Notes at Origin: Toyota, Aichi

Ryan · 0:06

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

Ryan · 0:21

Hello Ryan from the future here. You may have noticed that we have not started season 5 with our Uji matcha piece yet, partially because we had breaking news regarding the GI and we wanted to get that out. And this recording is about the tea picking we did in Toyota, Aichi, which we thought was better to be released just after harvest season.

Ryan · 0:43

We are going to start releasing the Uji matcha research piece over on our sub stack. If you haven't seen that yet, I'll link it in the show notes where you can start reading. It's in five different parts. And pretty soon we will launch that series here on the podcast feed.

Ryan · 1:00

All right, thanks for listening back to the episode. And we are in Toyota, Aichi. Yeah. So a town I didn't even know existed until about a year ago, but. I guess we do know because, like, it's Toyota. Ryan Toyota. True, that's a factory town. Yeah, yeah.

Zongjun · 1:16

It's actually has direct linkage with the car Toyota brand. Yes, it does. And turns out that it used to have a lot of tea fields we've learned. And as the manufacturing exploded, I think about 70 years ago is when like it really started to hype up, Toyota was buying a bunch of these different factories or Toyota is buying up a bunch of these tea farms to reclaim that land to move to manufacturing. So now there's actually not that many places that grow tea, let alone grown tencha here.

Ryan · 1:45

Yeah, there used to be a few 100 tea farmers in this region. And now they're just a small handful. Yeah, it's crazy, like a lot of these carts were built on. Once was tea bushes. Yeah. So if you're driving in a Toyota or listening to this in a Toyota, but actually overtook some tea fields here in Aichi prefecture. Yeah, same on you.

Zongjun · 2:04

But it had some secondary implications too. We learned is that with that local manufacturing, with that local manufacturing scale up, it needed workers. And what's interesting about tea picking work is it's very seasonal. Like you need someone to show up and pick tea from 6:00 in the morning until 5:00 at night, but they're only doing that for three weeks. So you need someone that not only skilled to do it, that wants to do it, that's willing to do it for the money that it. Pays and has the time to do it.

Ryan · 2:35

Has the time to do it in only a certain window of time. And a lot of these manufacturing jobs really sucked all of the oxygen out of the room when it came to the local labor supply has historically been. So it is historically even been difficult to find labor to pick tea if you're doing any hand picking for tezumi tencha. Yeah, but.

Zongjun · 2:58

Like, until like very recently, like, I mean, like we're talking about Toyota building cars like this is like modern history. 50 years history, I think I wrote it somewhere. So there's a couple interesting and unique things about this region here in Aichi and I think it expands in Tunisia as well.

Ryan · 3:16

The other really famous tea producing region is that they have local quarries or the stone, they have really nice type of soft granite that's used to make ishi-usu and apparently the one main quarry more, most of these ishi-usu are made ran out and there was a big stockpile of it and apparently they've almost worked through all of that stockpile.

Zongjun · 3:37

So this very specific type of local stone that everyone's using for stone milling here is in very, very short supply this. Is like Yixing clay a little bit. Yeah, it sounds a lot like Yixing clay, actually. Yeah, it has a really nice cold smooth texture, like a color bluish hue. Yeah, the color of the stone looks a little different than the ones we've seen in Kyoto and Yame. So it's really, really unique and interesting to learn about it.

Ryan · 4:02

The producer that we met here was saying that even getting medate or the refinishing of those stones for him takes upwards of six months every for him. He rotates the stones every three to four years and has them resharpened, that's a three to six month process.

Zongjun · 4:28

And part of what they do when they know that the stone needs to be replaced, as this is kind of obvious and but it was less obvious to us before we started asking some questions, is the degree of undulation. So it's really unique about a stone mill or an ishi-usu is that there's a wood post and the top stone is rotating around that wood post.

Ryan · 4:49

And there always has to be some space between the post and the other inner wall of the ishi-usu because that's, that's exactly where the tencha is going in to feed the machine. But as you can imagine, you have all of this granite and spinning, spinning, spinning, you're going to wear down that wood over time. And the more you wear down that wood, the more that space increases and it will undulate more because the top stone isn't just rotating.

Zongjun · 5:13

It's technically undulating around, it's orbiting around the it's orbiting around the post. And so those also get replaced every three to four years. And one of the ways that you can identify that stone requires medate is if it's degree of undulation is very, very high. So it's actually not necessarily a good thing. Apparently it doesn't affect quality too much. We didn't get a very, we didn't get a very definitive answer when we were asking about quality differences as it continues to go, but that was pretty interesting to learn. So Ryan, it's a little bit crazy that we are in Season 5 now and after being to so many places,

Ryan · 5:53

actually seeing so many tencha farming and potential facilities, tencha gardens, this is actually our first time seeing a tencha factory in action. In action, we've seen tencha processing equipment in a bunch of places, but we've never actually seen it being used.

Zongjun · 6:10

We haven't seen it moving. And that was quite the experience. Yeah. And that room was incredibly hot. Free sauna. It was like a sauna, sauna and steam room combined. Yeah, very good for my skin, for. Everyone's skin, well everyone was drenched who was looking at it earlier today because they both steam and in the same room where they have the tencha oven and it's a radiant style tencha oven using red bricks.

Ryan · 6:39

But the excitement was incredibly real and seeing all of these machine moving, seeing all the steams coming out from the machine, seeing all of these butterfly gnat and all of these tea leaves flying, there was something magical about it.

Zongjun · 6:53

And that was very cool. So Ryan, why, why don't you share to our audience, like, why are we here in the first place? Yeah, we are very grateful. We're joining the trip that Koto tea space Kun Pop and Yusuke Son have organized from their a tea house and tea brand in Bangkok, Thailand.

Ryan · 7:10

And we've met with them on and off and they were really kind earlier this year to invite us on their trip to meet Yusuke Son. I mean, they were like, hey, we're going to IT2. We're going to go pick tea for three days. We set up this arrangement which is an exchange with a local tea farmer here because there's a lot of Labor shortage problems. So they kind of negotiated or maybe negotiates to business see of the term.

Zongjun · 7:32

They talk with them to make an exchange that will pick T here in Toyota IG. And in exchange, we get some free education system behind the scenes access and look to understand what the process is going on. So there's a really international group here.

Ryan · 7:48

It's a really fun Group, A mixture of Thai people, some people from Laos, Indonesia, US and Belgium, and English is sort of the lingua franca of the group and. And the very large age gap. Yeah, where the youngest person I think is 19 years old and then it goes all the way up.

Zongjun · 8:07

So it's in a really like interesting group of we all share this this thing in common. Yeah, to the same passion. Yeah, we. Love it matcha. We love tea and everyone loves other types of tea too. There's a lot of gyokuro drinkers here.

Ryan · 8:19

Everyone's really willing to like carve out, you know, their free time, probably some working or some holiday time to come pick tea, which is literally backbreaking labor for three days to really get an immersive experience end to end.

Zongjun · 8:34

Literally are doing everything from like, like smelling the fertilizer in the ground as we're picking tea and like all that musty smell that you get in a tea garden all the way through enjoying a bowl of matcha and seeing every single process end to end circle, full circle. And we're really, really grateful for this invitation. Actually, we're quite tired and we're recording this at the end of the day.

Ryan · 8:58

If our voice doesn't sound as enthusiastic as it should be, it's because my back really hurts. I can feel well, every single muscle in my back. But it's been great fun and so much positive energy. They did a really wonderful job curating a nice group of people.

Ryan · 9:12

Just we're picking tea for five hours after lunch today and just so much chit chats karaoke. In the tea field. In the tea field, I hope we weren't bothering the grandmas and grandpas around us, the Japanese grandma grandpas around us picking tea. I think they were all secretly enjoying. Probably like sneaking a smile under their breath as people were screaming Ruby Chan for like the 20th time. It was.

Zongjun · 9:41

It was really lovely, spirit in the air. But you know, like this tea picking recession, think it's a little bit different than our other experience in the way that I think we really end up helping them like instead of like adding more, you know, energy or attention to the farmers to like kind of quote UN quote educate us.

Zongjun · 10:03

So taking care of us. Yeah, we're still like 20 people in total, including Kun Pop and Yusuke Son, and they also brought their staff with them as well. And huge props to them for bringing their staff here and doing this and seeing everything first hand.

Ryan · 10:16

That's one of the most unusual things about koto tea spaces You can walk in and no matter who you talk to, but they are actually an expert and they've actually been to the places where they're sourcing their tea from and like have such deep knowledge, which makes it a really unique experience.

Ryan · 10:32

And that's most people's first exposure and they've gotten people into tea through that. Like you, you go, you sit down, you have a bowl of sencha or you, you have a pot of sencha or gyokuro or order a matcha. And then you just learn more.

Ryan · 10:46

It's like these access points to go down the rabbit hole. But if you're talking to someone who's just like telling you how it's a secret mythical herb versus like the nitty gritty of the agriculture, right? You select for a really interesting group of people. And I think that really reflected in the community that they've cultivated for people who are willing to, to to spend the money to come out here and the time and the time to come and do this.

Zongjun · 11:08

So it's been really cool. So there's a couple of unique things about Toyota and IT specifically and that I think you're worth mentioning before we start digging into some of the details that we've learned and we've learned a lot.

Zongjun · 11:19

And we're really grateful for Yusuke Son for all the translation work that he's been doing. So we can basically have a dialogue with the farmer directly. So one of the things is that there's a lot of local oil pressing, and the reason that that matters is canola oils or rapeseed oil makes fantastic fertilizer. It's really amino acid rich, especially when applied before harvest.

Zongjun · 11:42

And in modern days, all of these rapeseed oils are kind of removed through a chemical process. So the leftover kind of like do not have anything, you know, valuable. But in Toyota IT they're still using this traditional oil pressing mechanism which the residual of the oil pressed content is it's still incredibly nutritionally rich, so. Free of chemicals.

Zongjun · 12:07

And free of chemicals. So people are using it, you know, as wonderful fertilizer from the tea. And similar story with the hon

Zongjun · 12:25

And. Mazuka, But I think some people, there are some people doing it in Mazuka, but I think apparently it's difficult. But sourcing rice straw that's free of pesticides and free of crap basically is very difficult when you're putting it over tea, we've heard.

Zongjun · 12:40

We also learned that one very interesting fact about Hangzhou and also like rice straw is that it help really helps maintain the humidity or moisture content within the tea garden. So we kind of see that, you know, being laid out on the ground all the time to protect the root system and also the moisture content in the soil. But when they when it's elevated as Tana, it also kind of contained the moisture in the air too. So it really helps to regulate the microclimate in the garden. And apparently for Sami Dori S AM I Sami Dori? It is very important for quality. And so with this one farmer does, it's so unique. We've never heard of it.

Zongjun · 13:20

We've never seen it until 2 days ago is that they have a sprinkler system? Like a literal sprinkler system that you'd have indoor for fire prevention to mist kind of for the Sami dori to mimic the moisture in the air that you would get over over Hanzo. Which is really interesting technique I'd never heard of. And there's another interesting kind of feature about that practice is that apparently some of the fertilizers will leave some minerals on the surface of the leaf that will kind of taste bitter and this sprinkler system will flush out of the mineral away.

Zongjun · 13:54

Giving it a light car wash. Yeah, kind of like that. And apparently makes the tea taste better. So in Toyota, most of the soil is clay type soil, which means that the fertilizer retention is very high, but that comes at the expense of drainage. You have higher.

Zongjun · 14:09

I mean it makes sense, right? If you have a denser sponge, you're going to hold the fertilizer there longer, but you're removing less moisture. So they have a gigantic channel at the end of the tea garden. I think it's like 3 meters deep or something but helps with like a normal agricultural or like flood drain channel to help with drainage.

Zongjun · 14:28

And inside underneath the tea garden, they buried a number of pipes to increase the drainage and all of the pipes will like funnel all the way to the channel at the end to kind of increase the soils drainage capability.

Zongjun · 14:43

Another thing that this farmer done does, it's very unique from an infrastructure point of view, is 3 layer shading. I've heard of triple shading with Suchi song, but I've never actually heard of triple shading using a white timer.

Zongjun · 14:57

So they use one white tonna and two black tonnas. And when they're pulled back, it makes for a very interesting like checkerboard picture because some of the tea was already picked by the time they got there. So they pulled them back a bit and it looks really cool.

Zongjun · 15:10

But I actually don't know why specifically they needed a white one. But when you do the math of how much everything's getting covered when you have all three at once, it's about 99% light coverage. So the history of tea in Toyota is interesting.

Zongjun · 15:27

It actually started back in the Edo period and it wasn't until Meiji that the Edo era monopoly on shaded cultivation broke where other producers started to make ten shot. So supposedly the first ten shot producers and matcha producers in Toyota IT or just after Meiji.

Zongjun · 15:45

But today I think there's very, very few. I think it's less than a dozen 10 jet producers here in Toyota, maybe even less than five if I remember correctly. My note says there are only two. Only two. There we go. Used to be 700. 700 tea.

Ryan · 15:59

Tea. Farmers. Tea farmers. OK, but now there are only two. Oh wow interesting only two left doing 10 shop. Yeah, and actually what's very interesting is that back in the days, most of these teas were machine harvest because there were just so many productions. But now people can actually do hand picking because there's so little tea left.

Zongjun · 16:20

It's one interesting, you know, side effect of this shrinkage, which for better or worse reason, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Certainly makes for some very delicious tea, all this tazumi tea, but certainly is also back breaking labor. Must be very hard to coordinate.

Zongjun · 16:35

It's it. This is a problem in all, like all handpicked tea producing countries actually, but it's especially bad in Japan. It's not very pleasant work. Very few young people want to do it. Everyone who's do it is older. You have to have a lot of free time, but the people that do do it are very effective.

Zongjun · 16:52

Yeah. Very skilled. So the on average our group today picked about 1.5 KGS of wet leaf in five hours. Yesterday 85 year old grandpa picked 7. KG in the afternoon. In the same amount of time he was, what is that, four times faster than us? Which is a crazy thought.

Ryan · 17:15

Good for him. Good for him, good for Uncle, but he's also like 85 and this is really a dying art. So if you do drink true tazumi tea, you should really savor that cup and anyone there's also, you know, this really bothers me. There's a lot of mislabeling.

Ryan · 17:31

There's a really prominent UK matcha brown probably everyone's heard of when they have their when I certainly is fake uji matcha. And like on the back it has all the buzzwords hand picked from the hills just off of uji blah blah blah. And you know it costs like 12 lbs for a 30 grand bag. Bullshit.

Ryan · 17:53

Like we should not be abusing this. I've even seen it at a pretty prominent cafe in Hong Kong to where you know, they they have this whole diagram on the board and say that all their match has hand picked the price that they're serving it at. The likelihood that that's true, that they're using that for their matcha latte is is almost zero. And anyone counting these little walking harvester machines where someones on each side of the row is handpicked, that is just, that's ridiculous.

Zongjun · 18:21

Maybe the matcha latte is handpicked on the counter to you. Or maybe they handpicked it by hand, selecting that matcha they point. That's the one. I want OK consumer. Handpicked, handpicked. No or, or the the barista or something, whoever's creating these recipes, you know this term they should be abused. That's right.

Zongjun · 18:39

So there's also a lot of talk about using fertilizer. So this is a very organic farm focusing much more on organic fertilizers and long term they don't use any synthetic synthetic fertilizer here and actually all of their tencha is EU exportable. And for the deliciousness, it is really like cream of the crop when it comes to EU exportable low pesticide residue matcha. And one of the things is in the summer they try to use very calcium rich fertilizers including fish meal and even meat meal like the bone some that come from meat waste products.

Zongjun · 19:13

And they have a custom fertilizer recipe that they use and work with. Yeah, that was very interesting because all of these farmers, they work with their local fertilizer company to do custom blending. And the companies will really have a track record of your, you know, past blending history and they will work with you depending on what kind of cultivar you're growing and also the matter this year. And they also apply it at different times and they kind of calibrate it because there's different degradation rates or different decomposition rates of these some of these fertilizer materials.

Ryan · 19:45

So you don't just apply everything all at once. I mean, you have to be careful about some dosage. So like rapeseed cakes pressings in particular produce a lot of gas, which damaged the roots. And we know that's a problem with some other fertilizers that we covered on our episode with Suji sound, what's called next level specialty.

Zongjun · 20:01

But here we were also learning same problem. You, it really is. You're like a chef, almost. You're like a personal chef in terms of applying fertilizer to the plants. Yeah. And the the the method that they used to cope with that is that they applied rapeseed during spring when tea plants have the best kind of growth at the time to come to overcome this burn.

Ryan · 20:24

Yeah, they need to be strong. Shady, shady cultivation is very difficult on plants. But you're you're starving them of light, which is something they need to live. You can't indefinitely shade a plant, so you need to have really strong Hardy plans to put up with this type of thing.

Zongjun · 20:38

So it's actually maybe a better analogy is a, it's a, it's not a personal chef. It's more like a personal dietitian really have to think about the long term health of the plants to. Bodybuilder coach. Yeah, bodybuilding code. Well, maybe Suji Son's a bodybuilding coach and this farmer is the longevity coach because we know Suji Son's tea trees only live to about 20 or 25 and then he replaces them. But it's just difference in philosophy really just two very different methods.

Zongjun · 21:07

So this farmer in particular doesn't submit anything to competition that's not commercially available, where a lot of farmers, especially in the class of CG Sun create competition products that are really not commercially available or if they are, it's incredibly small quantities.

Zongjun · 21:22

And where this farmer only submits what he actually sells to the competition isn't have a special quote UN quote competition grade. And it's a different philosophy. It's pretty interesting actually seeing the differences between this farmer and to decide and what they're optimizing for and how they optimize for that. And the outcome of the optimization? And the outcome and, you know, both are delicious. I mean, Suji son is definitely more rich and umami, just like with classical Japanese sense of quality. But this matcha is really good still. Like the umami is a little less, but there's a lot of complexity that he actually introduces in

Zongjun · 21:58

other ways. And the most unique thing about this, I don't know if anyone else is doing it in Japan, is that he Withers his tencha. So after harvest, it actually goes into a cold space where it's humidity controlled and a cold Withers overnight, which is extremely unusual for green tea processing for tencha. You do hear about this in Taiwan. There's a lot of Taiwan, Taiwanese high mountain oolong, like dao shencha.

Zongjun · 22:24

Those leaves, after they're picked, they go straight into a cold space where the humidity is controlled, typically like a gigantic refrigerator, essentially to keep them super green, to suck out just enough moisture, but not too much to sit into wither. And it gives it this really interesting fragrance. So his tencha, his matcha has this, what I keep referring to as a bao zhong note.

Zongjun · 22:47

A bao zhong is a very, very, very, very green style of oolong produced in the north of Taiwan. When you taste that bao zhong note. And if you've never had this, I really recommend you go to a vendor like Taiwanese Tea Crafts or Stefan Ehrlare or Eco Cha and try a Taiwanese bao zhong just to get that reference note. But he, they have this wonderful, it's kind of floral and sweet and very distinctive and adds this complexity that I've never, it's really hard to come by in matcha, which is something very unique to this particular producer, which is exciting to see.

Ryan · 23:25

Yeah, it's like not a traditional method. Yeah, I mean traditionally actually this will consider as a flaw. Probably. For a lot of these more traditional grading system, but for producers here it's innovation and for consumers this is wonderful and unique experience.

Zongjun · 23:42

Creative agency and really create something that tastes very different. And then they have a red brick tencha style oven which radiates a lot of, as we felt earlier, different. It has five different layers of conveyor belts, man, As it goes down, the temperature kind of descends. So the first toast as it goes across the first layer. I have it written down somewhere here. It was 167°.

Ryan · 24:04

Oh, there we go. And the second layer goes down to 110. There we go. And they also have these little vents at the top where they can like some of the moisture so it doesn't get a second steaming. Yeah, which we painfully found about in our little Qimen (keemun) or Kimon tencha experience. We're using some of these Chinese roaster to try to roast tencha and just traps so much moisture inside. Ends up being, you know, kind of like a second steam. We also learned a lot more about steaming and how steaming gets controlled.

Zongjun · 24:37

So essentially this gigantic tube Tumblr, continuous Tumblr that the T falls through, you can actually adjust the angle, which I didn't realize, which totally effects how quickly the T moves through it. So if it's more flat, it moves much more slowly, and if it's a more vertical angle, the tea will go through much faster. And then you can also control the steam and the airflow that's going through it.

Zongjun · 25:01

It's very important because different cultivar actually needs different steaming time and for kind of like tougher more fibrous cultivar like yabukita needs about 25 seconds. And for more delicate cultivars like Asahi, usually people will do under 20 seconds of steaming.

Ryan · 25:20

So we got to try some fresh steamed leaves coming right out of the steamer and I was just taken back. It was I said to you cultivar and it was so it was like taking a piece of like blanched spinach out is about this texture.

Ryan · 25:34

It's very tender and soft and it. Doesn't have the spinach. Flavor, Yeah, no spinach flavor, but the same like texture, mushiness kind of texture. Maybe it's a little more put together. The umami was just striking. There was a slight bitterness and then wow, the after taste after taste was so sweet and umami and lingering in a way that was kind of a surprise.

Zongjun · 25:59

When you're eating something that's like a green leafy vegetable like thing, it would normally be like in food like where you would encounter a warm, steamed, tender leafy vegetable which was really cool. So after the steaming, the leaves gets blown into kind of what we called a butterfly net kind of container. And the fan, the Tumblr fan kind of blows away all of the moisture from the surface of the leaf and then it gets sent into the tencha oven, which, you know, the tencha gets roasted for five layers and then it gets really, really, really crisp. And it was stared that the tencha would turn to below like 5% moisture.

Zongjun · 26:41

And it's almost like a potato chip. And so we got to try some and there was a little bit of miss picking on our first day. So they separated out some mature leaves that kind of made it through the process for bancha. But it was a really interesting comparison. We picked Asahi yesterday and we got to try proper young tender leaf Asahi and through the same process we got to try older mature leaves which should not have been picked and were saved for bancha after having gone through that tencha processing. So they were technically our tencha or aracha or crude tencha before the de stemming and deveining process. Wow a taste difference between a

Ryan · 27:21

young tender leaf and it's umami Ness and the mature leaves to puncture leaves was like they're not even the same product. And actually use case on when we were picking tea today was talking about Asahi cultivar. Someone who was in the tea picking group was complaining that they recently had an Asahi and that didn't taste any good and they're like oh I thought this was a good cultivar. You know why?

Ryan · 27:45

Why wasn't my Asahi sample good that I bought from, I forget which tea house in Bangkok? And he is like, yeah, you know what? Asahi actually doesn't taste very good inherently. But Asahi is really good at absorbing fertilizer. Yeah.

Ryan · 27:59

And he is like, an art in a science. It's like, I don't know, cooking with something like tofu, right? Tofu can just be incredibly bland. But if you really know how to cook it and add flavor. To it like. It's like a canvas to paint on top of. Gray analogy, or maybe like a spongy tofu? A spongy tofu.

Ryan · 28:17

Absorb all of the flavor from, you know, whatever the saucy end up adding into it. So the reason why Asahi is so good at absorbing fertilizer is that its root doesn't go down to the ground. It spreads and it's best spreads very shallowly. So it's kind of like a white net that, you know, the tea plant cast onto the soil to kind of trap as much fertilizer as possible. Apparently some rooting problems too because it does that, but it makes it particularly well suited for shaded cultivation and naturally high levels of umami when it is and and amino acids when it is properly fertilized. Or apparently other cultivars

Ryan · 28:55

like Uji Uji, like Uji Hikari I use case I'm gonna say are inherently just tastes better, like decent fertilizer, no fertilizer. Some for a lot of fertilizer like still tastes better than the Asahi does. It's not fertilized. I believe that, I mean we tried some of the unfertilized organic Asahi.

Ryan · 29:16

And it wasn't very good. It did. Not taste like you know the Asahi would remember. Like has a fancy name and a very fancy price tags because it tastes very good. So that was that was interesting to learn and wow, these fresh Asahi chips that come right, they're crunchy and they're blast of umami.

Ryan · 29:32

And then it turns into creaminess and complexity and the after taste really that the most unbelievable thing was the potency and the clarity, the after taste. And then right afterwards, we got to try another one through the same process that had been recently picked Saemidori and tasting the Saemidori tencha aracha chip next to the Asahi tencha chip. Wow.

Ryan · 29:57

I honestly think the flavor difference is more magnified at that stage when you're just chewing on these freshly processed leaves than they do in the cup. And Paul was telling me that Saemidori, like his his favorite tasting note to identify it blindly was edamame.

Ryan · 30:12

And I tasted that was like, wow, I get it. Like it just it clicked. There we go. I get it. This is like this is the edamame that Paul was talking about. Very cool and this is Saemidori. Saemidori. Yeah, SAEMIDORI. Saemidori, not to be confused with Samidori, which I somehow confuse more often than I should. At the beginning of my matcha journey. I could actually thought they were the same, just different romanization.

Zongjun · 30:42

They are confusing, but the kanji is very different. Read that. So Ryan, we have picked tea in Uji as well before. How is the picking tea experience different here? Than Uji, so there's different picking methods when you pick tea.

Ryan · 30:57

So the method that we did in Uji and here what they have in common is so before this harvest, they cut the top bud at some point, probably the very beginning of shading or right before shading. Excuse me, I actually don't quite remember when they do that.

Ryan · 31:11

But when the first spot appears on the top, it's the apical marista. And when you cut that off, it sends a hormone down the rest of the plant and tells new buds to grow. And that means that for basically every mature leaf that you have got working down, the branch shoots out another one. So you have all of these little shoots that shoot out. So you pull a branch towards you, you work from the bottom and you have a mature leaf and nestled next to that mature leaf, you have a new young leaf.

Ryan · 31:39

And then you pick that young leaf. So you work your way up and maybe for each branch you have, I don't know, 8 to 10 different alternating nodes to pick from. And the higher you get, the more mature, the more longer those new that new growth is. So when we were picking Gokou, you actually just pick off the whole thing.

Ryan · 32:00

So if there's a new leaf cluster, you pick off the stem and you put the stem and the leaf in the basket. This picking style that we're doing here, which has a name, which we're going to look up now and Sam can tell you because I can't pronounce anything Japanese, is where you pull and kind of, it's not quite RIP, but you leave that soft young stem behind and you're just pulling the Leafs out.

Ryan · 32:24

So it's as if you were picking one leaf by 1 leaf, but for some of these and just be way too slow to do that and too difficult. So you basically pinch down and pull up and you get, it's like, that's the best sound effect I can do to describe what that does.

Ryan · 32:40

I think most people can picture that, I hope. And at the end you have a sort of cluster of leaves and that you then toss into your basket with no stem. This picture when you're trying to use your three fingers to strip out of the grapes off from a very thinned Grapevine.

Ryan · 32:56

And that's, you know, kind of similar to how you would do it for all these young tea leaves. So the picking method for this kind of practice is called shigoki-zumi. And apparently it's, you know, not only in Aichi but also in Shiga, in Mandukuro they use this type of picking method as well. And I've seen some videos of some some people in Uji as well for a certain cultivars will choose this method over the other one which actually I don't know the name of called normal picking at least us.

Ryan · 33:28

How are you? Take the stem with you. But the other picking that we did in Uji and you know, but you end up getting a lot of stamps which will naturally be turned into hojicha or kukicha by the end of the day. So in this case is less hojicha by the end of the day which is so Sam. Which picking method do you prefer? Do I prefer?

Zongjun · 33:49

Interesting question. I don't know if I have a preference, but you know, for so many hours, your fingertip do end up getting, you know, a little bit painful for shigoki-zumi. Yeah, there's a lot more like rubbing when you're like trying not to damage the leaves, but also trying to remove the leaves from the soft stem, which is a difficult game. And putting just enough pressure, but not enough pressure to break the soft stem.

Zongjun · 34:15

Because if you break the soft stem, then you got to take off each grape 1 by 1 so to speak, each leaf 1 by 1, which comes up really. You waste a lot of time that way. Yeah, I also like for this method really requires a lot of like surface friction of your finger to the tea leaves to kind of strip the tea leaf off.

Zongjun · 34:35

And it's very difficult to do it with naked hand. Here they actually give you these special gloves that has, you know, unique surface texture that help you to strip the tea leaf faster. But Ryan seem to be Nah in the liking of using those. Gloves.

Ryan · 34:50

No. I hate this. There are too. There's too much like traction and I end up picking too many mature leaves. Yeah, it's very hard to feel the actual. Texture. You miss the sensoriness at your fingertips. I was, I did. I spent two months in India. I'm studying food and beverage preferences across NE South and West in different parts of India. And we had a sort of a local guide that each person who helped identify the food and beverage and flavour combinations we needed to do in each particular region. And there was this, there's this very nice old lady named Jayanti.

Ryan · 35:26

And Jayanti was like, look, something. You have to understand that in India, the sensory experience of eating food starts at the fingers, not at the mouth. And I will never forget that. And it was kind of echoing in my head when I decided to take these gloves off.

Ryan · 35:42

It's like, oh, I need to actually, because you can feel the difference. You can hear the difference. You can feel the difference in texture and in sound and in waxing Ness and I don't know how smooth they are or how moist they are and losing that little tiny bit of sensory perception.

Zongjun · 35:58

Makes all the difference. Was really difficult in picking the difference between picking tea fast and picking tea well. Yeah, I mean, I've been always picking tea with my naked hands, you know, in China, in Korea and also in Japan.

Ryan · 36:11

In the past, like in Uji, we didn't use glove, but here I tried to do it. But over some certain time your fingertips really start hurting. So I decided to wear one glove on one hand to do the stripping and use the other hand to kind of feel check the textures. So we also got to see milling, milling facility, I think they had 16 usu, so not all of which were actively being used. And we had a chance to really ask some questions. This is a very unique producer that does everything from like the agriculture all the way through retail sales. They have a little store and in the room we're obviously working on our matcha mill to mill much

Ryan · 36:49

of fresh anywhere and everywhere with an active cooling system, swappable millstones, anti static technology. Not that I have this down to a 32nd elevator pitch, but I gave us some good opportunity to learn just some milling knowledge. And so I asked him, what's your target temperature like what's the temperature range of the outer part of the stone that you consider generally acceptable?

Ryan · 37:09

And he said 40 to 50°C. But he says at the interface where the the stones are actually touching each other, they're probably even hotter, like probably closer to 60°C, which is the same thing that I heard from one of the ishi-usu operators in Bangkok who is getting recommendations from a producer in Ujitawara about the recommended milling temperature being about 60°C as sort of a ceiling.

Ryan · 37:39

Another interesting thing that he does is that he refinishes the tencha before grinding to remove any excess moisture content. And I took down some notes here. The what he does is he gives it another quick toast. I didn't have how long the duration was.

Ryan · 37:54

But he does not let it exceed 100°C. Otherwise he believes it imparts too much flavor change into the tencha. So to drive off that final moisture content before he decides to mill, he does a little bit of refinishing, but it much lower temperatures.

Ryan · 38:10

And the goal is to control the moisture content to about like 3%, which is very dry. Which is, yeah, very dry. The other thing that he mentioned is, and this is something we've heard from a couple people now, is they actually the importance of some heat in milling.

Ryan · 38:26

Without a lot of heat in milling, you can actually, you have flavors that become much less mute, more muted and much less interesting. And he was talking about how that was actually pretty important to create a balance profile. And I was asking him if you're milling tea for 24 hours and you were just scoop tea at the bottom of the pile, like in theory, tea that was milled in the first hour. And if you were to scoop tea on the top, which was just, you know, milled on a stone that had been turning for 24 hours and theoretically much hotter.

Ryan · 38:54

I, you know, in theory you'll reach some temperature equilibrium probably, but maybe it's still slowly exceeds, but you still have some material coming out of it that was in a colder ishi-usu than some of the later materials.

Ryan · 39:06

So you're actually kind of creating a blend. He was like, yeah, the tencha is a little bit more astringent, but he thinks when it's blended all together, it actually can bring some structure. I mean that he actually wants to see some of that astringency as well as some of the, he didn't use the word Hika and I forget what the word he used once, but this sort of this milling aroma that comes with that heat.

Ryan · 39:28

And he says that the milling aroma this, I'll call it milling hika with back of a better word or the, you know, a roasted smell dissipates within one month after milling. So everything that he knows is ground to order and ideally is consumed within one month. And apparently the hika that is made from tencha processing in the tencha oven lasts much longer. So you have different degradation rates for these different types of fired aromas.

Ryan · 39:55

So he recommends consuming tea within one month after milling to preserve this sort of double layer of complexity. Were there any other surprises to you? Zongjun in the milling room, we went in in two different groups because it was too small of a room.

Zongjun · 40:11

Were you surprised or what struck you, or were there any other interesting questions that people in your group asked? Yeah. So the other very interesting thing that we saw is that they use these wooden box to kind of collect out of the, you know, milled matcha and also, you know, tencha before milling. So they all contained in this very uniquely designed little wooden box that is tint plated inside. And this special wood that they use is called sugi. And it also has kind of like it's a local wood in Japan that people use for various functionalities, but people specially like it because it has

Zongjun · 40:49

kind of like a insect repellent feature that people not only store food inside sugi made containers, but also a clothes. Prevent the moths. Yeah, prevent, prevent the moths. Original moths ball box. Yeah, so, but it's, you know, fairly odorless.

Zongjun · 41:06

So people really like using this type of wood. And we also saw a lot of these sugi trees in Wazuka these like they really looks like a forest giants, very magnificent trees. The other thing that really struck me was just how much matcha is everywhere Freeware resurface. The matcha was everywhere.

Zongjun · 41:27

When you're milling matcha, when you're making matcha, you know it forms a suspension in water. After you mill it, it is definitely forming a suspension in air. There was matcha all over the floor. The floor is literally green. Yeah, it's green, like half.

Zongjun · 41:40

Of the surfaces are green, if you look up at the air conditioning filter, it's horrifying. And then if you think, what is this doing to my lungs? If you're not wearing a mask, it's actually pretty big hazard from an air quality perspective. So we recommend anyone milling matcha just in general keep that in mind.

Zongjun · 42:00

But then our machine, we made it kind of airtight. There's very little there's only or basically one way for matcha to come out that falls into a collector that we built a special magnetic cup that goes up into it so that like it's not being really exposed to the air. Otherwise it you definitely will notice this in the air quality. It's actually if you're comparing our mill against an ishi-usu.

Zongjun · 42:22

So it's actually say that's one area where we have a heads up because it much better contains the air surrounding the milling surface to prevent that. And anyone who does mill on an ishi-usu. So really recommend you get a box and you close it because chronic I think exposure to this type of dust, it's extremely unhealthy.

Zongjun · 42:41

The other interesting thing that we kind of already heard from other T Millers is that Yusif matcha after milling this farmer also sips his matcha and precedes pre sift matcha looks very interesting. It's very fluffy, contains a lot of these some kind of hair like texture in the powder and also you see some tencha too. So we kind of.

Zongjun · 43:05

It's naturally a messy process. Yeah, it's naturally a messy process, you. Get a little tencha here, a little tencha there, some partially milk powder when you because you have to kind of prime the plates before you get everything moving. Yeah, it's this is actually quite encouraging to see because we saw this a lot when we were developing our mill. This is very validating across the board, even across the optimal temperature ranges and that we're hitting right in the window and respecting the ceiling at most of the speeds coming from our mill.

Zongjun · 43:35

You can definitely push it hot if you really are running it very fast for an extremely long time. But it's still, you know, within this acceptable range for the most part from all of these different numbers that we've heard floating around. So last and perhaps most importantly, Zongjun, what did you think of the tea?

Zongjun · 43:51

And we got to try matcha after factory fresh ground ready to go and having picked it, having seen it end to the end. And what were your thoughts on that usucha? It was very good. It was very interesting. If you would have let me guessed, I would totally guess this matcha is is a traditional conventional farmed matcha has this very full body rich umami flavor that you know has this wonderful hint of as you previously mentioned and umami.

Zongjun · 44:20

So this matcha was a blend. In fact, this farmer only does blend matcha and it was really until this year, the Herd Koto Tea Space special request. The first time we're going to do a single cultivar, single origin matcha, but but for a blend matcha using basically organic farming, that was some very incredible taste. Yeah, with this very interesting sort of withered fragrance makes it super unique.

Ryan · 44:47

And you know, something that occurred to me today, we were getting a tour of the tencha processing facility, which is in an old miso factory, and a large part of it is actually made out of wood. And you see these giant timber beams in the building is about 100 years old.

Ryan · 45:02

And the farmer who, you know, it's harvest season. I don't want to say he looked tired because I feel like that's an insult, but the guy definitely has been working a lot. We're standing there and he was talking about earthquake proofing the building and that he's wanted to make sure that it was structurally sound in case of an earthquake. And I was looking at him and thinking about this and I was like, wow, I really understand now why most matcha and tencha producers are end to end from agriculture through retail sales.

Ryan · 45:34

This guy has to think about all of the hiring skilled tea picker people to work in the tencha processing factory, all of this land and probably all of the regulations and the paperwork, just owning and maintaining the land, all of these buildings, thinking, making sure that they're earthquake proof.

Ryan · 45:54

He has to do all the B2B sales. It had all the retail sales that they have. They're blending the products. And then also they have like basically a second factory where they're doing the shiage and the milling, which also needs to be monitored by people. And then you had to take care of all the tea plants and then you need to make sure that all of your T cells like I just even talking about it feels exhausting. You know, I probably only mentioned like 60% of the list. Like who knows what else that that guy has to think about and like the ability to context switch the money to solve the problems, the expertise to solve

Ryan · 46:32

the problems, not even to mention the time that it takes to solve those problems. I, I was looking at Sam as we were leaving today and it was like, I understand why some people just sell the wholesalers. He's a farmer. He is a he's a factory owner and processor and he's a brand, right?

Ryan · 46:51

And like so much mad respect. Like if you think about every all of us who are in the matcha industry, you know, they're sourcing material and selling it. Just imagine being the factory that made it and the farmers who grew it, right? Like that would increase the scope of work by just a huge percent because even just selling the product is hard. I'm selling it B to B, selling it to consumer. So it's pretty crazy.

Ryan · 47:14

You know, you think of these tea farmers, these artists who are sitting around thinking about their plants all day and the type of fertilizer that they put in the ground and making sure that everything is shaded perfectly.

Ryan · 47:26

And like, you know, it's exactly 21 days or it's exactly 30 days. And he picks the perfect optimal time window to pick the tea right when it's ready. But really what I realized is that this is just a game of compromises and constraints, right? How much tea, how many tea pickers do we have? How quickly are these coming in?

Ryan · 47:46

Apparently it's an early year here in IG, and it's just one big set of compromises. The level of intentionality and control that tea farmers have over the outcome is very low. And there's so many unpredictable factors from weather, from how many people you have to when the tea actually comes in. And then all of the other factors that can pop up as it goes from, you know, a plant in the dirt, in the ground all the way into your final cup.

Ryan · 48:16

Even things like the new Iran war and what that's doing to fertilizer prices like this doesn't affect our our farmer because he only uses this doesn't affect the farmer that we visited here because he only uses organic fertilizer.

Ryan · 48:27

I guess maybe it does indirectly, but for the people using synthetic fertilizer, like because of the the Iran war that's causing a huge bottleneck in supply, I'm probably going to increase a lot of fertilizer prices. I would make the raw inputs even more expensive.

Ryan · 48:43

So there's all these exogenous factors that play a non negligible role on the difficulty in the work that these farmers are actually doing, which goes back to the point that we've been making about Uji and uji matcha and saying that, you know, a can of matcha tastes good.

Ryan · 48:58

Just because it says uji on it, it it's not actually crediting the people who actually did the work to make it good. Like, yes, this farmer, he's not even part of the four Prefecture trademark zone, but he and the tea pickers and the whole company and his wife and his family members there are the reason why this tea is so good. It's not because he inherited the skill from this person or that person as part of some great lineage. I mean, we all stand on the shoulders of giants and whatever our respective fields are.

Ryan · 49:29

It's good because he put in the work and the blood sweat and tears and having these very reductive approaches, ceremonial grade Uji matcha, whatever really doesn't put credit to the right place to describe and define an attribute.

Zongjun · 49:45

What makes a good product to premium or good. Well said Ryan, well said. It's. This work is really about like sweat and tears and hard works. And when people talking about, you know, why these farmers don't, you know, opt into single origin, why don't they promote themselves more, you know, like it by the end of the day, really just kind of ran out your energy or thinking about other things like this is a lot of dimensions that people need to consider.

Zongjun · 50:14

And for the farming, for the cultivation, for the picking, for the manufacturing, for the packaging, every single segment on this value chain, they lack labor. There's really visible shortage of Labor and the very visible aging of Labor in all of these segments.

Zongjun · 50:32

I honestly feel a little bit concerned, like what if, you know, we don't have our 85 year old grandpa in the future to pick so many teas so fast and we were just looking around the tea fills when we were picking tea. We barely finished like one row yesterday and we barely finished half of the row today because we had less time and there were just so much unpicked tea around us. Very, like, intimidating.

Zongjun · 51:01

Or scary, I don't know. Yeah. And honestly? When we were picking some teas, some of the younger leaves are getting a little bit hard and that's definitely not because of, you know, the lack of farmers care. It's definitely because, you know, we don't have enough manpower to pick them timely.

Zongjun · 51:19

And that's very sad. All of these timings in the past before the harvest season, you know, they did their job, they did their hard work and it was just that we don't have enough people to pick the final product, that these product end UPS ends up deteriorating in the field.

Zongjun · 51:37

It's incredibly sad. This is like, you know, it's almost. Like jazz or really good jazz session where like every single person is improvising and perhaps once in a while you just have this magic chemistry between a group of musicians and a group of artists that create something so perfect because everything is just In Sync and coordinated and paste and the cadence is perfect.

Zongjun · 52:02

It's very similar. Like with the weather with the tea pickers, if you have enough labor, when things are ready, just so many things have to go right to create those years where they say this is a fantastic product. Yeah, it should go ECA. Exactly when you do.

Zongjun · 52:20

Have. The luck to end up trying a product like that. Please cherish. We should all cherish. Yeah. And I think we should be a little bit. Easier on producers, it's easy to be critical of, you know, any this, that or the other factor that you know might cause the tea to taste better or worse and truly understanding and attributing what makes tea taste good and why that flavor tastes good. It's just a very difficult thing to do. There's really no lazy.

Ryan · 52:47

Farmer and bad tea. There's lazy farmer and no tea. Like if there's ever tea end up producing that day, it's hardworking farmers and hardworking jobs. Yeah. And it also feels. Like this is honestly having experienced it and seen it, you can feel the lack of sustainability.

Ryan · 53:06

It doesn't feel sustained. Like I really can't wait to contrast this someday when we make it to Kagoshima with these auto harvesters where there's literally not a human single human hand touching the tea here. This tea gets touched so many times in this process it's crazy. It gets picked and then it gets moved from back-to-back. It gets withered and then it gets moved again. It gets steamed.

Ryan · 53:31

They have people checking every leaf in the tencha oven when it comes out to either separate the leaves or remove some of the older leaves and then it gets sorted out. This is the level of care and intentionality, almost a leaf by leaf basis and the number of human eyeballs.

Zongjun · 53:49

Let's see and inspect and make a judgment call on each leaf is is a little mind blow blowing and you're removing some of that soul in like these completely automated factories. It reminds me, you know, in China, they have these, they call them dark factories, right? Where they don't even need to turn the lights on because they're totally automated.

Zongjun · 54:10

In Shenzhen, you don't even need. Any people? To be there, all of these electronics factories. It's this it's future of. Of manufacturing of you walk in on a soul there right like you can feel that that's coming to tea farm.

Ryan · 54:24

You feel that it needs to come to tea farming. It has to, otherwise there will be no. Tea and the people that continue to do. This are really like heroes of saving culture. And you know, even us, you know, we're complaining that this is weird incentive loops in Japan about making better tea for the competition or making better tea for what old men think good think are good because they're the chashi's or the wholesale buyers that are buying and selling this material around Japan. And like, why isn't there more innovation? Why aren't there more innovation cycles? Why don't people experiment more? Like these people can barely get

Ryan · 54:58

the product out the door like a reasonable profit. Even some of the Rockstar macho farmers, so we've talked about on this podcast, you know, we've heard, you know, it's not like they are earning Rockstar money. And that actually cash flow is a huge problem even during this matcha boom.

Zongjun · 55:16

It is a difficult business when you decide to get into three businesses instead of 1. So it's really hard to think about like what does that feature look like? Like are these dark factories good? Are they still technically producing high quality matcha?

Zongjun · 55:31

This obviously needs to be preserved, but it feels like it almost can't be very commercial because like, who is going to come pick the tea? Who is going to take on the reins? And like, if you do all this work and the tea that comes out of the dark factory is good enough for most of the tea that most of the macho that's being prepared and drink in the world, then like who is this for?

Ryan · 55:55

And I think it's for this community. It's for specialty people. It's for people who care about where the food came from, people who don't mind paying double the price for a hand picked product. It's specialty food movement.

Ryan · 56:08

Specialty matcha movement. Yeah. It's. When it comes to terroir, I think especially so for matcha. It's really not about a geographic region, is about the people that lives in those area. And it's about all of these human interventions, human decisions that end up going into all these products that created this unique flavor profile. It's about people.

Zongjun · 56:32

You are literally tasting people's wisdom, people's hard work and people's life. Yeah, and you know this, this. Whole industry is not going to be kept alive unless it's able to grow outside of Japan. And Even so, there's going to be a lot of loss in culture and lower productivity or these slower methods. Well, hopefully there will be new culture. Being created new culture being created this. Culture being preserved in a larger market to incentivize more people to flood the zone with some money to keep this good work alive.

Ryan · 57:06

And it does create just a product with the soul and with the story. And so that's what we're hoping for, especially into the future. It's hard to know what's going to happen, but this was really interesting to put into context when thinking about like traditional practices versus innovation, which is an attention we love to floor here.

Zongjun · 57:23

And tomorrow we will go back to the tea field. And we'll try to do our part to add value and we'll try to learn more. Yes, we will. So thanks. So much for listening and if you enjoyed this, please consider sharing with friend and we'll see you the next one. See you in the future.