Reflections on Tencha Sourcing Trip

Ryan · 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, this is Sam. Hello. Hello. And we're the cofounders of Sanko Matcha Products. Yeah. We launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey in matcha, share startup stories and interview experts. And today we are being interviewed and we are turning the mic to our colleague Gwen, who is also part of the founding team and she is very curious about our experience in Japan and we are getting a few questions from her. Yes, I am very excited to hear about your trip. I am hopeful to go on the next one. I have a questions to get a

Gwen · 0:35

better perspective of what it was really like being in Japan and seeing the tea farms in real life and meeting with all the people you got to meet with. Yeah. So to make this experience even more authentic, we don't know about these questions in advance, so we are very nervously waiting for this moment.

Zongjun · 0:52

You'll do great. OK, ready. We'll start with an easy one. All right, let's do it. OK, do the farmers drink the matcha they grow? Great question, but yes they do. I guess this question is exceptionally interesting because tea farmers in Yunnan who makes pu-erh tea doesn't really drink their tea until very recently. But historically they drink green tea and they don't drink the pu-erh tea that they make.

Zongjun · 1:18

But in Japan they do. They do drink their their own produce. Yeah, and we had a couple instances of getting to drink tea prepared by the farmer, and it was the farmer who grew the tea. This is exactly the way they intended and really cool.

Zongjun · 1:35

Amazing experience tasting it with their water, their preparation style and all of their wares. I have heard of though that some of the more middle sized tea farm, some of the farmers do not drink their own tea, especially the people who basically 100% of their business is selling tencha to wholesalers and to then be blended or milled by other people. I know that Jared from Chaseki did a vlog going to Wazuka, which is in Kyoto Prefecture, and he sources tencha from a farmer there.

Zongjun · 2:10

And that farmer had never had his own tea as matcha. And Jared had milled some in Victoria, BC and brought it back to that tea tea field. And it was the first time he had ever had that tea, which is a pretty wild story.

Ryan · 2:25

I'd heard of that in like China, especially where it's not so common, or at least historically it's not been so common where farmers drink their own tea typically because they're not the processors of it. But apparently that's still some of the legacy supply chain for the, you know, farmers who end there at the processing of fresh pig leaves or end at the processing step of aracha or at tencha.

Zongjun · 2:48

Yeah, for aracha especially so we have heard from one of the farmers who also owns a factory in Izumo City that a lot of the farmers from the surrounding area would just supply him aracha exclusively. And you know if it's aracha then they must not have really drink the tea from those production.

Ryan · 3:11

Yeah. And anyone this thing that's not so familiar with aracha, it's a more crude version of the product. And so I believe in order for aracha to be converted to tencha, it has to go through some heat processing steps and I also believe there's some deveining and de stemming steps. Yeah, the refinery process or shiage, yes. So it goes from aracha to shiage and then it's ready to be milled.

Ryan · 3:37

But aracha can be kept for quite a long time in refrigerated units. There's a pretty new innovation in the broad scheme of the the tea industry in Japan and where you can keep this aracha for years and then it can get processed and and finished. And we actually got to see some processing of aracha while in Japan of factory that was in a different prefecture, but processing aracha from Kagoshima. Yeah, that was that was very interesting to watch. So you got to see a lot of the processing. Was there anything of the processing that you were surprised to learn or to see in person? We didn't.

Ryan · 4:14

Get to see any direct processing from like spring material and we were before the third harvest if some places were doing a third harvest. But we did get to see all the equipment and and walk through it. I'm just surprised how large these factories are.

Ryan · 4:31

And we saw some smaller scale factories as well. But the large factories can move some serious volume to very even. The small ones are really highly mechanized when you compare them to other tea growing regions of the world. And they were mechanized very early for some of the older tea houses.

Zongjun · 4:48

Some of the machineries have very large portion of wood components. Yeah. These machines were like made back in the fees of the 30s. Very interesting and very interesting that they seem to be all made from Shizuoka. Shizuoka seems to be like the mechanical or the technology center of Japan that supplies a lot of these bespoke made machineries for different size of factories. Like anything from a family run factory to a multi warehouse, you know large plant.

Zongjun · 5:25

They are all mostly I would say 90% or above are made by Shizuoka. I forgot the exact name of manufacturer but it's Shizuoka Manufacturer. Yeah. And the other interesting thing is apparently at least in Kyoto Prefecture, there are some land restrictions on the way tencha factories or sencha factories or all of these tea processing factories, the type of footprint that they can have based on just land considerations.

Zongjun · 5:56

And they're repurposing a lot of old buildings that used to be other type of industrial. So they kind of have to get all of this equipment to fit inside some existing building in some of these regions. And they were saying, you know, it's almost an unfair comparison when you're comparing building a new factory in Kyoto Prefecture. Whereas opposed to somewhere like Kagoshima where the land is just completely flat, like you can just build as big a box as you want and you don't need to have the contents inside the factory and you've shifted around to meet your building requirement.

Gwen · 6:29

That was interesting. I'd never heard anyone talk about that before until we were chatting with some people this trip. I've never heard of that either. Were there other parts of the matcha growing and processing that you learned about from things like shading or how they harvest? One thing that I would say most I've really never heard of anyone talked about is how Tezumi actually works, how hand picked matcha actually works.

Zongjun · 6:53

So instead of picking, usually people consider the most tendered leaf is the top part right? Like the bud and the leaf that follow right after the bud. But that's not true for matcha or tencha. Tencha picking, you're picking individual leaves that growing, stamping out off from the top part of the stem and you are actually want to preserve the bud so that the bud would turn into leaf again in second or third harvest.

Zongjun · 7:21

And we also learned that that it's not the top leaf, but the bottom leaf that tastes more tendered and more umami because they receive even less sunlight. So the amino acid is more concentrated. So that was. Yeah, that was very counterintuitive.

Zongjun · 7:38

And then apparently they saved the 1st and 2nd leaf in the bud for different picks like a gokou or some very high end gyokuro. But using these, they're still young and tender tertiary leaves. But the fact that the ones further down the plant, the still young ones, but we're not talking about the mature ones, which are, you know, very leafy and coarse and kind of rigid and then much darker color. But the ones that are still young and tender at the base. Very counterintuitive from everything you learn about tea processing for other types of teas. Yeah, like you almost need to unlearn to what you have to learn for Chinese tea to to

Gwen · 8:17

learn about Japanese tea. So the tea farmers that drink their own matcha, are they able to taste the matcha in between harvest to adjust fertilizing and light? Great question. I don't think so. And the best farmers only pick once a year.

Zongjun · 8:33

The more high volume places will pick two, maybe 3 * a year, maybe 4. But that's from what I understand slightly less common. And these really large scale factories, we were asking them how they know when to pick, what kind of measurements they do. And apparently they can directly measure the amount of chlorophyll in a leaf.

Zongjun · 8:55

Like they basically have min labs and it's highly analytical actually. And they go through the death. Also from Shizuoka, like they were flying these experts from Shizuoka to do all the testings. And they can like precision target fertilizer or like they, they can control all this stuff by like actual like analytical chemistry, looking at the amino acid content in the leaves, looking at the chlorophyll level in the leaves and doing soil samples, pretty sophisticated.

Ryan · 9:26

Yeah. Agriculture, very cool. On the, on the smaller scale, one of the farmers that we were with tasting tea, we were there in August I guess and we tasted a tea with them and it was the first time they were drinking this tea as matcha. Typically it's very common for the matcha to undergo a resting period or the tencha to undergo a resting period for a couple months.

Ryan · 9:53

And so when the first part of the harvest is you can separate. Part of the first harvest in the spring is shincha or fresh tea, which is usually is a very grassy profile, but it's more of a seasonal offering. But then a lot of the good stuff gets held back and released in the fall, traditionally through a holiday in chanoyu or Japanese tea ceremony called Robiraki. So like a lot of the vendors that sell this very high-end tea, typically they're matcha doesn't get released until September, October, November.

Ryan · 10:23

That just seems like a perfect intersection between these super traditional farms that are generationally run and really advanced technology that's able to analyze the components of the leaf. True, although they're different farmers, those are different people from what we understand.

Zongjun · 10:40

It's a really, really different craftsmanship. By the end of the day, there are almost two different products. Yeah, it's almost hard to compare like people who are doing insane volumes versus the smaller family gardens, which are largely hand packed, harvested once a year in incredible terroir. It's like really hard.

Zongjun · 11:00

That was that stark difference just in the amount of volume that they're doing. It's almost not even the same product in my mind. Now, having seen it, tasting it side by side, you know, it's a different story. But like the labor requirements and the amount of artistry and artisanship and that goes in, the other stuff really feels like agriculture. And the small family farms really feel like an artisanal product.

Zongjun · 11:27

And that difference couldn't be more. Start. It's almost like comparing a a Rolex to A to a Apple Watch. They can both tell time. The technology behind them is very just very different. Both produce good products. I mean most of the people drink in the world come from these high volume places.

Zongjun · 11:45

Yeah, they're both excellent product. Although to maybe answer your question, Gwen, even though these very high end artisanal farmers don't pick multiple times through our year, they do develop this expertise to be able to tell how different leaves mature in different times of the year. So Uji Hikari versus a Asahi versus some other cultivars. Between these two different types of farmers and other people you were able to meet, what is the opinion on how much is changing as it gains popularity around the rest of the world?

Ryan · 12:17

Do these farmers have similar viewpoints? Are they really different? What is like their vision for Matcha? I'll give you the outside perspective from what I heard in general. And then, Sam, I'm curious to hear what your impressions were on the ground. But the consensus when you talk to industry people that own tea companies, interact with much of farmers is that it really benefits the large players.

Ryan · 12:42

And we, someone that we were talking to who works in Wazuka, put it in a really wonderful phrase. It's either a race to the top or a race to the bottom where the winners really, really win. And they make tons of money in their small family farms, artisanal products.

Ryan · 12:57

And there's people all over the world who want to buy their products. And then there are these gigantic mass produced operations that, you know, fulfill kind of the rest of the world's demand. And there's a huge as a group of farmers in the middle, you'll get kind of stuck in not being able to invest in quality and kind of stuck in the buying system of just exclusively selling to wholesalers who do the quality evaluation and set the prices. Yeah.

Zongjun · 13:25

So, well, we talked to multiple, multiple farmers, you know, in different regions, in Uji, in Izumo City, in Yame, and I guess we have learned a lot of different perspective for smaller farmers. I think the key problem is that the popularity of matcha overseas doesn't necessarily trickle down to them. Like, they have heard of their products being very popular outside of Japan and also sometimes being sold for astronomical prices compared to how their matcha can be sold domestically.

Zongjun · 14:04

But that doesn't necessarily benefit them in any ways. Their matcha is still being procured by these larger houses getting rebranded into all kinds of product names, and they don't necessarily have a lot of consistent repeat buyers outside of all of these historical houses.

Zongjun · 14:22

So I, I think the problem is that how do we envision or work on a future that the popularity of much outside of Japan can benefit these farmers, you know, alongside with the growth of the market, all these other larger tea factories, you know, in other places. They are, I would say, getting very inspired by how flexible and how innovative all these, you know, matcha brands outside of Japan's are.

Zongjun · 14:52

So like they can like do basically anything, like anything from single origin to blend to all kinds of much on mix, different milling, milling mechanisms. They have the flexibility and they have the agency to be able to do so. But for these smaller artisanal farmers, they don't necessarily have the agency to accommodate these new growing need outside of Japan.

Zongjun · 15:16

So there's has to be some mechanism to help translate that popularity or that market growth into something that, you know, these farmers in Uji or in other places can grow alongside with us. Yeah, One of the things that Ian was telling us when we had dinner with him is that even the award-winning producers that are very famous, right, the percentage by volume of their extremely high end tea from their garden is still like a relatively small portion of their business. And then we were talking with another traditional farmer when we were in Uji and we were asking them, you know, you have all these new Western vendors

Zongjun · 15:57

that are coming here sourcing single origin, single cultivar products from small tea gardens like yourselves. Like do you do a lot of volume through those companies who are buying it and then marketing the products to, you know, the West and they said no. So vast majority of our volume still is sold the wholesale. And so there's actually quite a bit of supply that's available because these, you know, these famous farmers who are all award winners, actually still produce an incredible volume of matcha that is not being sold into what I'll call specialty channels that celebrate their product, their process and their farms. Is there a consensus of what the

16:40

future or or what they hope the future will look like? I'd say there was a lot of pessimism and we were like pushing, like trying to like pull out some optimistic threads. But I guess it's especially so for these artisanal farmers. Their concerns are mainly, I guess, mainly about labor. Young people just don't want to be working in this field. It's very laborers.

17:05

It's very, very tedious and hard and there's no guaranteed of profit year by year because the climate is changing so much and you see. Yeah, harvest season. We've been told first hand that harvest seasons are getting directly impacted by climate change, like getting pushed back further and further. Pretty interesting.

17:25

Pretty interesting. And and all these empty lots just sitting out there growing nothing in Uji that's very surprising. Like it's not a supply issue, it's a labor issue. No one is out there growing tea with all these tea gardens in Uji.

17:42

And one of the tea farmers were even thinking about using these unused lots to to like grow a lower quality tea and to turn that into cosmetic products so that it will be more profitable and attract more young people to come into the to the industry, which is very sad. You know, like the Creme delicate when? You think about it when you think about it like everything is fighting them, like everything is a fight. The labour is a fight, the cost of the things to fertilize it are a fight.

18:16

The succession planning is a fight because no one wants to get into this industry, right? A lot of it still hold sold at wholesale. I mean, getting blended in a way that you have no idea where it came from. Like there's just all of these like headwinds that they have to have to fight. And we're very lucky that a lot of these Western vendors, I think are starting to tell the story of a lot of these farmers when they did.

18:43

And they're like begging, knocking on their door. Please sell me your tea so I can represent you and your family. Like it's, it's, it's so weird. It's all like there's just a lot of barriers. A. Lot of friction. A lot of friction.

19:01

Even to be able to do business, you need to went through all these obstacles. After seeing everything you got to see in Japan and speaking to everyone, has your perspective and hope for Matcha's future changed? I'd say so you know what we're working on in a device to mill matcha fresh with, you know, quality.

19:18

Being very quality minded and having taken the time to research, like what the quality problems are when it comes to milling matcha. We didn't experience any pushback from the big players, from the small players. And I would actually even say that some of the smaller family gardens that we talked to were quite excited by the prospect of milling matcha anywhere. And that's really the status quo now. Shouldn't be seen as this thing that's preserved in stone and traditional because it's not industrial. Ishi usu are actually relatively new. This, you know, top of the notch packaging with nitrogen flushing capabilities and these little

19:57

oxygen absorbers are very new. It doesn't have to necessarily be that way if someone can come up with a better way. So no one was very opposed to this idea of people milling their own matcha stateside if it could exist in a smaller form factor than an ishi usu. So and got a lot of advice and knowledge and support when we were asking them questions about what feedback or advice they had for us SO.

20:20

It was that made me very hopeful. When you talk with people directly, they're really pragmatic. Actually, they're not so bound by these ideas of tradition. Yeah, very pragmatic and very progressive. It's like people often forget that how technology is so advanced in Japan.

20:40

You this is a country that had Sony and Toshiba and all of these very advanced technology emerged in the past few decades and they are keep innovating to this day. So this is a land of innovation. There are a lot of tradition or legacy baggage, but people doesn't.

20:58

Maybe people outside of Japan will view it more heavily than people inside Japan, or people are Japanese. Strange group. There's a strange group of foreign people and foreign perspective on the matcha industry that I think likes to get defensive or protective or offended on behalf of traditional Japanese artisanship, but it's not the case for the people who are on the ground living and breathing this stuff.

Zongjun · 21:26

Maybe the ishi usu makers will have a problem, but even them, maybe not. Maybe not. They are willing to mount a motor on their ishi usu. That's not traditional. That's not traditional. I mean like one thing that we are very sure after actually being in Japan is that matcha is not dying.

Zongjun · 21:47

Like this is very much a still very thriving industry in Japan and it's that some of the more artisanal production of matcha is disappearing. But matcha in large is growing very much. So even domestically it's growing. And also like, if this is going to be a, a very bright future, then anyone can switch back to matcha again in the future. Like the we have seen people switching to home to shaving in Yame for like very recently.

Zongjun · 22:18

If any of these practices end up making a change in the future, like people are willing to adapt. This is not something that, you know, like people are hold on to for generations because of it. Yeah, when you look at the demographic shifts of matcha farmers, there is something to be worried about in in their age.

Ryan · 22:38

But from an industry, the industry that we saw felt like it would, you know, still had a lot of life in it. And it's easy to get very pessimistic when you look at the statistics of like, the number of farms in Japan. And I think in the 1980s, there were something like 200,000 matcha farms. But it's easy to forget the 1980s were a very weird time in Japan.

Ryan · 23:01

It was when Japan was just flushed with money. There was a saying that if you had a hundred U.S. dollar bill and it landed on the street in Tokyo, that that $100 bill was worth less than the land that it landed on. Like that's how rich the Japanese were.

Ryan · 23:20

And it supported and propped up this huge tea industry and all sorts of retail. And it was still kind of a very traditional culture where everyone was brewing tea in the office, right? And now it's modernized and it's shifted. And, you know, it's changed.

Zongjun · 23:34

But, you know, it doesn't mean that like, it's going away. It just means that like, like it's industrialized. You can now probably in the same amount of farm and consolidate way more tea and way more volume than you ever could in the 90s with today's technology. Yeah, and they can always revert back. Like it's not something that people just like, move on and lost.

Ryan · 23:57

This is very much a living industry and a living art. I want to move back to the tea fields a little bit. Can you describe what it's like being in a field of tea bushes? Like what this smells like, the how big the plants are, the difference between the cultivars, and like your experience actually being there. Lots of spiders.

Zongjun · 24:16

That's really funny. I would not have guessed that. Lot of lots of spiders. We were walking by a place in Uji. We were just walking around and we could smell the fish. It really smelled almost a little off putting because of the marine notes that you can smell in these umami bomb matchas.

Zongjun · 24:35

I feel like I could smell that in the same way that you kind of smell cow manure when you know, they're spreading around in the States as fertilizer. There was this weird funky fermented fish smell that was going on as we were walking by that was less than appetizing, especially when you realized, oh wow, this leaf is like literally sucking that up and turning that into the amino acids that we're consuming in matcha.

Zongjun · 25:00

Very strange. Very strange feeling it's what what you throw into the soil really turns into, you know the tea leaf and you are you are actually drinking the production of it. It's very interesting, like people like matcha is very hyper engineered in this way.

Zongjun · 25:20

And for some of the more artisanal farms that we visit, you don't necessarily get that. And the tea there is not fertilized the same way in all the other tea farms that we walk pass by. And you can taste the difference from from the tea. Like one thing that really changed my opinions about Uji tea is that it's not, it can be not a umami bomb. Like it's it can be very delicate, very creamy, very nutty.

Zongjun · 25:53

It's not necessarily really umami driven if you don't, you know, dump all these fish like oyster fertilized or sometimes even synthetic fertilizers into the soil. Yeah, actually, I think it's the synthetic fertilizer that really makes the concentrated umami bombs.

Zongjun · 26:11

But all the tea that we had from the naturally fertilized small tea gardens in Uji, they were not umami bombs at all. You could really taste the cultivar. You could really taste a lot more complexity. Umami was a component, but it wasn't the dominant component in a lot of ways that you sometimes taste a lot of.

Zongjun · 26:32

Blends. And for those naturally farmed tea, they look very healthy. Ryan, I don't know, Like we, we have heard that this year is a very hot year and a lot of these tea plants get sunburned and are dying. But for that farm that we visited, all of the tea bushes are very healthy. Like we don't see any dying bushes and they're all just growing and looking very burden.

Zongjun · 26:57

Yeah. Very healthy. I think it's this meticulous garden management must be, you know, it's really a full time job, but that's the end. You can really tell the difference between a tea bush that is handpicked and a tea bush that is tezumi, and a tea bush that is automated. You can tell by the shape of the plant. You can tell by the way that it's laid out, and it's pretty immediately obvious, and the cultivars are also immediately obvious once you have an eye for it, you know, identifying the difference between cultivars is more less subtle than I would have ever guessed.

Ryan · 27:33

That's true. That's true. And I I guess what surprised me the most is how large the tea leaf of Asahi is, because for Chinese tea you tend to associate larger leaves with coarser or more wild taste, like some of the daya cultivar in Yunnan.

Ryan · 27:49

But the Asahi is the most tendered, most delicate cultivar in matcha and the leaves of Asahi are very large. I think it's the largest out of all the cultivars. At least that we saw. So that was very surprising. OK, I have one last question ready.

Ryan · 28:06

Ready, ready. What is a piece of advice you could give to someone who is looking to get into sourcing their own matcha? Many different things. Have you heard so many horror stories? Huh. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Ryan. So many different things.

Ryan · 28:20

We've heard so many different horror stories going in, so in some ways they think we over prepared and in other ways they think we under prepared. Sam, I don't know if you have the same take. Yeah, well for the under prepared part, definitely get a car.

Zongjun · 28:35

Next time you're in Kyushu, or you know anywhere outside of Uji, you are going to need a car. Yeah, getting around is kind of difficult. We for one of our meetings, we were running late. We had to grab a bus that you had to grab on the side of a highway. Like we ran into this bus.

Zongjun · 28:54

It showed up 10 minutes late. It didn't. It dropped us off a mile away from the Tea place tea factory. And then we like ran there. We were like, Oh my God, I hope we pass a vending machine. We need some water before we go into this meeting for an hour. Yeah.

Ryan · 29:10

And for the other place, we literally reached the end of public transportation and we are still like 2-3 miles away from the destination we want to get to. So we end up walking through all the rice fields in this subtropical burning sun and literally roasted into aracha or bancha. But as far as like Sam, what, what advice could we give to people?

Zongjun · 29:36

Like one thing that immediately comes to mind is just like, do your research. Like we came in and were able to not ask any basic matcha questions. Like this podcast and the reading and the writing we've been doing and all of our other tea knowledge really allowed us to engage with people to really learn on questions that they've probably never been asked before, which I think really helped us get a foot in the door.

Zongjun · 30:04

Yeah. Well, unless you're talking to one of the larger firms, which usually they have some sort of orientation that's set up to intro you like what's going on on site. But other than that, if you want to talk directly to the farmers, talking to other people, especially English speakers who has some sort of experience in the industry will be very, very helpful to get you prepared, get you learn all the vocabularies. Necessarily to be able to have a meaningful interaction with the farmers.

Ryan · 30:38

I think that would be very helpful. Yeah, absolutely. What other things do you think will be? I think figuring out your framing about what makes you or your company unique. When reaching out to farmers, we contacted almost everyone we met either through their website or through direct introduction through some very kind people in the industry who opened some doors for us. We're very grateful for that as well as using Instagram and those are really the tools and reaching out to them with a message that is authentic to yourself, but also maybe is, you know, a little more innovative than basically just repackaging their product.

Ryan · 31:16

I think would get them very interested, right? Because like it most, almost all matcha companies that exist right now are basically repackaging other people's product and marketing it and selling it, etcetera. And the spirit behind that brand really matters and what it stands for and why it exists. And having a clear understanding of that and being able to articulate it is important.

Zongjun · 31:42

And I think these people have very well tuned and very conservative BS meters and have a very good, we'll call it immune system to working with the wrong type of people. When is your next trip to Japan? So we actually got invited to come pick tea during harvest season and some of the Tezumi tea gardens in Fuji. So we're definitely going back for that 100%, but we'll maybe go back sooner when the mill is fully working. And so the mill is still mid prototype. It's working.

Zongjun · 32:13

We have failed enough that we're really starting to learn stuff and we're getting a bunch of new parts made right now. I don't know when this recording is going to come out, but when it's fully, completely working and we feel like it's ready to present to the world, we'll probably schedule a trip and take it back to Japan. Yeah.

Zongjun · 32:30

And we have heard that the tea picking is much earlier in the South. So maybe we are going to start from the South early next year and then slowly falling the harvest timeline, moving from the South slowly to the north and we end in Uji. Yeah, that was a that was a cool thing to learn. Basically is that we need to follow the harvest season based just on the weather.

Ryan · 32:53

Yeah. So hopefully next trip too, we'll we'll make it to Kagoshima and maybe Shizuoka as well. Yeah, and maybe we can also see some other tea production too, like bancha, kukicha, or even Goishicha, which is a Lactobacillus fermented tea that we we really, we tried the tea. It tastes very interesting.

Ryan · 33:17

I would love to see how it was produced. There's some pretty weird things going on in the fermentation world in tea in Japan that we just kind of have a personal interest in. I don't know if it's ever going to make sense in the broader business, but it's just too weird to ignore with these purposely inoculated Lactobacillus or Koji fermented teas.

Zongjun · 33:37

You don't hear about that in other places, especially outside of China. Yeah, it's it's very interesting technique, and I wonder how they. Would taste. Them. Maybe they'll be too strong. Yeah, we're going to have some, actually. Anyone sparkling Calpis tea, calpis matcha? Yeah.

Ryan · 33:58

I wonder if anyone's tried it with sencha, these types of Koji or Lactobacillus fermentations, because usually, I mean, you're kind of using the bottom of the barrel leaves for these techniques. But I wonder if there is something there that could be some something cool and different. Yeah.

Zongjun · 34:15

Future, future stuff. Yep. Once the machine starts actually be able to perform, it would really unleash a lot of imagination for us to do experiments. Very looking forward to that. Me too. ME3, do you think you'll go to any blend houses on your next trip?

Ryan · 34:35

That's an interesting topic. And I go back and forth in my mind like how specialty they are. I mean, ultimately our goal as a company is to raise the floor and the ceiling of quality by allowing matcha to be fresh ground anywhere. So while I don't think they're necessarily in the spirit of specialty, there is something that is an incredible cultural artifact of Japan and is evolving and has its own separate history.

Ryan · 35:06

So love to talk with them and hear their perspective on matcha farms and the way they interact with them and the way they blend. And I think there's so much we can learn from these traditional houses, even though it's not necessarily specialty matcha in the sense that you you don't know where anything comes from. Yeah.

Zongjun · 35:24

One thing that I don't really I guess getting any satisfied answers in and this trip is how does blending actually works? Like how does the naming scheme of all of these blends actually works? And what's the strategy, what's the reasoning behind them? And how do you design A blend for your customers and what are these customers like?

Zongjun · 35:50

Who are they? Like, who are you designing your product for? I think that's in. Their minds. In their mind, I think that's something that we are going to have to talk to one of these blend houses to get a satisfied answer from.

Ryan · 36:02

There's such a big missing piece of this picture. We're going like just direct to farmers and talking with farmers and they know very little about matcha milling. They know very little about blending. It's pretty interesting. It's so little that you feel like they're getting purposefully gated away from all of these these these fields like they are very much monopolized by some of the larger firms out there and they really don't know anything about these. The knowledge segments are so real. These are just really completely different segments. The farmers from the processors and blenders and Millers and like the end brands and then

Ryan · 36:47

like the traditional customer, which is the the tea ceremony practitioners or different temples, it's really isolated knowledge pockets. And like when it gets to like Chanoyu and traditional preparation, then in that case the farmers are several layers removed and they'll be like, yeah, I'm not whisking this traditionally, but I'm whisking it my way. Actually, we've heard that more than once, but they're just so far removed from the end user and the cultures that are built around this.

Ryan · 37:17

And it really, we got a whole, a whole new picture of how segmented the industry is and how no one, not a single person I believe in the world is really qualified to say whether or not something is authentic or traditional.

Ryan · 37:33

Because no one has the complete picture that across the whole industry, from the farming to the preparers to the blenders and the brands and the processors, it's just really so segmented. And I feel kind of almost arrogant saying that, but you really get the sense that these knowledge pockets have existed for a long time and people don't necessarily know what or why the other group is doing what they're doing. That is very true, especially when you're talking about tradition.

Zongjun · 38:02

Like what tradition? Like are you talking about the tradition in Meiji periods, in Edo periods or anyone, you know, like before that, like like this is really a ever evolving and changing industry. And you know, before I I bet Ryan, like a lot of these segmentation are rooted on the historical hierarchy of Japanese society, like the producers, the growers and and the the retailers or the the manufacturers and the end user of matcha are or were just from different classes historically. So I bet that that's probably the root and that somehow gets cascaded down to the modern society. Yeah, it brought such clarity

Ryan · 38:48

seeing all of this and we have a huge missing chunk with the traditional blend houses missing in our knowledge and knowledge structures currently. But I really dislike this top down positioning of traditional and authentic because no one is qualified to make this statement.

Ryan · 39:05

It's really, it's very energizing to me actually, because it's very firmly putting things into a very rigid box by people who really do not have a full understanding of any of these segments that produce these things. It drives me up the wall. Yeah, well, let's talk to them.

Zongjun · 39:23

Let's let's engage conversation with them. You know, like something that I, I guess learned from this trip is that sometimes you just just need to ask you go there and the people are actually very open. Sometimes, you know, you get a meeting and they there are actually are willing to share a lot of information with you. So let's plan for that for the next trip. Yeah, absolutely on our own learning journey and we'd love to share it on this podcast.

Ryan · 39:50

And if anyone listening has any strong opinions on any of these topics or disagrees, please reach out. We're really we're strong opinions, but very open to having our minds change with new data or new perspectives. So our viewpoint is the same. In a year from now, shame on us.

Zongjun · 40:10

Yes, indeed. Or if you are end up knowing any of these blend houses and you know, like if you're willing to give us an intro, we are, we'll be very grateful. Yeah. And we'd love to learn from them in the most respectful way possible.

Zongjun · 40:23

Like we really would like to learn this industry, the depth and breadth and it seems like it will be the hardest place to crack into. But we we would love to get a better understanding of what's going on for what is such a historically and currently important part of the industry that feels very black box. Very much so, even for a lot of people in Japan. Yeah, a lot of the farmers, we were asking them, blending questions or naming questions about like, what does hatsu mukashi mean?

Ryan · 40:52

And we heard the same thing over and over. We have no idea. There's ought to be some reasons like things don't. Just I think our first blend that we create for the Sanko brand needs to be this is not Hatsu Mukashi. Or hatsu mukashi, you know like hatsu means like the beginning or the 1st.

Zongjun · 41:14

Like I think there will be a very suitable name. Hatsu. Anyway, I think it's a fine place to end. Yeah. So thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider rating this podcast and subscribing wherever you listen to podcasts really helps, especially in discovery so that other people can find this podcast when they're searching for matcha related topics. We really appreciate your listenership and we'll see you in the next one.

Ryan · 41:42

Thanks. See you in the next episode and thank you Gwen for all the great questions. Thank you. See you. Bye.