We made an interesting discovery

Ryan · 0:05

Welcome to the Specialty Matcha Podcast. My name is Ryan, and Zongjun, who also goes by 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.

Ryan · 0:19

And today, Ryan, we made a very interesting discovery. Never been so excited about something. Yeah, real excitement technically yesterday, but very recently, yeah. Hello, Ryan from the future here. Our apologies. Sam's microphone wasn't working super well at about minute 17, so there's a slight echo. We put it through a bunch of audio cleanup things. It's pretty audible, but you can still definitely hear it a little bit.

Zongjun · 0:47

So our apologies about that. We've gotten a lot of feedback about the audio quality. So we had spot a new microphone. Hopefully it won't be an issue in the future. Sorry about that. Back to the episode. So for any of our new listeners who doesn't necessarily, you know, follow what we're doing outside podcasts, Ryan, why don't you share to them? Like, what exactly are we working on? And maybe that's kind of leaning to why we end up discovering this very interesting.

Ryan · 1:13

Too much of a cliffhanger on it, but it needs a little bit of setup actually because I'm afraid out of context, it might be a little bit misunderstood. But yeah, we do more than just run the Specialty Matcha Podcast. You have a company, Sanko Matcha Products and for the last two years we've been developing a countertop matcha mill to mill matcha fresh anywhere in everywhere at a similar quality standard as what you would see in a traditional Japanese stone mill called an ishi-usu.

Ryan · 1:40

So we've been working to do what is essentially a technology arbitrage play. So in other words, we're taking technologies and manufacturing methods that be pretty well developed in other industries and taking those parts, those technologies, these materials and components to build a matcha mill that mimics the physics that go on inside one of these traditional stone mills, ishi-usu. So you might ask, why is that important? These traditional stone mills are pretty finicky. They have their own personality.

Ryan · 2:12

It's much more of an art than a science. And approximately 10%, this number might be slightly outdated, but it's around 10% of the Japanese matcha industry relies on these ishi-usu to grind matcha fresh. So the ishi-usu, stone mill, it represents about 10% of the matcha output supposedly. And the rest comes from more industrial forms of milling and machinery such as a ball mill.

Ryan · 2:37

But in all of Japan, there's just a few dozen stone masons that are able to produce matcha mills to produce ishi-usu and they also have to be maintained. So along with this very famous matcha shortage, which has been very well documented, there's a really large ishi-usu shortage. Of course, we didn't know this two years ago when we set out to do this.

Ryan · 2:58

And the original problem space was really coming to the discovery that matcha should be ground super fresh. So the matcha has such a ridiculously high surface area to volume ratio that and it's a relatively delicate flavors to begin with and that it's so sensitive to oxidation and that you start losing color degradation of chlorophyll, you start losing taste in all of the volatile aromatic compounds.

Ryan · 3:23

And most importantly, perhaps as you start losing a lot of nutrition within two months at room storage, about 30%, so slightly higher actually of one of the most important antioxidants in matcha, EGCG, it's just totally degraded.

Ryan · 3:38

And almost everyone is drinking matcha that has been set at room temperature for longer than two months. And so it's literally slowly dying in that town as it gets to. So we, you know, across all axes, it's a better experience to drink matcha fresh.

Ryan · 3:52

So we set out to build the infrastructure in place because as I mentioned, these traditional stone mills are also super heavy. The granite itself weighs a total of 50 kilograms, which is 100 lbs, slightly more than 100 lbs. And then the entire motor and box that it comes in, you know, you're looking at well over a probably between 120 to 150 kilogram shipment.

Ryan · 4:17

And that's not to mention that every year or a few years or maybe even more frequently, if you're an inexperienced matcha miller, you have to send back the granite to Japan to get resharpened by stone masons. And these days that wait list can be months or sometimes even years.

Ryan · 4:35

So that's the context that we're building this machine in. And we set out to look at other industries that use millstones and discovered that the pharmaceutical industry, cosmetic industry, the mining industry have pretty advanced milling technology. And we're able to borrow a lot of manufacturing methods from that industry and materials to create a very durable type of ceramic millstone.

Ryan · 5:00

And then we look to the computer cooling industry actually for heat management, because in traditional stone mill, you have 25 kilograms of granite that acts as a natural heat sink to pull heat out of the milling system so that it doesn't destroy the matcha. So we are able to do that with computer cooling technology basically and a bunch of other features. So we've been working on this last two years. We just launched our beta program and they're going to be starting to be shipped out in early 2026. So we were at our lab doing a bunch of experimentation on a bunch of different tencha samples

Zongjun · 5:36

and a bunch of different mill settings and we came across a pretty interesting discovery. Sam, you want to kind of walk through what that was like yesterday. Yeah. So, you know, it's a very interesting, you know, business because you know, when we are set out to develop this machine, tencha was not or the predecessor of matcha, which is this a little green leaf chips was not necessarily in such a short supply.

Zongjun · 6:02

Yeah, it was not like almost impossible to find nowadays. So it's you know, for for a two year development. A lot of things has changed in the market and right now we are basically, you know trying to sell a printer, but the ink is in great short supply. Yeah.

Zongjun · 6:19

Remember early on our first sourcing trip, our primary problem that we perceived was, oh my word, how are we going to come up with the cash to place 100 kilogram order or 200 kilogram order? Now you're thankful if you have that problem. Thankful, thankful you can then get access to buy tencha from people.

Zongjun · 6:39

Let alone good tencha. Yeah, yeah. Frequently you run into situation where you know the the tea farmers or the tea factories are only willing to sell you tencha because they have a milling bottleneck and then some of the tencha from the warehouse that they're willing to kind of get some cash flow back back there's.

Ryan · 6:57

Because it literally cannot be milled fast enough. By the way, for anyone who doesn't know, these ishi-usu, usu are incredibly slow. You get anywhere between 20 to 40 grams of tea an hour which is like insane and it's like an inefficient manufacturing method. They're set up in a way that the motor of the ishi-usu is just powerful enough to turn the millstone. So it saves a lot of energy, but at the same time, if you're feeding anything that's, you know, in a lesser quality or less, you know, refined product with some stems or chips, sometimes the whole millstone can just get clogged, which is kind of like counterintuitive to think about

Ryan · 7:41

because it's one heavy piece of equipment and you can just can just be clogged. Totally jam. A little piece of wood that got stuck in the group. So that was all very interesting and the sourcing has been honestly quite painful for us for the past year or two.

Zongjun · 8:01

And we have came into some pretty interesting thoughts around the way because, you know, people frequently, you know, only the highest quality tencha are getting fed into all these ishi-usu to speak because you know they're scarce to begin with and you only want to mill the highest quality stuff and. If you have lower quality, you might as well use a ball mill or use a.

Zongjun · 8:22

Ball mill or jet mill, right? Like and people are experimenting with all these kind of things, but like never has anyone probably crossed their mind believe they have done it before, but it just didn't end well with with the ishi-usu technology. We having this milling, the new milling mechanism in our hand kind of like unleash the capacity or capability of doing all sorts of different experiment other than tencha. So yesterday, you know, after sampling a bunch of aracha in the warehouse, tencha, we were like, OK, you know, minus about. We started to throwing some other stuff just to spice the whole vibe up.

Ryan · 9:07

Honestly, it was kind of for us personally, just to set the stage, we just came back from about a 10 day sourcing trip in Japan and we finally found one contact that really can get us very high quality tencha. And we found a bunch of other tencha from other farmers and we got a bunch of samples and we were milling those samples all day.

Zongjun · 9:26

The good stuff hasn't arrived yet. And it was like depressing. Like we kept asking ourselves, it's like something wrong with this mill cooling system working. Is the pressure system working OK? Like are we milling it too fast?

Zongjun · 9:39

And we were just going through all of these samples and the best one that tastes that we tasted all day up until that point was not even one that we have commercial access to. It was a gift from a friend, and it tasted really good.

Ryan · 9:53

But like everything else that we were, it was on our candidate list for sourcing. And this stuff is pretty expensive, like wholesale with, you know, it was ranging between I'd say 150 to $250 a kilo Henshaw, which, you know, these days it's pretty cheap, but also it's like not that cheap either.

Ryan · 10:12

And we had like decently high expectations for this material. Like it was from good regions in Kyoto Prefecture. And some of it was conventional, some of it was organic, some of it was from some very interesting cultivars.

Ryan · 10:23

And that we had never heard of a single cultivar. And now we know why did we probably never heard of that cultivars. Single cultivar matcha did not taste good. I think Sam described it pretty accurately as a mezcal burnt rubber note.

Ryan · 10:38

So our stuffs were in pain, our mood was in pain. So we were like, we bought this very interesting gyokuro sample that was the stem from Horii Shichimeien right in the middle of their lineup. We paid ¥1900, which is about 14 U.S. dollars for 50 grams. And we were like, wow, we have this machine, this, these, these seem soft and tender, but let's see what happens when we put them in.

Ryan · 11:03

Let's give it a try. Well. We had very low expectations already, because we were, we, we have been told that you know, the outcome cannot be good, which was kind of a setting the expectation for us in the 1st place we've. Had some milled gyokuro samples before I think. Like I've had it in the context of genmaicha and some like kind of weird like matcha task that was gyokuro mixed with some like, you know, genmaicha toasted rice notes. And you know, it's something that was on my radar and I've had before.

Ryan · 11:38

But like, they must have not been using very high quality base material, which would make sense in the context of like a matcha gyokuro genmaicha kind of. Yeah, and most likely the milling, the milling mechanism is not necessarily. If you're so if you use.

Ryan · 11:55

Because the feeding mechanism of the ishi-usu, usu is, you know, kind of so it's it's a mutual optimization, right? Like for tencha and for ishi-usu. So they meant to be create for each. They're co-created, they've evolved. Together so for for those of you who you know have never seen a gyokuro tea before, it's a very like almost like needle like green tea.

Ryan · 12:18

So different than a tencha, which is very flaky. These are gyokuros they will undergo a kind of a rolling process after being steamed. So they they turn into these very long needle shape that will unfold in a hot water.

Ryan · 12:34

I'm turning to a regular green tea. But you know, if you put that into a ishi-usu, it doesn't necessarily want to enter into the milling surface of these needles kind of block each other from getting entry into the milling. Packing efficiency is too good.

Ryan · 12:50

If you imagine you have a bunch of boulders and you put them in a giant cup, right? There's lots of space in between them. And then if you crush the boulders into smaller rocks, better packing efficiency. And then if you keep crushing it like sand has really good packing efficiency. And tencha is super optimized and it's packing efficiency to feed into an ishi-usu so it doesn't get clogged. So that's not necessarily a problem for our machine because we have this kind of like a spiral post in the feeding hole that kind of push all the tea into the milling surface. So that kind of really in a way

Ryan · 13:27

pre crushed these gyokuro needles into smaller chips and they mill just as fine. And the result was very, very interesting. Very good. It was the best sample that we tasted all day. Literally drank about 20 disgusting matcha and it was such a breath of fresh air that it kind of put us back in our seats. Everything about we had preconceived notion about the ability to mill other tea kind of evaporated. It's just a very good product.

Ryan · 14:02

Like it's it's a it's a reality. Sitting right in front of the color was impeccable, the spell was impeccable, and the taste exceptionally was impeccable. It was a beautiful, beautiful tea. It tastes umami, tastes sweet, it's balanced, and it has like this wonderful, wonderful like floral fragrance that you just don't like very frequently run into in matcha. Was the most compelling thing about this milled gyokuro. On our mill, the powder finest was very, very similar to matcha.

Ryan · 14:37

It was really not grainy. At all. Honestly, it's better than some of the tencha we milled on that. Yeah, yeah. That we discover is that really garbage in, garbage out. If the tencha quality was not good then you are not going to get a very with Marsha. Fresh milling does improve lower quality if you consume it quickly, we've also noticed.

Ryan · 15:00

But still. I mean the machines not magic. I mean imagine exploding the surface area on low quality green tea. You can imagine what flavors get extracted much easier. But then imagine what those flavors taste like after they sat around oxidizing in a tin can for half a year. Definitely still, you know, maintains the product integrity on day one of shelf life.

Ryan · 15:23

I would say not even maintain it. Yes, it's day one quality shelf life and generally goes down from there. But it tasted umami. It tasted extremely creamy and it was very weird is that we brewed it as gyokuro separately and it was not that umami and it was not that creamy. There is something about there's some transformation that is happening while milling and it's unclear if these small particles are playing a part, if we're extracting something that is just kind of locked in those leaves when you make it as brewed.

Ryan · 15:56

Or if some of the volatile compounds are just not linear in terms of their flavor. Yeah, when you can extract everything all at once, it's like the difference between a pour over and something like an espresso where you're having really high pressure extraction. You can get access to a lot more of these flavors when you explode the surface area on something like gyokuro. Yeah, maybe exactly as you said, Sam, You extract different proportions of things, which lead to a nonlinear perception. New flavors just come out, and this is really well documented in sensory science.

Ryan · 16:34

There are some flavors that at low concentration smell like roses and high concentration concentrations, they smell like human feces. But there's a lot of these very nonlinear effects within sensory science. So that was super, super interesting and really put us back to, you know, kind of almost deconstructive framework into thinking about, like, what matcha is or what matcha really should be. Yeah.

Zongjun · 17:01

So how is this different? How would we describe this? How is this different than like, let's say an average high quality matcha? To me it was much more fragrant and I found like much more frank like up front on the nose.

Zongjun · 17:13

It was much more aromatically expressive than all of the like, really good, matcha I've had recently. And it's just so much more complex. The flavor profile, like this rolling mechanism, like breaking the cell, I think really unleashed something from the leaves. It really adds A dimension, a new dimension into this tea that you just don't necessarily like. Experience.

Ryan · 17:37

It's like you're viewing it in a different way. Yeah, it's really unlocking some like very interesting flavor profiles that probably like are just as not achievable. Yeah, by brewing it as brewed tea. So my notes here on what it tasted like are avocado really distinctive richness and creaminess.

Ryan · 18:00

That was the most clear, delicious expression of avocado that I've ever had in it was really. Compelling like with the thickness of the soup has a very thick, juicy body I got. Sweet cream, umami, some bitterness and astringency that definitely wasn't absent, but I actually really enjoyed it. It structured everything and balanced the flavor profile. There's still a little bit of green grassiness. I mean, this is fresh gyokuro.

Ryan · 18:29

That was, I guess it's been resting for six months. So it's still like fresh green tea from Japanese cultivar. So, you know, it has a lot of this characteristic taste still. I got a sweetness that you get from unsalted butter.

Ryan · 18:41

I got a really interesting sweet pea and kind of a sweet corn note. Imagine you take like some fresh corn straight off the cob raw, put it into a blender and you know when it like hits your tongue, it's like both like starchy and you get that starchy sweetness and like that like sweet corn sweetness. Yeah, not.

Ryan · 19:04

Canned corn, but like fresh corn. Yeah. Sweet. Corn and on top of that a little bit of like green lime green lime zest, a lime skin kind of dried lime skin. It's like very interesting fruity notes that you just don't necessarily taste from other matcha very infrequently.

Ryan · 19:23

I went into such a tasty profile and probably my suspicions is that with all those like likely kind of oxidative or you know, enzymatic of flavoring profile. This is something that David from Tezumi and Paul were talking about back in the days when you had to literally like, carry your tea basket really far. You had some natural withering going. On yeah, the tea leaves will sometimes just slide with each other.

Zongjun · 19:51

And that's oxidized slightly, yeah. And it becomes very fragrant. See this kind of like yellowish reddening on the edge of the tea leaves, You know, in Chinese tea or Korean tea, this is like something that people look for.

Zongjun · 20:04

And it's actually interesting, we saw this trend and counter trend in Taiwan that what Taiwanese oolong is very famous for high mountain oolong, Kao Shanxha in Chinese. And in the 1990s, there was a huge explosion both in Taiwan and in mainland China for demand of these Taiwanese teas.

Zongjun · 20:24

And they just kept pushing higher and higher and higher up the mountain. And it has a very, very, very distinct flavor profile. And they have a lot of green notes. They generally is a very green style of oolong and it just get being pushed by consumers and by connoisseurs into becoming greener and greener and greener and greener like as low withering as possible.

Zongjun · 20:46

So much so that now recently they started to do refrigerated withering. And then these essentially was a gigantic refrigerator that they put the tea into do withering at such low temperatures that the enzyme that oxidizes tea called polyphenol oxidase just doesn't have as much activity.

Zongjun · 21:03

And you end up with what's called amongst the Chinese gongfu cha tea appreciation circles as nuclear green tea. And a lot of our tea friends and our own tea preferences for Chinese tea have pushed away from those profiles.

Zongjun · 21:19

Actually, they tend to be really uninteresting. I think they're very impressive by people who don't have that much Taiwanese oolong. But the more you taste, it's kind of a homogenizer in a super boring way, and you lose some of this beautiful fragrance. So actually a lot of our tea friends and my own Taiwanese tea sourcing, we like to see a little bit of reddening on those leaves.

Zongjun · 21:42

Oh yeah, it's much more interesting tea. It's a little more bitter, but a fragrance out of this work, which is really kind of interesting because within the context of tencha, these ideas around quality and what people think is high quality might not be what other people's preferences are. And we saw that trend swing back. And it's interesting to see how the other tea friends within the matcha space show like, oh, maybe this like nuclear green concept where you're kind of trying to steam it as quickly as possible for as little oxidation as possible might lead to some lack of some very interesting

Ryan · 22:17

expressive. Aromatic. Well, this, this is really controversial in the way that it's pushing the boundary as like what matcha really is. Yeah, with the context of oxidation, it's really pushing it into kind of oolong-ish. You can almost argue.

Ryan · 22:34

Yeah. Especially with, you know, this whole rolling process and Gyokuro. I mean the sample that we had probably was also very low oxidation and by the look of it like I mean it was also very deep green. Yeah, it's very deep green.

Ryan · 22:48

But that's what we were drinking. Yeah, this idea is super interesting. But it's, it blurs boundaries very, you know, like I was describing it as the constructive in a way that you know, like how exactly do you define matcha or how exactly did you define what good matcha should be made or consumed?

Ryan · 23:13

Do we necessarily have to follow some rigid rules that someone created? Which is kind of interesting because like the rules was evolving too. Yeah, back back when matcha first started in Japan, it wasn't shaded. The processing probably looked very different.

Ryan · 23:31

Yeah, so and and now we have a objectively very tasty product sitting right in front of them. Like this is like reality. So before we we dive into this contradiction that we are sitting in front of and literally just tasting, what are the differences between tencha and gyokuro processing?

Zongjun · 23:51

Like what? What are the fundamental differences? Because they're both shaded? Cultivation. Both. Shaded cultivation both steamed. They both like have very very very low low to non oxidation. So these are basically both green teas. Yeah, it did really the only I was a major the differences that gyokuro undergo this rolling process that kind of breaks the cell wall and turned gyokuro into this very iconic needle shape. But you know, for the higher quality gyokuros, they're also, you know, shiage, which means being refined. So they're the stem and you know like of course for tencha you need to mill it into matcha to

Zongjun · 24:31

consumed in the powder form, whereas for gyokuro it's through with hot water. The other huge difference too is that tencha is not really considered a finished product and still considered a semi crude product. No one is making tencha with the expectation that it's going to taste any good. But very few people has, you know, the capability to vertically integrate all the way from farming to tencha making to shiage to the final product.

Zongjun · 25:03

Just not milling. Milling you frequently run into farmers who are reluctant to convert into tencha making because it's really like you're for a farmer, you're really making a component, a raw material for a very, very long processing chain. Yeah, or actually most farmers are just making leaves. They deliver them to the cooperative and that's that's the end of their involvement.

Zongjun · 25:28

Yeah. And the cooperative sells them and then they go to the auction system and then that's the end of the cooperative RHR processing facility. And then it goes into the hands of probably Shashi, which then blends it or maybe sells it on to a different tea company, which then outsources the shiage and the milling.

Zongjun · 25:47

And then someone has to sell the final hand. This really a very complicated supply chain for this stuff that and the power is so aggregated. Who has access to these auctions? Who has access to tencha processing equipment? Who has priority?

Zongjun · 26:03

And when the matcha gets milled on an ishi-usu, who has priority in the shiage refinement facility to remove the stems in the veins to make the tencha suitable for milling? There's all of these bottlenecks and politics. And like you talk to like this industry and you go deeper and deeper and deeper and you hear about all of these economic, political, cultural relationships that are the undercurrents of the existing matcha industry in Japan.

Ryan · 26:29

And you kind of become very discouraged some more that you learn about. At one point Sam and I were having a sort of an internal conversation. I turned to Sam. I said, do you think there's a yakuza involvement in this industry?

Ryan · 26:42

And for those of you who don't know, that's like sort of like gangs or mafia. Which is, but it's a very interesting reality in the way that tencha making or matcha making is highly, highly powered, imbalanced industry.

Zongjun · 26:57

The power dynamics, all of these tencha making or matcha making segments are very, very concentrated into a very few people within the chain. And for a lot of these peoples, especially the farmers, they have very, very low agency into doing anything about the final outcome.

Zongjun · 27:17

Has that been way? It's been that way historically. Yeah, it's really a historical legacy, to be honest. It's kind of the interesting reflection of the Japanese society. There's a very clear line between isolated Edo era Japan with closed borders and feudalistic system. You can draw a straight line between that and the I don't want to call it strangeness.

Ryan · 27:42

I'll call it the uniqueness of what's going on underneath the matcha industry in Japan. Well, let's, but this will be a totally separate episode if we want to unfold that part. Or many episodes. Or many episodes, but the power dynamics or the power disparity is very real.

Zongjun · 28:00

Anyone who thinks that matcha is a pure industry. It really is not. The reality is for most of the good product, it's all these weird power dynamics with tons of fertilizer pumped in the ground and tons of pesticides sprayed and like the the processing decisions are in the hands of very few people. And who's even allowed to buy that product? Hands are very good people, few people and like everything up and down and so almost a little discouraging. To be honest, it's a, it's a, it's very interesting. Like after talking to all these farmers, the reality right now is that matcha is almost like a green cocaine green fry holding from one of our good tea friends

Ryan · 28:41

like Squeeze who recently used that metaphor in a very interesting article. Series of articles. But that that was, I think it was very, very accurate description of what's going on here in the matcha world. I recommend this series, it's definitely PG13, very long but it's really some deep emotional resin.

Zongjun · 29:02

Yeah. You talk to all these farmers and you ask them like, why are they not just all comfort into attention making? Like this is clearly a business that's much, much more lucrative than making, you know, sencha or, you know, gyokuro or any other things, Waka.

Zongjun · 29:18

And for some of the farmers that are, you know, kind of reluctant into doing this conversions, we learned that from their perspective, almost like AI would say rebellion against the system is that they have much more agents in making sencha or gyokuro or Wakota or all these other, you know, like it's a finished product and they can dictate what exactly the outcome is for that tea. And, and that's their like, essentially. So in a way, you know, like that is really the foundation of a specialty movement is that you can go all the way down to these like individual farmers, these individual tea farmers, tea gardens, and you can taste the

Zongjun · 30:03

difference between, you can taste their understanding, their assessment, their creativity, their vision of what. And that's also probably my greatest fear so far for the matcha industry is that it's not really a system built for a specialty move. It's a system that's being seized by the very few and it's very difficult for individual farmers or tea gardens to gain agency or capacity into doing things that they want to be like into kind of how do I frame this? The reality does some the specialty reality this is it that there's a disparity between how many farmers are there in Japan versus how many

Ryan · 30:52

possibility can you achieve with the current matcha making. Yeah, there's a really interesting concept and I'm going to borrow this from MTCH, but they do a course that I am aware of. I haven't done it, but I'd really like to and it's called Growers Matcha when there's a concept in wine, particularly in Champagne called Growers Champagne. And Champagne actually is a like has a lot of parallels between matcha.

Ryan · 31:20

Traditionally Champagne are mostly blended products and a lot of the Champagne brands that are famous that you know, the people who make them do not grow the grapes. They do know viniculture. It's all happening in processing afterwards and blended together to make products.

Ryan · 31:37

And in more recent years, there's this whole movement, it's kind of stepped in parallel alongside the natural wine movement and called grower Champagne. And it's people who are farmers that go all the way from the dirt to the champagne in the bottle.

Ryan · 31:52

And it's called grower champagne. And it's really supposed to be an expression of them, their creativity, their land. They have complete control and agency over the process. And it's not some random thing where there's a bunch of middle men and they funded great products not to pass any judgment on the large Champagne houses, but there's this whole movement and whole market actually the people that want to support grower Champagne.

Ryan · 32:15

So Jev from MTCH, who also has a really cool, interesting Japanese natural wine importation business into Thailand. There's also really into wine. I kind of use this framework to create this class called growers Matcha. And the problem with growers matcha, well, there's no problem with it inherently.

Ryan · 32:33

It's incredible. I mean, it's actually a mini revolution that's going on within Japan. But there are very few people that have the ability to do growers matcha where the farmer, the same person who touches the land in the dirt, manages what's in the cup.

Ryan · 32:50

Like there's probably like a few dozen maybe. Well, if there's a Suji son, there's for Akala Secha, there's Tai chi son and his family. There's just not very many people, even most farmers and producers. Fruit cover son or Tai chi son, they relied on, you know, other people's facility to process there and that's.

Zongjun · 33:13

True. They don't even necessarily they have these shared processing equipment. We recently learned from Tashi for those Tashis that has vertically integrated all the way from the farm to, you know, processing to the plant and to the final outcome, he estimated to be about 5 of them. Tashis.

Zongjun · 33:35

In Japan this how little they are and you look around the landscape of Japanese matcha, you see all these different kind of blends, different kind of names, different kind of types. It's almost a man made diversity. It's not really a true diversity or specialty other plans, but these poetic names are all plans being controlled by the very few. Coming from largely commodity products and it's interesting early on in our journey, if you listen back to some of our earlier episodes that we recorded a year ago or even further ago, the way we define specialty product wasn't a commodity product in any way.

Ryan · 34:16

So things I would reference examples like single cultivar, single origin concept. And we invited Ian from Yunomi on the podcast. He's one of our first guests and I posed this concept of specialty matcha and he said something that really took me back at the time and he said, well, it's all commodity, Commodity people like, yeah, I mean, you can have, you know, tons of okumidori that come out of a Co-op facility and people bid on it and like everything about it is a commodity. And I'm like, in my mind, I was thinking very much of like Marc from Ooika's marketing or Cuzen's marketing and you know, these direct to farm

Ryan · 34:59

relationships that people like MTCH have and this concept of growers matcha. And what I didn't realize at the time is just how rare and small that portion of the industry is from a volume perspective. And you can layer on specialty components to this more to this more commodity stuff, right?

Ryan · 35:19

You can still buy like 100 kilos of okumidori at auction that comes from a certain region of Kyoto, right? And technically you can call that single origin and it's single cultivar and you can go it on and it is, I mean, you can taste what that cultivar tastes like when it's grown in that particular region and anything else about it.

Ryan · 35:39

But from the human side, it's commodity like it does carry characteristics of its processing, but it's not someone's expression in the same way of an artist leaving their strokes or the painting. And that is really indeed very rare, yeah, in this industry to have this concept of growers matcha, but which it was unheard of though like 10, 20 years ago.

Zongjun · 36:08

So it is moving in the right direction. Yeah, yeah, that's true. One, one other thing that we learned along that way is that how impactful processing equipments and milling equipments are to the final outcome. These different shiage or different tencha making, tencha processing facilities gathering across Japan. You can or you probably should view it as part of the local terroir.

Zongjun · 36:37

These machineries are designed, you know, by different makers and they have differences from, you know, the the red brick oven to the semi commodity, semi steaming Nagasaki tencha, tencha steaming that people are using like all of these, you know, machines. They are not necessarily, you know, universally available. It's part of the local flavor because everyone sends their tea only into the local processes.

Zongjun · 37:05

That's a very interesting reality, right? Like you can have different cultivars, you can have different farming techniques, but at the end, you know, people, everyone in that region will go through this almost like a flavor homogenizer into creating some products that taste more or less probably similar to each other in a way.

Zongjun · 37:24

And all these farmers or even some of the chashis do not necessarily have the capability or agency to control or tweak these machines for their own profile. Everyone kind of gathered together in a doing the tencha making seasons. They give each other some advice as to how to tweak the temperature or you know, do some adjustments on some small processes.

Ryan · 37:46

But you cannot necessarily stop the machine and process your own batch according to your own criteria. Yeah, well, think about what a chashi's primarily job is nowadays. It's buying tencha and blending it. Their agency is in the blending and in the milling, right? So they work with components that they have, and that's what that entire profession is built around. That's right, art that they can control. Maybe some of the powerful ones can give feedback, or maybe the really rare ones that have a lot of influence their own their own tencha processing facilities and can like draw Direct Line backward.

Ryan · 38:23

But really the entire chashi profession is to optimize what you've got in front of you, which is a really interesting dynamic too. But what's so powerful about this gyokuro discovery? Tasting good, at least to our knowledge. There's a lot more direct room for creative expression. And most importantly, you do not need a tencha factory to make it.

Ryan · 38:47

You can do it on much more accessible equipment and then a gigantic tencha factory. And then it's like stuck inside this much of supply chain tencha, supply chain cycle and system and culture. And what's interesting about this milled gyokuro is it's a cup of contradiction.

Ryan · 39:05

So how do we live with this contradiction center? So. There's a lot of stories right now, people very upset that people take gyokuro, mill it and they call it matcha. They sell it as matcha but it's not coming from tencha. It's a form of mislabeling.

Ryan · 39:22

People smell BS, they just see the the intention. It needs some fillers. I need some placeholders. I want to make some money and my Stu. My consumers are stupid and probably don't know better. And also like this is our suspicious, but you know, all of these gyokuros being turned into powder tea, you can't necessarily run it through an ishi-usu.

Ryan · 39:43

So we have to use a largely inferior milling mechanism to turn gyokuro into powder. Actually, it's a bit of a mystery why more people don't run gyokuro through an ishi-usu. So our theories right now is that it's probably a jamming problem and maybe like no one ever considered to try or maybe they didn't have a bad experience and.

Zongjun · 40:06

Possible. It's possible. But like, the contradiction is the cup that's in front of us. It looks like matcha. It tastes like matcha. It smells like matcha. Done a lot of matcha honestly, it looks impeccable. It's green, it's foamy.

Zongjun · 40:21

Some, you know, like we spend all these times arguing some reasoning behind all of these, these assessment by people. We had these conversations back and forth in the past day as well. But like sometimes like Ryan and I just all of a sudden sit in silence and then we we look at this tea in front of us like this is a objective to reality.

Zongjun · 40:42

It just tastes good, man. That's delicious. Really good. It's really like there are some minor distinctions that make it a little bit different from matcha, but they are so small. I like, I'm very confident that we blindly serve this to all of our industry friends.

Zongjun · 41:02

They'll be like, whoa, this is good. What is this? Yeah. And I don't think anyone would even question that this is matcha. Yeah, finally, like so much so that I want to take this to Uji and go around to the different farmers and the different like shop owners have them taste try.

Zongjun · 41:22

This guy I feel like. You know, these like real time videos like hey, what do you think? And I do think. This is. Just find it delicious because it is. It's objectively delicious, but it's also a gigantic cup of contradiction. What do we do with?

Ryan · 41:36

This. Yeah. What do we do with this? If you would have asked me two days ago, like why can you not mill gyokuro into matcha, I would have given you the best answer I could have. I would have been like, wow, tencha is not rolled so the cell walls are intact, so it preserves the flavor inside the leaves. And then those cell walls will get degraded when it goes through the milling process and everything about tencha from its moisture level to its compact efficiency. And ishi-usu design co-evolved and really the perfect product for an ishi-usu with centuries of optimization. And it was a tencha is able to

Ryan · 42:14

be stored a lot longer and and the because gyokuro is rolled, it's, you know, it's a lot more volatiles and flavors that are brought to the surface and it will go bad faster. And it like probably can't mill very well. Maybe that's true on an ishi-usu. I mean, we don't own one.

Ryan · 42:34

We don't know. But within our mill, that music mimics the physics of an Ishiusu, but also can apply a lot more pressure than an Ishiusu. And we can control exactly how much pressure, we can control the cooling system, and we can control the way it gets fed into the mill. Whatever our combination of variables worked makes this look, feel, and taste just like matcha, and way better than the tencha samples that we were milling earlier that day. Like we spent the first half of the episodes concentrated the powers are a tencha making or in matcha making and this discovery really unlocks a interesting new scene of what a specialty matcha movement or the T

Ryan · 43:22

landscape can be in Japan or like in all the other tea growing regions in the world. Really this is like I would say probably a start at the true specialty reality. You are unlocking a lot more potentials and agencies from people in all corners of the world.

Ryan · 43:44

It's certainly very deconstructive. You're almost breaking the definition of matcha. Like, yeah, even the legal definition of matcha. And Japan has to come from tencha that. Has come from tencha. It's like. The only rule, but what do you call it that very confusing to most consumers has like like green tea powder or Gyokuro is stigmatized and like honestly, price to quality ratio.

Ryan · 44:08

If you were to compare this to western vendors, the flavor is it, especially with these new matcha price increases, it tastes like a $60.00 can, 20 gram can of matcha. But that's about what the sensory experience is now having tasted so much matcha. But that's what I would say it's worth if you were to blindly taste it and this is that it was matcha. This is ¥1900 for 50 grams.

Ryan · 44:34

So this is retail that we bought it for is less than 7 bucks for that same can, which is the most exciting opportunity within the specialty matcha movement. As industry grows, as the infrastructure gets better, so people can do their own milling.

Zongjun · 44:50

He's like, you come across these kind of insane discoveries like this to us feels like it's the first time we have been genuinely excited since the mill started working. Yeah, going through a whole lot of depression, like realizing, wow, we just spent 200 bucks on this bag of tencha and it doesn't taste good. Like it's disgusting.

Zongjun · 45:12

Try building Moga cha, which is like filler matcha that's like matcha that's or tencha, not tencha, but it's, you know, processed on sencha equipment, but they turn the rollers off. And we are trying to find Korean and Chinese tencha.

Zongjun · 45:28

Like anything that like can bring supply, that just is something that's delicious people to melt. And we've just been getting, I don't know if desperate's the right word, but much more exploratory, very exploratory and experimental. Really unlocks a lot of imagination because this is just one girl.

Zongjun · 45:45

We just melt. Imagine like what this could be if we tried all the other and all the other peas too. I think this machine really unlocks some interesting new mechanism of raiding like called powder tea or we probably need the name in the future. But creating this form of, you know, powder tea that people are consuming every day, it's like, let's start putting like Wakocha, let's start putting like these stem center. Maybe we should start putting in woollen or even pork. Let's do some new experiment, right? This is so interesting.

Ryan · 46:22

It's so it just objectively very interesting and you know, leads to an interesting like conversation as to like why, why is this necessary? Why do you want to do this? And this is a observation that Marc from Ooika made on one of his live streams. I think he was repeating this from a conversation that he was having with someone about why matcha and not gyokuro or sencha has become so popular.

Ryan · 46:47

And he had a really great framework and I'd love to do an A sub with him on this one day. You can add value on top of it. You cannot make a gyokuro latte Cafe like loose leaf tea. Takes a long time to brew and it's relatively low effort and you're not really adding any value.

Ryan · 47:04

Like how many people enjoy spending four to $5 on a high end sencha where a barista is puts a tea bag in a paper cup and hands it to you? Yeah, every time any consumer pays money and they look at, you know, the server doing certain things and they think to themselves like, I can do that too, that's probably not a good sign.

Ryan · 47:29

And the other nice thing about matcha format in general is that it is almost perfectly substitutable with coffee and its intensity and its caffeine content and the fact that you're not diluting a drink down. I would just why we see things like chinos, Americanos, matcha latte, all of these fruit infusions, like all of this stuff, it's like suit anything that you could put espresso into, you could basically put matcha into. And so long as that it tastes good. But tea in general could be really elevated. And Japanese tea, I mean, there's a real fear in Japan right now that gyokuro is losing its market. The Japanese tea consumption

Ryan · 48:09

habits for Lucy's tea are in decline. People don't know how to use teapots in kyusus. Young people don't like green tea. They don't value green tea. They're not spending money on high end gyokuro and abroad matcha is what's trending in this matcha boom, matcha frenzy, whatever you want to call it is causing a lot of the people who know how to do shaded cultivation and gyokuro is a shaded tea as well are switching over to tencha. There's actually a really famous good producer in Kagoshima and that's producing some fantastic gyokuro. We've heard, I haven't had it yet, but I've heard about it from multiple people now.

Ryan · 48:43

And they just announced that they're converting the majority of their garden from gyokuro to tencha. And so that gyokuro supply is vanishing. We're actually witnessing culture getting destroyed in real time because of this matcha boom.

Ryan · 48:57

But if we can create a demand for gyokuro in this milled format, it really is interesting. Now you could make the critique. Well, Sam, you said that it's a expression, a direct expression of the artist, the artisan, the farmer who is making the gyokuro. Wow, Milling for doing a fundamental transformation, right?

Ryan · 49:15

You're adding a stroke, a last stroke onto their work and destroying their intentions. But I would disagree with this argument if that's what anyone is thinking. Who's listening. I think that brewing really is the final stroke. And having tasted this sample, it dimensionalized this tea in such a new and interesting and unique way. I would actually compare it more to pulling a shot of espresso to doing a pour over than I would of a much more fundamental transformation, just like re roasting a tea or something like that.

Zongjun · 49:51

Very interesting argument. The tea. Our teas are never really a finished truly finished product like brewing and tea making. That is the last film that is E drinkers or tea makers are adding their value or their understanding into AT and and I think with our machines this we are not necessarily being a other person adding a stroke into into a piece of work. We are creating a new type of froth, a new type of tool that these people can use in the future. Like the farmers who are making or sencha, they will be aware of this existence in the future and they will have this in their mind in creating their work.

Zongjun · 50:37

This will be a way of consuming and this will be a weight of consuming Sena Wakota and having that reality, having that mindset in their head. I think that's it's not necessarily changing their creativity is helping or assisting or unlocking new creative.

Ryan · 50:56

For people that have their own milling capacity and we're not totally sure if this can be done on an ishi-usu. So it can certainly be done on our machine, which is like I would say like convenient economically process, but also like we have might have accidentally created a piece of hardware piece of machine that can mill this very well, maybe because of the feeding mechanism, maybe because of the pressure control. Like you know, to be honest, we are not totally sure. All that we know is that what is in front of us is incredibly delicious.

Ryan · 51:25

But it's the opportunity to support Gyokuro farmers and production and all the artisanal craft that goes into that in Japan. And it's a more robust supply for anyone who wants to mill tea themselves. Mill matcha or mill this.

Zongjun · 51:41

I don't know what to call it. Gyokuro matcha. Like it needs a name. I don't think it should be sold as matcha because it doesn't come from tencha, but maybe matcha should still be in the name like well. The the kanji for matcha is really like powder or tea.

Zongjun · 51:56

Yeah, you know, the definition honestly is fluid. But when it comes to matcha, like this whole law, like legalization of matcha's definition only happens like relatively recently when compared to, you know, the existence of matcha across different countries and different times. This can be new cultural creation if people start to do this and we really encourage everyone to try it, which it's going to be hard, our mills not out into the world yet. You know, like it's.

Ryan · 52:26

Like a weird little secret of the universe feels like we've discussed. Discover something. But you're so right, it's new culture creation. It's. Intention really matters here, right? Like people has been historically milling gyokuro for the best intention of mine.

Ryan · 52:43

But we are and we have great something very good. This is this deserves to be enjoyed by more people. This is this deserves to to to have a stage. For consumers too, I mean, the price of this that we bought retail, like if you're buying these products wholesale, you can offer a matcha experience, Matcha like I'll say experience for half the cost, much of prices going through the roof.

Ryan · 53:13

It's crazy. We're asking people to pay more and more and more and more for either and as good or slightly worse product. And that's just so uninteresting. It's such a sign of a stale industry. We are so close. I think that like having matcha come through have its true specialty moment where it's a whole new generations cup of coffee and so to speak. It has a healthier caffeine profile, it's a more nutritious, it's much more easier on people that you know, really struggle with jitters and has a entirely new dimensions of paste. And if we out price everyone, all of the cynical people in this matcha industry all

Ryan · 53:56

throughout the like value chain are going to be right. This boom is going to die down. We over invested. That was a mistake. And then matcha will be on a slow and steady decline, which I don't think it's going to be, but it might be. If it's going to cost you 100 bucks to get your tiny can of matcha that tastes worse than it did last year. There's just not that many people who are willing to go through that.

Zongjun · 54:18

Actually, the reason we discovered this is because it is so difficult and painful and like, quite frankly, disgusting to try to find good matcha working hasn't worked through so many disgusting samples and things that you would think were great. We've had.

Zongjun · 54:34

We went to northern Kyoto to a region that generally just gets blended into Ujicha. We found some interesting conventionally grown Yabukita. It was like over $200 a kilo. We taste it and we compared it next to some Chinese Yabukita from Zhejiang for 30 bucks and we were like oh wow, this is almost the same quality. If not slightly worse.

Zongjun · 55:00

Six times price difference. It's it's really discouraging. We have tried to venture into these snowmans of these undiscovered regions. And part of my greatest fear is that there is no true specialty, you know, tea out there like these are just raw material, raw ingredients supplying ingredients. There are still a lot of regions for for us for people to venture.

Zongjun · 55:27

Into and there's still a lot of people doing a lot of very interesting and good work. Don't get us wrong, but but also like this could be partially true in the way that it's it's the reality of how this whole industry. Everyone who is discoverable to purchase matcha from directly or tencha from directly is discovered.

Zongjun · 55:48

And like we've been talking to these farmers and recent sourcing trip. I mean, it is not uncommon to hear stories of people getting reached out to 20 to 50 times a day. And with AI and translation tools getting better and better, sorting through what is a garbage message versus a genuine message is going to get harder and harder and harder. And that's why they, if you try to do this, people just don't respond.

Ryan · 56:13

Absolutely. And also like for all these regions like Shiga, like Mie, they are contracted be supplying materials to or to like some certain large companies or big farms like that there isn't a really specialty oil, so to speak out there for a truly expressive product to grow. Like they are desperate to be a blank component of the industry. So that's really a fear of mind or fear of us that it's just not possible to it's not possible to find something interesting. It's not even possible to get something to begin with. Like we recently was told by by our tea friends in Uji, if you go to Shiga or Mie, you cannot

Ryan · 57:00

really buy it. There's very few producers that aren't contractually obligated already where all of their volume is saw or spoken for basically. So like, how do you cope with that reality? If you are trying to push a specialty movement, It's it's not there like in those places, but like in there are still a lot of regions in Japan, you know, like you venture down South, you have Yame, you know, like all these higher mountain places in Kagoshima, which we have never been yet.

Ryan · 57:29

We haven't been yet. But you know, first these regions that we have tried to venture into, the reality is very. Yeah, very discouraging for a rich and interesting specialty industry as I mean, we would like to see hundreds of specialty market companies working directly with farmers and then milling the tea fresh so that it's really the best possible product delivered to that cafe or to those consumers meant to have this.

Ryan · 57:54

Like really rich, interesting ecosystem of storytelling and sourcing and flavor diversity at a reasonable price with new consumers in every corner of the earth speaking all of the languages you know, to, to create something that is just awesome. Just like we see in specialty coffee or in some of these other industries where it's this huge diversity and the current structural problems with intention make it incredibly complicated to do this type of storytelling. And like you get to a pretty quick point where you stop learning interesting things when we're, I would say at a plateau and our learning journey for

Zongjun · 58:30

Tencha where it's like the novelty has worn off a little bit on a lot of the stuff. Like we tried a lot of unshaded things, you've tried a lot of these cultivars, you've tried a lot of these different techniques and the depth is there. But like also the innovation feels very slow in tasting this sample after being what we'll call insertion of mental rut in our own learning journey.

Ryan · 58:55

Just was like explosion of inspiration of my word, what is possible here And like you're digging deeper. Like what would this taste like with Yama Goku? Yeah. This would be like a little roasty toast, you know? It's probably in good mind.

Ryan · 59:12

Blowingly incredible. Yeah, like what happened if you've rolled the gyokuro a little harder or a little lighter. What happens if you start using these different cultivars? What is Kirari 31 gyokuro from Kagoshima tastes like when it's put through this type of milling?

Ryan · 59:29

Like all of these things are really inspiring. Now, will it work with Wakocha or, you know, Japanese black tea? We don't know. Will it work for sencha? Who knows, maybe it will just taste incredibly bitter when you explode the surface there.

Ryan · 59:41

Nor would it work for a body Ocha from Korea, China. We just don't know, and it's going to need a lot of experimentation. And, you know, we don't want to be the narrative deciders. All that we know is that we tasted something incredible. We wanted to share it with the world and we think it's a cup of contradiction and we don't know where the future goes from here. But this is good man.

Ryan · 1:00:03

Like this is freaking good. It's, it's really delicious and you know, we don't want to be the ones who define what matcha is or anything like that. But I think once our meals are out into the world, we really encourage people to try milling high end gyokuro and just taste for yourself.

Ryan · 1:00:19

And then we would love as a call to action to anyone who has access to any mill for that matter, not just ours, is to try this and to let people try it and taste it. We, I don't know if it would work super well on ishi-usu, but if it does, all the better. We just need to get this into people's hands because from a price to quality ratio perspective, our minds are blown.

Ryan · 1:00:42

Like really blown cost equality perspective. Like the flavor is just insane and we're we're being a little bit repetitive here, but this is like a shockingly complex topic and the presentation really matters, especially because of the stigma that. We have and we are still kind of in shock. Yeah.

Zongjun · 1:01:00

We've only done this with one gyokuro. So we're reporting this in real time. So this is very much a primary perception, primary perspective, the. Old time React. Yeah, real time reaction and we tried to contextualize it with everything we've been learning recently.

Zongjun · 1:01:15

So who knows what the future is, but it's. Yet to be defined. Yet to be defined. And you know, our company name is called Sanko Matcha products and it's actually borrows from the Chinese phrase. So in Chinese tea, gongfu cha, which is sort of the appreciation of drinking tea, the scale of making tea, it's very flavor focused. And this is sort of the tea space that we grew up in, where we were first Chinese tea practitioners still are, and really deeply passionate about gongfu cha and Chinese Taiwanese tea, ETC, and all of that culture. And there's a phrase called pin cha. To pin cha to appreciate.

Ryan · 1:01:55

To appreciate T and it's. It's three circles stacked like a triangle and Chinese. If you were to give a descriptive name for my horrible Chinese speaking ability, I'm like. They're getting better. There are three kou's. A kou is a square and it means mouth or portal or door. Approximately 3 in Chinese is San. So it's like Sanko.

Ryan · 1:02:18

It's like it's a descriptive name for pin and it also kind of sounds Japanese. And so it's like, oh, this is like perfect. We want to take a Chinese T appreciation spirit and bring it to Japanese tea. And you know, we were both Japanese tea ceremony students in the Omotesenke school. And that was my biggest like critique when I was a student. I studied for about 3 years.

Ryan · 1:02:40

I was like, wow, we never talk about the tea. I'm like so interested in this matcha. Like why is this matcha taste this way? Why does it taste differently than the last time you came and brought something else like what's driving quality here?

Ryan · 1:02:52

And I got quite frustrated, kind of like took myself off of that path. I think it's a beautiful path. Not for me. Really interested in and like understanding the flavor of tea and appreciating tea in the product for what it is. I thought, oh, this is the perfect mash up. You take this Chinese tea appreciation spirit and bring it to matcha.

Ryan · 1:03:10

So Sanko matcha. Very. Interestingly, Sanko also means to. Reference in Japanese like a reference tea. Reference Tea reference. Matcha. Or you keep referencing. And learn things. This is what Okumidori tastes like. Yeah. This is the reference for Honzu shaded. Yeah.

Ryan · 1:03:27

And then doubly or Tripoli, I would say in Japanese tea ceremony when you have usucha, you're supposed to consume it in three sips. And so also a Chinese language reference, if you were to say yikou cha, yikou means 1 sip and Cha's tea, so one sip of tea. So Sanko cha would be 3 sips of tea which is also in reference to Japanese tea ceremony usucha. Consumption.

Ryan · 1:03:53

So there's a lot of cross cultural mixing, and this is coming from someone who's culturally American but is also ethnically half Korean and 1/4 Austrian but very much grew up in Pennsylvania. Happens to have a Chinese friend. And and Sam, who's ethnic Chinese, but you know, spent a lot of his childhood in the States who love Japanese tea culture.

Zongjun · 1:04:17

So this is actually a lot of bunch of reflection of us. Yeah, a lot of cross pollination, the cultural exposure from our personal experience and I think it's beautiful. I think this is very much our, you know, kind of aggregation about the experience from the past decade or so. And, and, and I think all cultures, tea cultures in East Asia, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, in different levels, they all have something I think they should learn from. Oh yeah.

Zongjun · 1:04:50

And, and, and the the end result of that I think can be something truly beautiful. Intention really matters. People keep using the word to call for appropriation, accuse each other, but it's really about the intention by the end of the day, like are you appreciating this form of art, this form of enjoyment, and the intention of referencing the intention of appreciating? I think it's the spirit of drinking. Yeah.

Ryan · 1:05:19

And I think for this particular blend from Horii Shichimeien that we milled, whose product name is Poetic, am I cannot pronounce. It's Autodino Suzu. It means the do of Tina. I'll totally no see you. I would say that we got to see this product.

Ryan · 1:05:42

We got to see this painting, this product, taste this product, see this painting in a way that it has never been seen before. I'd be shocked if anyone has ever milled this product into a matcha-like consistency and the temporary controlled pressure controlled, RPM controlled mill that mimics the physics of the ishi-usu to create a matcha like product. And we dimensionalize this in a way that I don't think anyone has ever seen that side of the painting before. Whether or not this flavor profile was the intention of the producer, I appreciate this tea in such a fundamentally different way now that I have

Ryan · 1:06:21

tasted it like this then I ever would have. Brewing it with cold water versus brewing it with the perfect temperature water versus brewing it with soft versus hard water or all of the agency I have as a brewer to control the flavor profile outcome. This was like a whole new level of like understanding. Wow.

Ryan · 1:06:42

I cannot believe that nature in common combination with all of these skilled human hands created something that tastes this delicious, and I think it's really just seeing another side of the painting that no one knew was there.

Zongjun · 1:07:00

Yeah, it's like people use X-ray to scan that Renaissance painting and found another layer underneath the painting, that whole story. This makes very interesting incredibly excited. We don't think future is it's a real time recording. So tell us what you think.

Zongjun · 1:07:17

Would you be interested in trying this? You think that this is cultural appropriation? Do you think that we're adding a final stroke onto the masterpiece of someone's Cocoro? Do you think that they should be called matcha or should it be called something else?

Ryan · 1:07:31

We'd love to hear from you and your ideas because honestly, we don't know. No idea, whatever you accuse us, I don't care either. You should try it too. I think it's a perfect place to stop, so if you enjoyed this podcast, please consider sharing with a friend and we'll see you in the future. See you in the future.