is the next level specialty. But before we get there, you know, this matcha boom has a lot of interesting implications. And we were, I asked them like, are you ever going to release a single cultivar product? And they said, you know, a lot of people ask us this. And we do aware.

Zongjun · 59:47

We are aware this was a very surprising and not surprising sentence and I sure that they would not tell us if they were planning on it. So they said no, we don't have plans to do it. I don't know if I believe that answer 100%. If anyone could take specialty to the next level, it's a blend house like Marukyu Koyamaen.

Zongjun · 1:00:11

And if you think about the amount of tencha that they probably have deep in their warehouse from 4 different prefectures, from probably dozens and dozens of farms, from many different cultivars, and perhaps from different vintages and cold storage. Although they might have run through quite a bit of it during the matcha boom where they didn't have enough aged material because typically you want to age tencha for a little bit and then you can blend it to get different profiles because it tends to mellow out as it ages.

Zongjun · 1:00:39

But they could overnight flip a switch and let's release like, I don't know, 1000 cans of like 2015 Asahi from Uji. They have the library and the depth and breadth to like make such a cool specialty that literally no farmer or company in the world has. And the amount of leverage that they have to be able to extract information from the farmers or like extract interesting information, useful information that they consider, as you know, important to the tea.

Zongjun · 1:01:17

Or control the flavor profile outcome to all the farmers. I wanted to taste more like this or I want you to do this. And just put those information on the label and educate consumers on, you know, how they understand tea based on their generations of knowledge in this industry.

Zongjun · 1:01:34

I think that will be something next level and actually see kind of see this kind of practice in some other regions in Japan. For example, sake, in a lot of these sake breweries in Japan on the labels, you can learn specific Koji that they use to inoculate the sake, specific rice cultivars, how polished the rice are, specific from specific fermentation methods, specific environment, moisture in the local venue, temperature during the fermentation. You can learn everything about the sake. And that's one of the most traditional industry in Japan. And they're doing something, you know, very transparent. And I think the tea industry can

Zongjun · 1:02:17

really learn something from them. I don't think these blends are going away, but you have to ask yourself in the next 20-30, forty years, we'll probably move from a world where there's a million like tea practitioners. I think there's about a million or so tea practitioners in Japan at the moment. It's very likely.

Zongjun · 1:02:36

I don't know what the graph is, but if you look at the trajectories that that goes to half a million and that is an enormous difference. And then you project out even a few more decades. There is a structural decline in the tea ceremony, traditional audience of people drinking tea.

Zongjun · 1:02:53

And if a sophisticated enough market merges abroad that really appreciates matcha as a specialty product, they have the most power, leverage the structure, control all of words like this to unleash a level of specialty that we can only dream of that is literally only accessible to the chashi's at that single company and the handful of other traditional blend houses. In hearing the sentence, a lot of people have been asking this and we are aware.

Zongjun · 1:03:24

Is interesting, encouraging based on our past into reaction with a lot of these old legacy Japanese companies. That's almost a affirmation. You know, Maruq also made a very clear point of mentioning that they are not afraid of innovation. Like they use some very sophisticated T processing equipment, including an electrostatic sorter. It was the first time I'd actually heard of that to help really clean up the tencha before it's milled as well as like a really sophisticated lab what really checks every single batch.

Zongjun · 1:04:02

The other thing that I was very surprised that, and that's much more specialty than I ever would have guessed, is that they indeed mill everything with a traditional stone ishi-usu, including like the stuff that they put in mixed with sugar and their latte mix. They have a little can of matcha that has like a spice, a perforated spice lid so you can shake it. So it's like you can use matcha and like sprinkle it on some cupcakes without getting a sifter mess everything. I asked it like twice in different ways. Like there's no ball mills, you use everything for each. You used to even like the latte

Ryan · 1:04:40

mix. Yes, crazy. That was crazy. That is an insane standard. Another interesting things is, well, like in the beginning of the tour, they showed us a kind of like a video of, you know, the history of tencha making the history of Maruq and all that. And there's some pretty like long section of how much I can be used in other contexts like ice cream, cakes, confectionaries.

Ryan · 1:05:06

Avocado Gelato was it was one of those things where, you know, you visit a 300 year old institution that most people would describe as really the most traditional and the quote UN quote, the most authentic, like much that you can get in Japan. And then all I'm thinking about are these like quote UN quote Karens on Reddit talking about how we shouldn't be using ceremonial grade tea on culinary applications or lattes for that matter.

Zongjun · 1:05:31

Here is the 300 year old company spending 5 minutes of this promotional video talking about all the different ways you can use. Very delicious is the topping on ice cream. Very delicious and cheesecake. And in their souvenir store in the factory, you can even buy a bar of matcha soap. And you know, a lot of the, I mean, they do formulate for latte and some of them say like it's, you know, suitable for latte, which is also kind of promising. But you know, if you take a look at it, if you follow the standards of the Western Internet about all the things you need to look for to find ceremonial grade matcha, First Harvest, beautiful green color,

Zongjun · 1:06:12

it fits the bill. I think a lot of people who would blindly taste a lot of these confect the matcha that they're promoting to be used as a culinary ingredient would fit every box of a quote UN quote ceremonial grade matcha.

Ryan · 1:06:27

So we both actually started laughing. It was almost awkward. In the middle of the video, our thoughts converged about just how ridiculous this would be if you put this up to some like quote UN quote Karen on the Internet complaining about the way people were used.

Ryan · 1:06:42

The matcha they end up putting into their soap bar is probably better than the ceremonial. Grace that those terrors drink. But we hate this type of judgment and really take pleasure in these ironies. Yes, indeed, We don't rise above that.

Zongjun · 1:06:55

Well, that was our experience at Maruq. Very, very inspiring to in a different way. Yeah, actually we left there very energized and felt like we learned a lot. We really recommend, even if you know a ton about matcha to go on this tour.

Zongjun · 1:07:09

It's not very expensive and you actually get to taste some pretty cool matcha, the very beautiful little tea house inside. And the tour is really well done. And the tour guide, we asked her like, how long have you been working here?

Zongjun · 1:07:21

She was like 8 years. Like she is not like some random summer intern that doesn't know very much like her. The depth and breadth of knowledge about not only Matcha but about Maruq as a company was really deep. That was very impressive. She was.

Ryan · 1:07:38

I was blown away. Actually. I was had very low expectations there. Well, because I kind of came in with what are could be considered kind of obnoxiously specific questions. So they're probably someone doing the tour guide wouldn't know, but it was not the case at all.

Ryan · 1:07:55

Yeah, yeah, they I bet they'd probably rotate like these are actual staff of the of the factory. It was a very well done tour and they were very very nice and very just world class. Couldn't recommend it more. And we'll say English so you can understand.

Zongjun · 1:08:13

Very helpful too. All right, Sam. Last but not least, what was our next level specialty matcha experience in Uji? Well, it kind of happened over accidents. We were spending time with one of our tea friends from Wazuka, and then by the end of the day, as we were driving back to Kyoto, he kind of proposed that we spent some time in his friend's tea house.

Zongjun · 1:08:36

So we went to this wonderful place that we had no expectation than idea of Nakamura. We had heard about this place a little bit. We. Actually interviewed one of the staff who works at the bed. Yeah, Kungan, who was the first Thai Nihoncha instructor, first Thai national to ever achieve that rank, which is a really big deal. And, you know, he mentioned he worked at this place and they make fresh sencha.

Zongjun · 1:09:02

We were like from frozen wet leaf. And I think that's interesting. That's what's pretty weird. It's different. Unconventional. That's. Cool. OK. Yeah, but after we after we went there, all starts to make sense, like they are doing something.

Zongjun · 1:09:17

Else that was crazy. So they actually special ordered lab scale sencha processing equipment and they can make one kilogram batches anytime. And the owner, Nakamura San, has very good relationships with tea farmers in like Wazuka, I think some in Kagoshima and Kirishima specifically.

Zongjun · 1:09:39

And he goes there, he steams the tea, he freezes it at -60°C, packs it into blocks, keeps it in -60°C. -60°C. That is almost the temperature of liquid nitrogen. I think liquid nitrogen is -68 super cold faucet out, takes the wet leaf and then finishes the processing and 1 kilogram batches. And he's got tons of different cultivars, all sorts of interesting or sort of base material to work with. And the coolest thing is, is that he gets to make it like experiment with different parameters. And what's even cooler is that all of the equipments and all of the activities is behind the counter bar. Yep, everything is done in front

Ryan · 1:10:27

of you. You. Can see it, you can now that you can touch it. People talk about multi sensory experiences. This is smell, touch, taste, see and hear all of this equipment in the backroom. The Sencha shaping machine going click clack, click clack, click clack.

Ryan · 1:10:43

You can hear the ishi-usu motors going in the background. You can smell the beautiful fragrance in the air. It's really and then you obviously taste and smell the tea. Wonderful sensory orchestra, yeah. It's it's unbelievable.

Ryan · 1:10:59

And the coolest thing is it's like the closest thing to a coffee roastery that we have ever seen where there's so much transformative value creating steps that are happening. You know, there's a really interesting line, I think it was from Zach Mangan's book, Zach Mangan of Kettl in his book, I think it's stories of Japanese tea and it says, you know, most tea farmers have get to process tea 30 to 50 times in their life if they're only producing once a year.

Ryan · 1:11:26

They got 30 to 50 shots to learn. And what's so interesting about this is that you get 30 to 50 shots probably every half year. If you can process in one kilogram batches and you have all this material, the amount that you can learn in the kitchen, all of that learning, when you have all of this miniaturized equipment in front of you, you can optimize things faster, you can change things faster. You can understand cause and effect relationships faster about what's driving flavor, what's driving quality, run experiments and run grids.

Zongjun · 1:12:01

And that's definitely what's going on there. Yeah. And it's not only just happening for Sencha, it's happening for Matcha too. That was so cool. And they're doing a lot of tencha sourcing and they're also starting to transform tencha, including to roast tencha. Not as a hojicha, but like just the right amount of roast stitch to bring up some very interesting flavor. High temperature, very short time, transforms some tea and imparts some crazy delicious naughty chocolatey flavors that we all love from places like Yame. And you can taste that.

Zongjun · 1:12:38

In comparison, you can taste the unroast version and the roast version, which is very very interesting. And I've, we've had some very amazing, incredible experiences in Bangkok of having a cold whisked matcha. And so they, it's, it's low temperature extraction, no water is used. People just take milk and mix it with matcha. And we've talked about this in the past, but you can close your eyes and you would literally think you're drinking hot chocolate.

Zongjun · 1:13:05

It tastes like chocolate. Your expectation if you were blindfolded would be that the product is brown and it ends up being this bright green color. And we finally kind of understanding where those flavors are coming from.

Zongjun · 1:13:18

And they can be totally introduced later by this type of roasting because tried the unroasted version and the roasted version, exact same tencha. The only difference is that they ran it through this roaster. Very high temperature, very short period of time, and wow, that sensory experience was replicated there.

Zongjun · 1:13:36

Like that is what specialty matcha should be like. Understanding that, holy crap this tastes delicious, what can we do about it? Well, it turns out you can produce those flavors on your own. And also just the fact that seeing this, you know, quote, UN quote, nicknamed Thai style latte being done in center of Uji by local Japanese tea producers.

Ryan · 1:14:01

It was super interesting. That was next level kind of culture exchange. I never was expecting to see a Thai style cold whisked latte in Uji done by a Japanese farmer and tea or former farmer and tea producer, Tea producer.

Zongjun · 1:14:19

Oh, he's a tea producer now and cafe owner Nakamura-san in Uji, downtown Uji Central. And he loves it. And then he would add a little bit of sugar to it and say, wow, like now it tastes like like chocolate ice cream. Like the level of cross cultural exchange and seeing a place like the Thai appreciation, the Thai culture but for appreciating matcha swing back to Japan is insane.

Ryan · 1:14:50

Yep, Yep. And just seeing how young Nakamura-san is and how open-minded it is is like really, really hopeful. Like this is like really the future of the next, you know, evolution of Uji matcha or Japanese matcha or matcha as a whole.

Zongjun · 1:15:06

That's really something that inspired a lot of hope and confidence. That's something that every single person in the world can do that has the ability to mill is this transformative step to get this what they would call hika, this roasted smell which gives a lot of nuttiness in tea or a lot of chocolatiness in tea.

Ryan · 1:15:27

So long as you have access to a roaster like this where you do quick high temperature and it preserves the color, it does make it slightly more yellow, but it's almost not even noticeable unless you make that comparison.

Zongjun · 1:15:39

You boom, that's where that flavor comes from. Has nothing to do with like other factors other than processing and maybe the cultivar that you use, maybe some certain taste characteristics different than others. But the fact that someone could do that, especially when those flavor profiles are really hard to find. Like my girlfriend, for example, loves this like Yame matcha nuttiness this intense, like hazelnut and chocolate aromas and flavors that can appear in tea. They're really difficult to find sometimes even like the most famous producer is Hoshino Sencha. But like, where are you?

Ryan · 1:16:17

Where can you even buy Hoshino Sencha? Like everyone sold out of their stuff. It's very hard to get your hands on, especially internationally. And if you do find it internationally, if you compare it to the Japan prices, but you realize that there's like a 5X markup on the retail price that it's available if you can buy, if you can find it in Japan. So the fact that those flavors can be turned retrospectively is is just so exciting.

Zongjun · 1:16:42

Yeah, very exciting. And some other interesting things that we end up trying is that a lot of the matcha that Nakamura-san makes are naturally farmed. So it's more like terroir and cultivar driven. And we got to try some of the very like esoteric cultivar made matcha. One of them is Asanoka, actually the father of that. He is a Chinese cultivar.

Ryan · 1:17:05

Even more cross culture. More cross culture, genetically speaking, which was very, very interesting. It has this like really interesting like fragrance oral notes that you would only find in some of the more fragrant Chinese tea in the coastal regions.

Zongjun · 1:17:24

And you kind of see that being expressed in the Japanese matcha was very, very interesting. And the other thing is just how open minded what Nakamura-san is. We were kind of like bashing on Chinese matcha, you know, all these time and we finally end up discovering some of the OK or better Chinese matcha. But we were kind of talking about that doing a conversation with Nakamura-san.

Ryan · 1:17:46

And he like turns back to us and OK, try this, try this Chinese matcha and it would change your mind. He was like actually like very open minded about, you know, matcha being made elsewhere. We were drinking a Chinese matcha in the center of Uji being served at that tea house.

Zongjun · 1:18:03

I don't think it's on the menu but like he had it as a reference. Sound and and as a recommendation to us that he. This might change your mind. He thinks this is good and interesting, and what's more interesting is that after that matcha he pulls out a Thai.

Ryan · 1:18:19

Matcha from Chiang Rai. Kung An brought it from Thailand, yeah. His colleague, yeah, but they, they were, they were also talking about this matcha being very interesting and had us try. It it was a Jin Xuan, which it's a milk oolong quote UN quote milk oolong.

Zongjun · 1:18:33

It's a Taiwanese. Culture which was developed in by the Thai Taiwanese Research Center, I think in the 1980s very common cultivar for high mountain oolong and it was Tana shelf shaded for three weeks hand picked Tezumi in like I think December or January. I guess what it was like an appropriate temperature. It's a pseudo like autumn or winter harvest, which is super weird.

Ryan · 1:18:58

And because Nadi matcha is very popular in Thailand, it was given a very high hika. So there's a lot of heat treatments and there's kind of almost it. It smelled almost like dried peanut powder and sort of this earthy roasted notes to it. And we tasted it and wow, it was good. They were both good.

Zongjun · 1:19:17

I don't know how well it was milled and it was a little bit pasty, but honestly, the flavor was was really stunning. And that was the I guess it was the second Thai matcha that we had ever had been very impressed. Yeah. I mean, having those two samples and just like they were like they're like other tea people.

Ryan · 1:19:33

We call them like in Chinese tea culture. We call them cha ren. Or in Japanese. Chajin, chajin, like they're just generally interested in tea and like all of these judgments that get cast about fake matcha, real matcha, traditional, authentic, it's like, let's just let the product speak for itself. And it turns out like this tea is very delicious and seeing other open, we don't experience this attitude very much in Japan.

Zongjun · 1:19:59

So it was very refreshing. Very refreshing. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's honestly, it was a really target or tea people meeting. By the end of the day, we were sitting at the counter and we just had like, like this array of different trays and teacups laying on the table that we end up trying, you know, that's made by different cultivar, made by different farming techniques, like made by different, you know, countries. And, and, and that's was just like such a tiring moment because like, it's about sharing, it's about curiosity. It's not about like judging or being, you know, critical about specific definition.

Ryan · 1:20:42

That was like being, you know, arbitrarily made by someone in the past. It was just genuinely curious and appreciating the diversity of different expression of communion sentences, you know, by by different people. And, and I think that that that's very important for the tea community as a whole and for us being part of the tea community is to like keep this curiosity and keep exploring.

Zongjun · 1:21:07

And this is also a really important part, I think, as the foundation of the creativity for a specialty product Movement, like a movement, needs to be a life and moving forward, you really need to preserve this precious credit that is getting constantly suffocated by all of these arbitrary rules and judgments, passing by other people or passing by some authorities. Absolutely.

Ryan · 1:21:34

It's next level specialty, appreciating the product for what it is and seeing what can be achieved by the combination of creativity, curiosity about other TNT cultures and agency. All of this lab scale equipment. He owns an ishi-usu, he's able to roast his own tencha, he's able to go directly to the farmers, able to steam his own tea in a lot of cases.

Zongjun · 1:22:00

So that combination of resources agency in the form of equipment, creativity and curiosity is where specialty gets born, where all of these entrants interest. Human stories get told. It's not a can of ceremonial grade. It's not even a can of organic Okumidori, right?

Ryan · 1:22:22

Like it's much, much, much, much more specific around all of the intent and the effort that goes into creating these fantastic products that ultimately tell a very, very interesting human story and product story. Seeing that in action in the center of Uji is just so refreshing for us.

Zongjun · 1:22:42

It's humbling. It's makes us feel optimistic. It's like next level, a specialty. People are moving the ball forward. Yeah, yes they are. Yes, they are. And seeing that being pushed and done by people within Japan is very, very confidence inspiring. Like the specialty is very much well and alive here inside Japan, inside the birth place of contemporary matcha. And and I think that's really super important because, you know, as a lot of people talking about the whole specialty movement is as if, you know, we are patronizing a culture that's not part of us.

Zongjun · 1:23:19

Like we are as a outsider trying to influence a country's history and culture. But seeing, you know, they eat themselves being part of the player, I think it's very, very important. And that's what they say: an egg being broken from the outside is death, but an egg being broken from the inside is new birth. And I think this is really the epitome of that analogy. We're seeing something being born within this thousand years old culture and it's sparking something very, very. Delicious.

Ryan · 1:23:48

I can't think of a better place to end. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with The Front and we'll see you in the next one. See you in the future. See you.