Our Questions and Announcement

Ryan · 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan. This is my cofounder Sam. Hello. Hello. And we're the cofounders of Sanko Matcha products. Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey, matcha, share startup stories and interview experts, and occasionally announcing good news.

Ryan · 0:17

Yes, it is today. So today's podcast is update and a call to action so. What's the good news, Ryan? So the our broader company, Sanko Matcha Products, the one that runs the specialty podcast, we're launching our first product commercially, which is the Obsidian 1 Dimensional Matcha Whisking Bowl. We did a Kickstarter.

Ryan · 0:39

It's successful. All of those products were delivered a few months ago now, but we finally figured out the packaging, the logistics, the ongoing shipment infrastructure that we need to fulfill orders online and that is going to be dropping very soon. So lookout for announcements, tune, follow us on Instagram. So in some ways this is kind of an ad Specialty Matcha Podcast. We want to be very non commercial, but when it is going to be slightly commercial we ought to be very explicit. Yeah, we are going to help you skip this part in the future. But we also have a couple call to actions as well, and there's a couple of things that we're in

Ryan · 1:15

the middle of researching when it comes to our own matcha learning journey, and we're having a lot of trouble finding answers to some of our questions. Or even like talking and interviewing so many people, we're still kind of getting puzzled on some of these topics.

Ryan · 1:29

Yeah. We've, we've encountered a couple contradictory pieces of information that like obviously come from 2 very different perspectives, but we're having trouble reconciling it. So we, this is a call to action for experts. So if anyone listening knows the answer or part of an answer to any of these questions that we're about to ask, please reach out.

Ryan · 1:52

Or if you know someone who would know? Yeah, point us a direction. Please point us in a direction because we'd love to make content around this. And also, if you have a question that you haven't been able to find a satisfactory answer for, let us know. Email us. im.ryan@sankomatcha.com. You can DM us on Instagram as well or fill out the contact form on the website Sankomatcha.com and we'll try to find someone to find the answer for you. And we'll, I guess, do an episode or create some content around it.

Ryan · 2:27

Yeah, absolutely. So we sort of want this to be almost a community space where the podcast is a way to elevate certain questions or topics. All right, so what's first, Ryan? Yeah. So I am doing a lot of research on cultivation techniques and processing methods in the way that matcha gets made.

Ryan · 2:46

And you hear people talk about heritage matcha, traditional matcha, matcha all the time. But what it's unclear to me is what were the innovations 100 and 150 years ago? And I guess the base question is what did matcha taste like 150 years ago before the Industrial Revolution happened?

Ryan · 3:11

So in Japan it was industrialized pretty early compared to a lot of other countries. And I want to know what stages and production steps mechanization was first introduced, what happened, what was how do people steam tencha before these industrial steaming machines and cool it and roll it and like do the heat treatment process for it etcetera. So like what happened pre and post Industrial Revolution and the modern history around commercial farming basically? Very interesting question.

Zongjun · 3:49

I might know part of the answer of the steaming part because, you know, back in the Song dynasty people also steamed green tea and they put the tea into this dry bamboo basket and put it on top of a boiling wok and let the steam kind of pass through the basket. Just like a dim.

Zongjun · 4:07

Sum. Yeah, kind of like a dim sum tray, but that's how they did it in the past. And there is another method that I recently read about. It's called louting, which basically like they just dumped the leaf into a boiling pot of water and then like slightly boil it and then, you know, scrape it out.

Ryan · 4:25

Interesting. But that's China in China in China, I guess part of the technique transferred into Japan with tea itself. It's very possible, but we don't know. So if you know the answer, please let us know. We're very curious, any other parts from harvesting methods?

Ryan · 4:42

Like at what point did people stop hand picking tea and what did that transition look like? How did it impact the labor economy? All of these different aspects, and even the more modern aspects like refrigerating aracha to keep it fresh before it's fully processed into tencha.

Zongjun · 4:57

And all these synthetic fertilizers in order to really boost up umaminess. Exactly. And what were the fertilization techniques and were they widespread? And even the shade canopies. I know there were honzu, straight shading, I'm assuming it was the only method, but how and when were those materials changed and introduced? Because a lot of people still, I mean, is that traditional? You have all this baggage that comes with traditional heritage, but the reality is that even the heritage market today has undergone quite a bit of innovation since 150 years ago. So really, we'd love to dig into

Ryan · 5:30

the nuance of that. Evergreen traditional. I guess today's traditional is tomorrow's traditional. It's a revolving definition. So that's that's the first one. So if anyone has any answers or insights into that, we'd love to know and love to have you on the podcast or even just to have a call with so you can have a better understanding and then share it here. Yeah, OK.

Zongjun · 5:49

The second edge, yes, your second edge is kind of similar to one of my question too. Like Ryan has been obsessed with the early history of the matcha latte. Yeah, which is weird because actually I don't really even like matcha latte. I do, but it's definitely I guess not traditional to Japan I.

Ryan · 6:11

Think from what I heard it was invented there. It was. I'm not certain. Really, that is my current understanding it does a lot of contradictory information online and incomplete information online. My understanding is that it was part of like this move of using matcha and confectionery products in Japan as an ingredient.

Ryan · 6:33

And then I've heard, and I don't know if this is true and I've tried to confirm it with other people and no one seems to be sure, that the 1st place to have it was some cafe in Vancouver. And then it spread. And I know Starbucks was a really early adopter of what they called a green tea latte, which was basically a matcha latte.

Ryan · 6:50

And I also know that Haagen Dazs was super early to the game and using it in a product, although it's not a matcha latte. But I'm very curious about the modern history of the matcha latte, Who invented it? Who were the true early adopters and how did it spread and why? Yeah, yeah.

Ryan · 7:07

It's such a powerful gateway into matcha. So many new consumers, especially in the West, in Europe and in North America, have fallen in love with Matcha through that first exposure, and there's very little origin story about it. It's like no one knows who invented Coke, Coca-Cola. Yeah, this is, I guess my question goes even beyond that. Like, I'm very curious about, like, because we all know, like, how much have moved from China to Japan, like all of the early stories and the early Gospels of, you know, like, how much as a culture and as a plan transferred from a country to another.

Zongjun · 7:50

But what happened after Japan? How did matcha end up, you know, becoming this globally popular drink outside of Japan? Like who are who were the early and SI for Europe, for North America, for Southeast Asia? Yeah, who are those people?

Ryan · 8:09

Yeah. Like it must be so interesting. Like I bet they have like probably like similar degree of legend as as I and leak you. No, but no one knows who they are. And no one knows who they are, or if you know who they are, please let us know.

Zongjun · 8:23

Or if it's you and you're listening, let us know. You're very curious. Yes. The next one is around hojicha and caffeine. And we used to work a lot in specialty coffee industry. And there's this weird myth that heavily roasted coffee contains more or less caffeine. Sometimes you hear different things. The reality is caffeine is very heat stable. It's very heat stable.

Ryan · 8:47

I think it doesn't start degrading until around 400°C. It's very sturdy. So even when you're roasting coffee to a burnt crisp, you're not losing a lot of caffeine content. And everyone says that hojicha has remarkably little caffeine because it's been roasted and it gets lost during the roasting process.

Ryan · 9:06

But I find this entirely unsatisfying because I know that not to be true in the coffee industry. Now you can double click even further and say, OK, hojicha is kind of a vague term. You could take tencha, which are the leafy leaf parts of the plant, which to my knowledge contain much more caffeine than the stems, and roast it and it has very little caffeine. But I'm not sure if that's true because it is not degrading in coffee and I don't know why it wouldn't degrade in coffee when it would degrade in tea.

Zongjun · 9:37

And hojicha is definitely lower temperature firing than what some of the darker roaster coffees are going. I don't know if it's a water content difference and maybe that plays a role. And I know that hojicha, when you're roasting it probably has a much lower water content than something like green coffee or I don't know what's going on, but I find this contradiction unsatisfying.

Zongjun · 9:57

And I'm not sure that I believe that that's why hojicha has less caffeine. And I also know that hojicha can be made from anything from stems to veins to mixture of leaves and stems. And I'm sure there's some natural variation based on that. But having a more satisfying explanation or some studies even would help clear this up and I think help clear it up for a lot of people.

Zongjun · 10:19

My suspicion is that some people are drinking hojicha that they think is nearly caffeine free and may or may not be. Yeah, well, it tastes so good. Does taste good regardless. OK. My turn, my next is about farming. So we all know that, you know, there are different styles of farming techniques in Japan.

Zongjun · 10:38

Largely you have these very carefully curated garden style. You can have these organic farming and then you can have natural farming. I guess to me, because starting from the Chinese tea drinker, I would always preferred my tea come from more natural kind of Yunnan style forest tea style farming tea. And I feel like those tea has the the best kind of taste profile that can represent the local terroir and the the local climate.

Zongjun · 11:08

And it's the most characteristic compared to other teas. So I'm wondering how does that, like, to what degree does natural or forest farming exist in Japan? What do they look like? How do they, how do people process those tea into like do they get all processed too, like bancha or other kind of lower grade tea?

Ryan · 11:30

Or do some of them actually turn into matcha? Yeah. And how easy is it to shade? And just to add some color on what Long Jun saying is that you're basically talking about low intervention matcha in the same way that people talk about low intervention wine, for example. That's correct.

Ryan · 11:48

So it's you know, when you think about it, modern matcha or tencha farming is incredibly unnatural when you compare it to other tea cultivation and processing. So like you have a monoculture of these rows of genetically identical plants that are planted perfect distance apart and the vast majority of the matcha the world is consuming gets the the plants get pumped with tons of synthetic fertilizer and then shade covered for weeks.

Ryan · 12:20

This is like the most on the nature nurture spectrum. This is heavily nurture. Yeah, I mean like theoretically you can basically produce this kind of tea anywhere in the world if you have the technique and the machine and the climate, right? I guess climate is like the most uncontrollable part. Other than that, you know, this is really a hyper engineered process.

Ryan · 12:45

Very little of them is natural or you resembles the local terroir. And when you compare it to some of the natural tea, and there is some in Japan, right, it's, you don't necessarily see these gigantic rows. Sometimes you do, but they're usually a little more dispersed. They let the natural flora and fauna exist. The root structures of the plants are allowed to go much deeper and access more nutrients. Typically they're seed propagated, not exclusively, but typically, which means you have more genetic diversity in the plants, making the whole system more resilient. And then you can't necessarily machine harvest them because you don't, you don't have these

Zongjun · 13:22

perfect rows where you can just put a big machine and cut everything down. Yeah. So it's. When I was in Yunnan last year harvesting tea to make pu'er, these trees, these are like, they're not tea bushes, they're tea trees.

Zongjun · 13:38

Like, people literally would climb up the branch to pick tea for harvest. So I'm wondering, like, do that, do that exist in Japan? Like, it would be very wonderful to experience that because I had the most wonderful time, you know, experiencing nature and drinking tea that comes from the same nature that I experienced. Like you can taste what you've felt before, which is a wonderful experience.

Ryan · 14:06

And, you know, it's probably very true to what matcha tasted like when it first came to Japan, right? Because a lot of the spread within East Asia, Korea and Japan was through temples and it would just be allowed to grow in the temples. Wild.

Ryan · 14:21

I know a lot of that still exists in Korea. I think some of it exists still in Japan and some of those early Buddhist temples. But I think it's quite rare that it was like really truly cultivated. And you know, not to say that you can't have good matcha from heavily cultivated mono crop of things.

Ryan · 14:37

And some of the best award-winning tea comes from these types of places. Maybe it's hand picked or it's treated and processed, you know, a bit better than the really industrial stuff. But we're very interested in the natural tea movement and if it could ever become commercially viable to have. So you know how you have like natural wine, if you could have quote unquote, natural matcha that's very low intervention and more reflective of terroir.

Zongjun · 15:00

Yeah. All right. Next one for me is deductive tasting structure. It's for blind identification of matcha including region, processing methods, etc. So basically for the industry experts who can taste something blind and say, Oh, yes, this is Kyoto prefecture, this is probably from Wazuka.

Zongjun · 15:22

It was probably shaded for this many days, and it tastes like Uji Hikari. And I think that this year was pretty good. So kind of like what you see for these people who dine blind, identify wine. I would love someone to give knowledge structure.

Zongjun · 15:38

How do you recognize the difference in just the taste profile and disentangle all of the attributes that make up that product, the region, the processing, the cultivar? And I know that's going to be really hard and that couldn't be a single episode. But even just high level structures on the way that all of these things taste different and the way they come together to produce a unique product is very interesting to me. Yeah.

Zongjun · 16:07

And some of the more skilled experts, you know, doing all the tea auction season, they will go ahead and taste it, taste all these are like unprocessed or like barely processed tea. And they will be able to tell the final taste profile based on these raw material. Yeah.

Zongjun · 16:23

Like at that linkage you do see that exists elsewhere, you know, in China and Korea for other kinds of teas. But I wonder if, you know, it's a similar kind of trajectory to learn to or to gain the experience in Japan too.

Zongjun · 16:37

And how do you do that? How do you do it? And for those who have done it, please tell us like some of the differences, how can you help teach others to taste? What flavor attributes matter? What flavor attributes are predictive of region, process, cultivar, etcetera.

Zongjun · 16:55

Would be really useful I think for people in discovering their own preferences and what they like. So call it tea sommelier knowledge structures for blind identification. There's something that we'd love and we're going to work on it ourselves, but it's probably going to take us a few decades before we could have any credibility on the top and we'd like to speed that up.

Zongjun · 17:20

All right, next I have is labeling rules. So if anyone's very familiar with labeling standards in Japan and other countries, we'd love to talk to you. I know some very high level things, like I know that there's like tons of tea like grown in Wazuka and then transported and processed in Uji. And so long as it's like 50% Uji tea, you can still call it Uji tea.

Zongjun · 17:41

Which actually makes the last part really complicated because if the label of your tea is Uji and you're trying to learn the taste of Uji, but really 50% of it comes from some plantation in Wazuka, which is next door, still in Kyoto prefecture, you're not learning the taste. There's another case for transparent labeling, which we're talking about.

Zongjun · 18:03

So we don't need to go off on that tangent, but I'd love to learn what are the rules? Because you can't learn to taste and blind identify if you can't trust the label. And in order to trust the label, you need to know what the rules are. I guess, you know, like for there are too many things going on with all these labels like if for someone to call it Uji, like obviously you can sell it for better price than other smaller regions.

Ryan · 18:30

So I guess we really need some system other than the the current system to be able to enforce this labeling system in the future. Just transparent labeling that's truthful is enough, yeah. It's. I mean, it's ridiculous. The state of the industry is ridiculous. Blind, you have no idea what the case labeling standards where. You could even have tea that was grown and processed in mainland China under the brand name Uji Matcha, which is owned by a Japanese company by a Chinese subsidiary. It is crazy land.

Ryan · 19:02

How is anyone expected to learn anything about this is a specialty product? Yeah. Something very frustrating. Something needs to be done. It will be hard I guess. Well, we're going to do it and we're going to disentangle this. It's going to take years.

Ryan · 19:16

And part of this is we need to learn what the rules are. I know what some of them are, but if anyone listening is well knows the rules are ruled better than we do, please reach out. One more speaking around traditions and of opaque parts of the matcha industry. I'd love to learn more about blenders. Anyone that knows anything about matcha blending, please, please, please reach out.

Ryan · 19:40

I want to know how you take component one plus component 2 to get your blend and like, what are you thinking about? How do you think about blending? How do you think about achieving these flavor profile outcomes so that we can make better products? And you know, I'm really of the belief that this does not need to be such a product craft.

Ryan · 19:57

I know that there's many different levels and there's this whole. Institution around it and you get licensed and it can take many decades, but it would be so interesting. We saw in the world a specialty coffee where you have hundreds, thousands, 10s of thousands of coffee artisans out in the world buying green coffee, roasting it and blending it to create things that their consumers love, that their consumers love in Saudi Arabia, that their consumers love in mainland China, that their consumers love in Peru.

Ryan · 20:30

And they have the knowledge of that local market. And that's why they call it craft coffee, because they're having a value at those coffee roasters that own those cafes or owns those brands. They're contributing to the value, creating things that consumers life love and blending it to their preferences. The fact that all of this blending is done in Japan is deeply bothersome to me from just a product perspective. I do not believe that those Japanese tea blenders, no matter how skilled they are, are capable of knowing the preferences that are going on in their head in consumers as diverse as the Middle East to

Ryan · 21:10

the rest of Asia, the United States, or in Latin America, or in Europe or in Africa. And that expertise resides locally. And the ability for new people to buy tencha, blend it themselves and mill it would be such an interesting value add, value creation that could make Matcha much more enjoyable for people who have different preferences than outside of Japan.

Zongjun · 21:35

Yeah, I would say it's, it's it's just very different mentality, Ryan. I mean, like to to my knowledge at least these blenders or blend houses are very, very close gate. All of their blending skills are guarded for generations and not to be shared to outsiders.

Zongjun · 21:53

Maybe like a small portion of them gets shared and gets talked about. If you know some of the leaks, please let us know. But you know, like their mentality. Very similar to a lot of the other Japanese crafts works. Are.

Zongjun · 22:10

They are creating something that they think are the best and whether or not you enjoy that, it's up to you. They really don't care about your preference. That's that's similar case for, you know, like Japanese artwork, ceramics, like they don't really trying to cater your preference.

Ryan · 22:32

They have their own standard. It's a shame, it's a beautiful world and I really admire Japanese tradition, but at the same time the domestic market is just not interested. Yeah, it's a dying market. So it's I don't know.

Ryan · 22:46

They have to adapt, otherwise you know no one will be there to enjoy their creation. I mean, imagine if all the wine blending skill existed in Bordeaux and Burgundy. How sad would that be? The fact that you can get a fantastic blended wine from Bulgaria or from pick any of the new world wine from from Australia, from Napa Valley in Sonoma County. The skill exists, the knowledge is shared, and everyone can add their value to the craft that creates something unique, interesting and delicious.

Ryan · 23:17

And matcha could totally be that if people had the ability to learn about it. And to do that, they need the ability to taste. They need to trust what's on the label. They need to understand how these products are getting labeled.

Ryan · 23:28

They need to have access to a lot of this tencha and the ability to do it and the access to Matcha Fresh, which we're working on. Yeah, totally agree. Open source is the future. Open source is the future. That's it. Is it a closed ecosystem or an open source? Because I think you could have thousands of Matcha brands all over the world where people are creating these very unique products where they're adding value. Because right now you really just see people importing tea. There's very little value add other than marketing and sales totally be way more craft that's distributed anyway, he said. It's turning into a rant

Ryan · 24:04

session. Question. I deeply apologize if I offended anyone. We would love to talk to you if you know anything about funding. All right, I think this is all the questions we have so far. If you feel inspired or if you have any answers of all of these questions that we are curious about, please reach out.

Ryan · 24:24

We will love to do more content, do more research, to better suffice our own interests and suffice yours. So we're going to do a a quick plug for our bowl. So they are back in stock. So if you'd like to buy one, they'll be available September 3rd to be shipped to a lot of different countries. I think it's around 30 different countries we can ship to. And also for wholesale if you own a Matcha business, external packaging came out really quite beautiful. We're very happy with it and we can coordinate larger shipments too.

Zongjun · 24:58

Yeah, it's also very resistant, so. We did a little test run. Yeah, the sacrificial. Tossing the bowl with the box around and unintentionally or intentionally smash it on the ground. Yeah. They survived. It survived. The box was hardly impacted.

Ryan · 25:16

Yeah, but if you end up receiving the bowl cracked, please let us know. We happily replace it for you. We'll be very surprised if any of these breaks, but essentially the 62nd sales pitch for these bowls. It's a modern way to whisk matcha, so instead of conforming to the geometry of a bowl, requiring you to whisk in a zigzag motion, it is laid out. It's an elongated bowl, so you just have to whisk back and forth with all sorts of other thoughtful design features. It's a very hydrophobic glaze, reduces retention. There's a very large foot, the base of it so that it's very stable and you can easily handle

Ryan · 25:53

it upside down and easy pour spout. And yeah, we, we kind of see it as in the same way that a lot of this new coffee gear that is specialized and efficiency and making it very easy to clean and giving very consistent outcomes.

Ryan · 26:10

So more innovative than traditional, But we've gotten tons of great feedback. And I was just whisking in a bowl the other day and I, I realized I can't go back. You know, I have the skill to whisk in a normal bowl. But what I've really realized is it's not 2 dimensions when you're whisking in a bowl. It's actually 3 dimensions because most bowls aren't flat on the bottom.

Ryan · 26:33

They're either a cone or a round bottom bowl. And you actually, it's not just a zigzag, it's like a 3D zigzag and you're not really supposed to touch the bottom, but you still gotta like lightly brush it to incorporate all the matcha. But this I would say is very close to being truly one-dimensional.

Ryan · 26:50

Maybe you can do a little bit of lateral movement depending on the width of your chasen, but really simplifies the process and it folds the foam in on itself so you get microfoam much faster than you do in other bowl geometries with with this.

Zongjun · 27:06

Yeah, my grandma learned how to use it in 3 minutes. Nice. There we go. But you know, if you have any criticism on the product after usage, please also let us know. Yeah, it's our first product. We are always open to more innovation and improvements and make your life easier. We very much see it as V1.

Zongjun · 27:24

We're very happy with the way V1 came out, but we're all about Kaizen and continuous improvement here. As cringy and corporate. A word that is. One, actually one criticism that we have already received is different color. Yeah.

Zongjun · 27:40

So now the bowl comes with only one color. But you know in the future we are going to definitely going to test more glaze and there will be more color available very soon. Yep, for sure, very soon. We don't know how to define but. We will see.

Ryan · 27:56

A few months, but yeah, we're very happy. And if, if it interests you, you can find it on our website and it would be linked on our social media. And that's the end of our ad read for today's podcast. All right. So the next episode is our 25th episode, which we're considering the end of season one, Season 2 we've already recorded a couple interviews for and have some really interesting guests in perspective, very international perspective from people in Thailand.

Ryan · 28:23

We'll have people on from the Philippines, Singapore, in Japan, in the States as well. So we're really excited for everything that's coming in season 2 to get even more diverse perspectives. And the next one will be the end of season one, where we bring on the whole team here at Sanko to kind of give some reflections and our learnings from all the interviews we've done so far. Well, stay tuned.

Zongjun · 28:46

All right. Thanks so much. See you in the future.