Latest / Specialty Matcha Podcast / It's all about the References

Transcript

It's all about the References · Specialty Matcha Podcast

• 0:06
  Hello and welcome to the Specialty Match Podcast.
• 0:09
  My name is Ryan. This is my Coho Zhongjun, who
• 0:11
  also goes by Sam. Hello.
• 0:13
  Hello. And we're the cofounders of
• 0:15
  Sanka Match Products. Yeah, we launched this podcast
• 0:18
  to discuss our learning journey, Matcha, share startup stories
• 0:21
  and interview experts, and today's episode, What are we
• 0:24
  talking? About all about the references,
• 0:26
  a really important topic not only in matcha, but in tea more
• 0:29
  generally, and even in other specialty products.
• 0:32
  The ability to taste for information is solely dependent
• 0:36
  on having reliable references. So put another way, if you want
• 0:40
  to taste Asahi cultivar, you might need to taste 5678
• 0:45
  examples in contrast with other cultivars to begin to understand
• 0:50
  and build a mental model for what Asahi cultivar tastes like.
• 0:54
  What does it taste like when it's grown in Uji?
• 0:56
  What does it taste like when it's grown in Wazuka?
• 0:59
  What does it taste like with and without fertilizer?
• 1:02
  And so long as you reliably know the reference on the label
• 1:07
  Asahi, you can start to build a mental model of the expression
• 1:10
  for that particular of their cultivar.
• 1:12
  So this is true across cultivars, but it's also true
• 1:15
  across growing regions, processing styles, Tana shelf
• 1:20
  shaded where the shading Kanesha, the mechanism of
• 1:24
  shading is elevated versus directly touching the Bush.
• 1:28
  The ability to taste Hanzu shaded, which is uses rice straw
• 1:32
  and kind of filters a very different type, kind of light
• 1:35
  versus Kanesha. And then what you're looking for
• 1:38
  all of these different labels to become a a smarter, more
• 1:41
  intelligent consumer. Arguably very, very difficult to
• 1:44
  do so right to be able to taste the difference between Hanzu and
• 1:49
  Kanesha. But the only way to know if you
• 1:51
  can or if it is difficult is to know that it was Kanesha versus
• 1:57
  Kandu Asahiya. Versus Hansu, it's, it's, it's
• 2:01
  very interesting. And also like, I guess this is
• 2:04
  really a difficulty across all products.
• 2:07
  If you do care about the information, the level of 'cause
• 2:11
  frequently you are not really tasting difference of a change
• 2:17
  for a single parameter. You are often tasting a
• 2:21
  difference of multiple parameters being changed from
• 2:24
  producers to producers, from vintage to vintage, right.
• 2:27
  You are not just tasting like everything remains the same,
• 2:31
  just a difference between Kanan and Shahu Hong Zoo for this very
• 2:34
  specific year. That kind of comparison sample
• 2:37
  is all is always very difficult to acquire, not even not not
• 2:42
  just for matcha, but for all kinds of products.
• 2:44
  So the access to information is pretty difficult to begin with.
• 2:48
  Let alone the access to the reference samples.
• 2:51
  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Frequently the manufacturers
• 2:55
  can't even have that level of information to for them, for
• 2:58
  themselves to reference which is which Is that that very
• 3:01
  interesting situation that we're seeing here because like, like
• 3:04
  given this situation, like almost any conversations about
• 3:08
  flavor is essentially meaningless.
• 3:10
  People, people are essentially just talking over each other
• 3:14
  based on their own past tasting experience, past formative
• 3:17
  experience over a certain sample that they had the chance to
• 3:21
  acquire at a certain time. And you're using that as your
• 3:25
  point of preference to hold a conversation with someone else
• 3:28
  with probably very different experience with a very different
• 3:31
  product. Yeah, So there's a couple
• 3:33
  different really interesting schools of thought when it comes
• 3:37
  to tasting and transparency and labels across products.
• 3:42
  And this doesn't just exist in matcha, but multi and all
• 3:44
  products. And the most extreme of the two
• 3:47
  sides is people who want absolute transparent
• 3:50
  information. They want to know all of the
• 3:52
  details about the product's growth so that they can build.
• 3:56
  And every new tasting experience is education.
• 4:00
  It's a chance to learn. And then on the the opposite
• 4:02
  side of the extreme, there's people who say we shouldn't care
• 4:06
  about all of this, all of these labels.
• 4:08
  We don't need to know all of this detail.
• 4:10
  Let's just appreciate the tea for what it is.
• 4:13
  Why are we making this so complicated?
• 4:16
  Why don't we just sit and enjoy the raw hedonic pleasure of
• 4:21
  consuming the tea and all of the sensory pleasure that it brings
• 4:25
  us So sudden. June, what is your best argument
• 4:28
  for and against the camp that does doesn't care about
• 4:32
  transparency? Well, first of all, I think
• 4:36
  these two schools of thinking should not be mutually
• 4:41
  exclusive. I can certainly coexist
• 4:44
  depending on the context, depending on mood, depending on
• 4:47
  like. What exactly is the purpose of
• 4:51
  this macho, this drink sitting in front of you today?
• 4:53
  I can drink it for for pleasure or you know, I can drink it for
• 4:58
  educational purpose. Or caffeine for that matter.
• 5:00
  Oh, caffeine, for that matter, totally functional.
• 5:03
  And I think there's nothing wrong with any of these
• 5:06
  directions of consuming a product.
• 5:08
  But for, I guess a argument to to make that goes against, you
• 5:15
  know, transparency. It's transparency at best when
• 5:19
  it comes to the information sitting on the label being true,
• 5:23
  but still those are selected information to be shared.
• 5:27
  You cannot, you will not be able to know everything about this T
• 5:31
  like it would. Only the information will only
• 5:34
  be made it to you if the manufacturer decided to put
• 5:37
  those information on on the label.
• 5:39
  That along that it can be twisted or distorted information
• 5:44
  sometimes. So I guess the the argument to
• 5:47
  be to be made against transparency is that there's
• 5:51
  still no ground truth about the product.
• 5:54
  You're still being presented to a twisted, distorted, or at best
• 5:59
  partial reality. Yeah, absolutely.
• 6:02
  So just to make this super tangible, if you have something
• 6:05
  like A1 ceremonial grade organic matcha and that's being sold to
• 6:11
  you for let's say $60.00 for 20 grams, right, you are absolutely
• 6:16
  going off of the reputation of the brand that's given it to you
• 6:21
  and everything else is no form of objective truth.
• 6:24
  Ceremonial grade is not regulated.
• 6:26
  It does not objective truth. In the same way that saying
• 6:29
  something was produced from Uji grown tensha, or was produced or
• 6:34
  was shaded for 40 days, or was Kandesha versus Honzu shaded or
• 6:39
  was fertilized using synthetic fertilizers versus natural
• 6:43
  fertilizers, right? These are forms of objective
• 6:47
  truth that we can use to learn about the product.
• 6:50
  It's the difference from a top down system versus a bottom up
• 6:54
  system in a top down world. At the world of tea ceremony,
• 6:59
  you need to be told this product is usacha grade, or this product
• 7:04
  is koicha grade, or this is the top hatsumukashi that is
• 7:09
  endorsed by the Ersenke Iyamoto. You should buy it.
• 7:13
  You have to be told that something is good, and maybe you
• 7:16
  have to then rely on brand reputation or your own
• 7:18
  experience in deciding whether or not you then like it or
• 7:22
  dislike it. But it's still a world of
• 7:24
  information scarcity where someone else is ultimately
• 7:28
  making that judgement for you. And I recently came across a
• 7:31
  very interesting piece of industry gossip.
• 7:33
  I never connected the dots on this, but these Yamoto
• 7:38
  endorsements for these different poetically named products from
• 7:42
  the large blend houses. It turns out that that
• 7:44
  endorsement isn't always free. I don't know if the rates
• 7:49
  differ. Surprise.
• 7:50
  And to protect my sources on this piece of news, I'm going to
• 7:53
  be a little bit general, but I recently met someone who has a
• 7:56
  very good relationship ship with a very large macho producer in
• 7:59
  Japan. And they were approached and I
• 8:02
  think they do a mixture of both white label and have their own
• 8:04
  brand really large producer. And I won't say from which
• 8:07
  prefetcher was approached. And Dongjun, can you guess the
• 8:11
  rate that they would have to pay for an Ersenge Iyamoto
• 8:15
  endorsement for a poetically named product?
• 8:19
  Reasonably I would say couple $1000, but it's probably in the
• 8:24
  10s of thousands of dollars. $40,000. 40,000.
• 8:30
  U.S. dollars a year for the. Oh, it's by yearly basis.
• 8:35
  It's a subscription. It's a subscription.
• 8:37
  It's reoccurring revenue. Interesting.
• 8:40
  Very advanced business model. Very advanced business model on
• 8:44
  the tea ceremony schools part and you know, you know, does
• 8:49
  this sort of dirty the water in terms of what's going on in the
• 8:52
  purity of tea ceremony? I think so a little bit, but
• 8:54
  also it's a very smart business decision.
• 8:56
  I mean, the Iamoto's endorsement does bring probably close to
• 9:01
  around 1,000,000 practitioners to that particular product of
• 9:05
  which some segment will then decide to purchase it.
• 9:07
  Or like if you are a matcha drinker, beginner matcha
• 9:12
  drinker, like this is something that you probably would
• 9:14
  recognize as a seal of quality, which I think does help with
• 9:18
  marketing and with themselves. But if you're in the know, you
• 9:23
  do know that the same blend, the exact same powder, exists under
• 9:27
  a different poetic name, Same cultivars, same everything,
• 9:32
  exact same product, but at probably 20% less the price they
• 9:38
  got to make up that $40,000 in the endorsement.
• 9:41
  Yeah, we learned that in the very interesting context, but
• 9:45
  and we personally experienced it too and also like the same
• 9:49
  product can live under different, yeah, motor
• 9:53
  endorsement, which is also very interesting.
• 9:55
  You know, it's really not about the product itself when it comes
• 9:58
  to, you know, traditional matcha consumption.
• 10:01
  Yeah, if you really care about the product itself, these
• 10:04
  poetically named products, not only does it not tell you
• 10:07
  anything, but that these undercurrents that are driving
• 10:10
  the price, it's misleading. And what really matters and what
• 10:13
  I think everyone cares about outside of a tea ceremony
• 10:16
  context or even within CT ceremony context, is, is it a
• 10:20
  good deal? Am I paying a fair price for the
• 10:22
  quality of the product and its base material and mastery that
• 10:26
  brought it to life? And just like anything,
• 10:29
  literally anything, from instant noodles, a soda to beer to wine
• 10:34
  to spirits, marketing plays an enormous role.
• 10:37
  And sometimes it comes in the form of an emoto endorsement.
• 10:41
  Sometimes it comes in the form of a made-up grade where
• 10:44
  someone's calling something A1 or S S or pick whatever random
• 10:48
  letter combinations. For some people, A is the
• 10:51
  highest. We just had a sample here.
• 10:53
  They was the lowest. It was about 40 U.S. dollars a
• 10:57
  kilo versus their S grade, which it went A through E and then S,
• 11:02
  which is literally 10 times the price and really bizarre.
• 11:06
  Sometimes it's how many A's you have.
• 11:09
  We've seen AAA quadruple A7A's, 7A's.
• 11:15
  And A+ signs following by that 7A's, whatever that means.
• 11:20
  Everyone's living in their own universe when it comes to these
• 11:22
  rankings and it really does the whole industry a disservice.
• 11:25
  So I think that's really the crux of the issue is are you
• 11:28
  getting a good deal? I have another, another counter
• 11:31
  argument for the people that say, you know, let's not worry
• 11:35
  about transparency. It's the wrong focus.
• 11:38
  We should just be enjoying the tea for what it is.
• 11:40
  So obviously marketing plays a huge role in all of this and
• 11:43
  very easily influence consumers and it can very easily prime
• 11:47
  people to decide that they like it more even they can trick
• 11:51
  themselves. But I actually think engaging in
• 11:54
  the flavor, especially if you are not a tea ceremony
• 11:56
  practitioner, is a way of engaging in culture.
• 12:00
  What is the difference between us drinking matcha and a dog
• 12:04
  eating a steak? To a dog, a juicy steak is
• 12:09
  delicious. They love it, they are enjoying
• 12:11
  the taste. It's primal, right?
• 12:14
  It's animalistic. They can enjoy it through the
• 12:16
  same 5 senses that we have. Actually arguably even more
• 12:21
  attune 5 senses as their sense of smell and sense of taste
• 12:25
  might be more sensitive than ours.
• 12:28
  And I think the difference between raw, animalistic,
• 12:31
  hedonic pleasure and humans enjoying this food and beverage
• 12:36
  that we make, that we craft, and that we spent hundreds if not
• 12:39
  thousands of years perfecting the production of is that it
• 12:45
  allows us to engage in culture. We can taste the genetic
• 12:50
  manipulation that humans have done to the tea plant to give us
• 12:54
  these different cultivars. We can taste the centuries of
• 12:58
  processing skill and differences in processing skill across
• 13:02
  regions that lead to very different flavor profile
• 13:05
  outcomes. We can taste 17 generations of
• 13:10
  blenders masterfully honing their craft to keep product
• 13:14
  consistent, even though it comes from wildly variable components
• 13:19
  that nature ends up manipulating in different ways depending on
• 13:23
  the weather, depending on this or that, it's very much outside
• 13:26
  of the control of any individual producer and tasting that
• 13:30
  consistency year after year after year.
• 13:32
  These things matter. And I think it's what
• 13:36
  distinguishes us as human in enjoying things past.
• 13:41
  Just enjoy the tea, just enjoy your food, just take it in.
• 13:45
  Who cares about all of this other stuff?
• 13:47
  I think that's what makes us human.
• 13:49
  Wonderful speech from marketing material Ryan's Only if you know
• 13:52
  those are true and only if you can actually taste the
• 13:56
  difference. So I I agree.
• 14:00
  I mean, like any product is beyond the product itself and
• 14:05
  anything that you are putting into your mouth.
• 14:07
  If you do end up carrying it's craftsmanship and creation,
• 14:10
  there is more to know about the product.
• 14:13
  But you know, like, I guess a counter argument to your
• 14:16
  argument is that is it worth 10 times the price of such a
• 14:21
  product or worth a repeating purchasing such a product
• 14:25
  because the education really comes once right?
• 14:28
  You are, you are, you drink the product, you consume the
• 14:30
  product, you know everything about the product and that's it.
• 14:35
  And anything beyond that, anything after that, I would say
• 14:39
  that you are consuming for the product because of the product,
• 14:43
  not because of anything that lives beyond the product itself.
• 14:46
  You don't relearn a piece of information over time, only if
• 14:50
  you forgot about it, maybe you, you, you would pick it up again
• 14:53
  and trying to refresh your memory.
• 14:55
  And I guess that's also a difference or a argument to be
• 14:59
  made for or products made for educational purpose.
• 15:02
  You learn about it and then its purpose is finished.
• 15:07
  You would not want to repeatingly consume a product
• 15:12
  that's just objectively tastes bad.
• 15:14
  I tried this, very interesting, you know, fermentation from a
• 15:18
  very esoteric grape that made into a funky natural mind.
• 15:23
  I had that experience I have that I don't like it and I'm not
• 15:27
  going to buy that again. And I think that the, you know,
• 15:30
  it really depends on the context and the purpose of consuming the
• 15:34
  product. And by the end of the day, I
• 15:37
  think for any product, the quality or if it suffice, a
• 15:41
  consumer preference, I think should lie, should lie before
• 15:46
  it's educational purpose needs to be a good product to begin
• 15:51
  with. Otherwise it's not, it should
• 15:53
  not be called a product. It's a reference sample.
• 15:55
  That's, that's actually a very good point.
• 15:57
  And we are, we are all still human in terms of repeat
• 16:01
  consumption. That that's a really good point.
• 16:03
  But it does make smarter consumers.
• 16:05
  You don't have a bunch of consumers that are smucks,
• 16:07
  schmucks and need to be told what's good and wildly overpay.
• 16:12
  I mean, let's be honest, there's a very large percentage of much
• 16:15
  of consumers out there that are wildly overpaying for quality.
• 16:20
  And you really only get good things if you're in a market
• 16:25
  where you have very transparent labels.
• 16:27
  And it's become very ubiquitous to find these pockets of value.
• 16:32
  And these pockets of value can be different things.
• 16:34
  There is no like gold when it comes to matcha, right?
• 16:38
  We all have different preferences.
• 16:40
  Things that I might love might be things that you don't love.
• 16:43
  So there's all of these different pockets, but we need
• 16:45
  to give consumers and everyone the vocabulary.
• 16:48
  And actually, I think it really starts with the Matcha brand
• 16:51
  owners. A lot of Matcha brand owners
• 16:54
  actually don't really know what fertilizer does to the taste of
• 16:59
  matcha. They don't really know the
• 17:01
  difference between a lot of these cultivars and a lot of
• 17:04
  these regions and processing styles.
• 17:06
  We don't either. We're just barely scratching the
• 17:09
  surface. There's like maybe 200 people
• 17:12
  like the chashi's out there that really know what's driving
• 17:16
  quality and everyone else is just taking everyone else's word
• 17:21
  for it in this remarkably insular culture.
• 17:25
  And I don't want to take someone else's word for it.
• 17:28
  I want to like taste it myself. And all of these tea people out
• 17:32
  there that call themselves like tea sommeliers.
• 17:34
  And I have, you know, if if you look at the type of training
• 17:39
  that the wine people go through to become actual sommeliers, to
• 17:43
  actually be able to blind identify something objectively
• 17:48
  and to have deductive tasting and work backwards.
• 17:50
  I mean, I'm sorry, these two sommeliers are like at the
• 17:55
  preschool level where the other people are at their pH DS.
• 17:59
  Like, there are just remarkably few people on earth that can do
• 18:03
  that in let's just matcha, let alone in all categories of tea,
• 18:09
  right? There's all of these gurus.
• 18:10
  It's a huge problem in the tea industry actually, is that
• 18:14
  people misattribute quality to things all the time.
• 18:19
  And a great example is your story in Wui Shan 1 of what is
• 18:23
  considered to be the top tower of Oolong in mainland China.
• 18:27
  Sam, do you want to describe a little bit about your time there
• 18:30
  and and perhaps some of the marketing at play for the people
• 18:34
  that say quote UN quote terroir is everything with some nice
• 18:39
  drone footage of Wu Shan? I actually see a lot of
• 18:43
  similarities between Wii and Japanese tea production, a very
• 18:47
  large portion of Japanese tea production.
• 18:49
  So when you are in Weishan, like people like mystified this place
• 18:55
  as you know, the birth place of, you know, Kung Fu cha or Chinese
• 18:59
  tea ceremony, like it really adopted the child away the
• 19:02
  brewing tea into it's very sophisticated, you know, tea tea
• 19:07
  making culture and it got perfected and refined by the
• 19:10
  literatis over, you know, different dynasties.
• 19:14
  So it has a very rich history and is arguably the birth place
• 19:19
  for, you know, Chinese tea or Chinese tea culture, just like
• 19:23
  how uji is considered as the birthplace or the origin of
• 19:27
  Japanese matcha. Well, modern day Chinese tea
• 19:29
  culture. Kung Fu Cha specifically.
• 19:31
  Kung Fu Cha specifically, and when you are in WUI, when you
• 19:36
  are in the so so the the core area for the tea production in
• 19:40
  Wuyusha is what's now the National Park designated area
• 19:45
  and there is not a single additional Bush allowed to be
• 19:50
  planned inside the park. All of the bushes tea bushes in
• 19:54
  the park are registered and numbered, and there are drones
• 19:58
  surveilling. The park every day with the
• 20:02
  computational vision to scan if there are any additional bushes
• 20:08
  being planned. So for people that own tea, tea
• 20:12
  gardens inside the park, they can only increase their
• 20:15
  production by increasing the efficiency of each tea Bush
• 20:20
  units. And by doing so, how are they
• 20:23
  going to do that? Fertilizers.
• 20:26
  They dump fertilizers like water into the park.
• 20:30
  And the bushes in the park are shooting out, you know, fresh
• 20:34
  leaves in the middle of summer. And they are so like that.
• 20:38
  That was actually the first time before I actually went to Japan.
• 20:43
  I've heard that tea plant has a lifespan.
• 20:47
  They will die at some point. And I was shocked because like,
• 20:50
  that's not a concept anywhere else like in in Yunnan, which is
• 20:54
  the, you know, the, the, the tawar for poor or like in Chao
• 20:58
  Zhou, which is the tawar for dental.
• 21:00
  It's some of the other tea production region that really
• 21:03
  values Gushu or ancient tea tea trees that grows, you know, for
• 21:08
  hundreds of years. And they value, you know, the,
• 21:11
  the flavor that comes out from those ancient trees.
• 21:14
  But in we, that's a different story.
• 21:16
  People like young trees because they produce better fragrance,
• 21:20
  more pungent flavor notes. They dose insane amount of
• 21:25
  fertilizers to push for unit efficiency to the point that
• 21:29
  these tea plants would die at some point of their life.
• 21:32
  Or they would just, you know, eradicate the the older trees,
• 21:36
  the older bushes and replace it with younger trees because they
• 21:39
  produce quote UN quote better flavors.
• 21:42
  So that's really, it was really interesting when I first learned
• 21:46
  about, you know, Japanese productions in lots of areas in
• 21:49
  Japan. Such a interesting similarities.
• 21:52
  And the difference for between a fertilized and unfertilized tea
• 21:59
  is huge. It's enormous.
• 22:01
  And that, that's also very obvious in Japanese matcha as
• 22:04
  well, which is very, very interesting.
• 22:07
  So what exactly are you tasting by the end of the day?
• 22:10
  You tasting the culture, you tasting the tawa, are you
• 22:13
  tasting the cultivar or you're really just tasting the
• 22:17
  fertilizers or the processing method?
• 22:20
  I think there's really an argument to be made right there
• 22:22
  that the, you know, depending on the style of tea making, certain
• 22:27
  attributes really doesn't matter and certain culture that's being
• 22:32
  tight or associate to the product is really just stories
• 22:36
  that people can place a higher price tag to to sell it for, you
• 22:41
  know, better profit. And and and and, you know, it's
• 22:45
  not, you know, always like that for all we right like it.
• 22:48
  They're still in some areas people are more adhered to the
• 22:52
  more organic, more natural way of farming tea.
• 22:56
  And it's also the case in Japan. There are many farms in Japan in
• 22:59
  different areas that really doesn't treat tea trees like a
• 23:05
  leaf production machine. They do take care of them as
• 23:09
  life and you do taste the difference of those tea beyond
• 23:13
  of the fertilizers. Yeah, and even within
• 23:17
  fertilization, it is an art in and of itself.
• 23:20
  I mean, you can pump synthetic fertilizer in, you know, or you
• 23:23
  can use rice, oyster shells, rapeseed oil, sesame oil
• 23:28
  byproducts, mackerel or really types of oily fish that then are
• 23:33
  allowed to ferment using local microbial flora and then
• 23:37
  integrate it into the soil. There's a lot of this type of
• 23:40
  agriculture happening as well, in especially we've heard within
• 23:44
  actual Wuji Wuji area Wuji, that's Shirakawa Gokasho.
• 23:49
  That's a very interesting culture actually.
• 23:51
  So I would say that's one thing that I think, you know, matching
• 23:54
  Japan is very different than, you know, teas being grown in
• 23:59
  certain areas quote UN quote more famous areas in Wui Shan is
• 24:03
  that they really treat the fertilizer as as part of the
• 24:06
  processing, as part of the recipe, as part of the flavor of
• 24:10
  the tea versus people are using fertilizer for purely for
• 24:14
  increase the production. You can can taste you, you, you
• 24:18
  are able to taste the flavor of the fertilizer, which is a
• 24:22
  little bit uncanny, but also like very interesting when we
• 24:25
  were walking in the gardens of Fuji and we do smell all these
• 24:30
  fermented fish and oyster shells and all of those odors in the
• 24:34
  air and we end up tasting them in the tea too afterwards.
• 24:38
  Yeah, pretty weird. And for those of any of our new
• 24:41
  listeners that you haven't listened to past episodes, you
• 24:45
  know, one of the reason that fertilization is so important,
• 24:47
  important in matcha is that, you know, matcha and tensha pre
• 24:51
  ground matcha has to undergo shaded cultivation.
• 24:54
  So you put shades up that block the sunlight, which disrupts a
• 24:58
  lot of natural metabolic pathways, a lot of pathways,
• 25:02
  biochemical pathways that occur in teeth.
• 25:05
  And you're actually basically suffocating the plant in a way,
• 25:08
  because plants rely on sunlight to, you know, do photosynthesis
• 25:12
  and create energy for themselves.
• 25:13
  So when you block 70 percent, 80% in some places up to a week,
• 25:18
  they'll block, you know, something close to 9899% of the
• 25:22
  sunlight. You're disrupting a lot of
• 25:24
  processes. And there's a process which
• 25:27
  turns amino acids, which are nitrogen rich compounds.
• 25:31
  This is more scientific definition, but in this case,
• 25:34
  we'll just call them amino acids in general.
• 25:36
  They're many different ones, including Alpheanine through
• 25:38
  photosynthesis and with sunlight get converted into bitter and
• 25:42
  astringent catechins. And these catechins are
• 25:44
  antioxidants, but they also taste bitter.
• 25:46
  And it's these antioxidants that actually help protect the plant
• 25:50
  from the sun. It's like sunscreen.
• 25:53
  It like helps prevent them. It helps absorb free radicals.
• 25:56
  We, you know, you should drink them.
• 25:58
  The plants produce them for the same reason that we drink them.
• 26:01
  To absorb these free radicals is what antioxidants do.
• 26:04
  And when you disrupt this chain, you disrupt the balance of the
• 26:08
  amino acids and sweet and savory amino acids into bitter and
• 26:13
  astringent catechins and the more nitrogen, AKA fertilizer,
• 26:19
  which also contains a lot of phosphorus and a lot of
• 26:22
  potassium. And that balance is also very
• 26:24
  important, but mostly nitrogen is what's important within the
• 26:28
  case of matcha. The more nitrogen you put in the
• 26:31
  soil, the more it's going to go into the plant and the more it's
• 26:35
  going to concentrate the amino acid profile, which is how you
• 26:39
  get these insanely umami rich teas and matcha tansha and go
• 26:45
  curl production. It is actually very
• 26:49
  fundamentally unnatural. If you think of the tea plant as
• 26:54
  a natural being that has some state where it lives in the
• 26:58
  wild, it would never taste that savoury.
• 27:03
  That savouriness is absolutely human intervention, and if you
• 27:08
  taste a completely unfertilized matcha, you will not taste those
• 27:13
  crazy levels of umami and savouriness.
• 27:16
  Yeah. But you know, if we zoom out a
• 27:20
  little bit, I have always been, you know, kind of cynical about
• 27:27
  the way how, you know, tea or matcha get so heavily intervened
• 27:33
  during the farming process. But honestly, like if we zoom,
• 27:38
  zoom out a little bit and, and, and, and kind of integrate that
• 27:41
  farming process as part of the manufacturing process of a tea,
• 27:47
  it's really, how do I frame this?
• 27:50
  We are not drinking or eating fresh tea leaves or fresh tea
• 27:54
  plants. Teas we are not like teas are
• 27:56
  not oxidized, teas are not fermented, Teas are not roasted
• 28:00
  for being steamed. They are living beings.
• 28:03
  They are alive. And all of these treatments that
• 28:07
  make tea taste so different are all human interventions.
• 28:12
  And I think extending that beyond, you know, tea being
• 28:16
  picked from its Bush to like tea tea leaves being still grown on
• 28:22
  the Bush in the farm or in the garden or in the forest, I think
• 28:26
  that it doesn't there, there isn't a fundamental line that we
• 28:29
  can draw that we can argue that, you know, like to which point we
• 28:33
  should stop human intervention. I, I think that's a counter
• 28:37
  argument to be made for my, you know, cynicism back in the days.
• 28:44
  Yeah, we've evolved as well and our opinions are indeed like
• 28:48
  constantly changing as we learn more context, especially for two
• 28:52
  people that had mostly Chinese and Korean tea context coming
• 28:56
  into this company. Part of the reason we started
• 28:58
  this podcast was just to share our learning journey in Matcha
• 29:02
  and what we quickly realized that there were all of these.
• 29:05
  Everyone was making these inter product distinctions on things
• 29:10
  that actually didn't have much to do with human intervention.
• 29:14
  They were just these man made fungible abstractions and we're
• 29:19
  still uncovering them like Uji Macha is a man made like
• 29:23
  abstraction. It's not much of the comes from
• 29:26
  uji. It can be, but most of the time
• 29:28
  it's not. It's like a better word or
• 29:31
  translation should be uji style matcha.
• 29:36
  This is what's actually going on there because it's trademark and
• 29:40
  it can come from any material and Narashiga Mia or Kyoto
• 29:44
  Prefecture, so long as part of the processing is done in Kyoto
• 29:47
  Prefecture, which is not an origin at all, there's very
• 29:50
  little objective truth. Yeah, which makes it
• 29:53
  exceptionally hard for transparent label because the
• 29:57
  problem or the driven cost of such confusion is systematic.
• 30:04
  Like even probably sometimes the producers or the brand owners or
• 30:08
  your suppliers for your tea brand doesn't even know the full
• 30:11
  picture of what's inside of, you know, the bag of tea that they
• 30:15
  end up selling to you. So it's very difficult from a
• 30:19
  system level to really give off a lot of transparency to the
• 30:23
  consumers. Most people honestly just don't
• 30:26
  know and it's so interesting. So when you learn about Chinese
• 30:29
  tea, especially when you're more classically trained, you were
• 30:33
  taught to question everything. If you go to a tea market, let's
• 30:38
  say fun soon in Guangzhou, one of the largest tea markets in
• 30:41
  the world, and you go there and if you have a good teacher,
• 30:44
  they're going to say you need to go in with some skepticism.
• 30:48
  These people are trying to sell tea right there.
• 30:51
  We Yancha Dauphangpao might not even be from the cultivar Dong
• 30:57
  Pal, it might be a blend, and it might be not grown anywhere in
• 31:02
  the Wuishan area. It might not be even in WUI or
• 31:06
  even in Fujian, the province it can actually came from like a
• 31:10
  different province, which is almost the identical situation
• 31:14
  to Fuji. So, and when we went in to
• 31:18
  Japanese tea, like really like deep down learning journey two
• 31:23
  years ago, I thought to myself this time, I mean, because a lot
• 31:26
  of what you see in mainland China and Taiwan and other tea
• 31:29
  growing places is like either someone was stupid and they
• 31:33
  didn't realize what they were purchasing because they never
• 31:36
  learned the reference sample. To be able to distinguish
• 31:39
  between real tea that comes from a certain region, an imitation
• 31:44
  tea that's, you know, from a different region.
• 31:47
  Let's say the difference between real Hangzhou Long Jing versus
• 31:51
  Long Jing style green tea. It was actually produced in a
• 31:55
  very different prefetcher, very different terroir halfway across
• 31:59
  the country of China in Guizhou, right?
• 32:02
  These you can learn to taste, but you have to have reliable
• 32:06
  references. It's the single greatest problem
• 32:09
  in Chinese tea is finding a teacher, building chains of
• 32:13
  trust, chains and chains and chains of trust to make sure
• 32:18
  that you're tasting actual poor from teen 80s to make sure
• 32:22
  you're actually tasting Longjin that was grown in Hangzhou.
• 32:26
  To make make sure that you're tasting the difference between
• 32:29
  pre Ching Ming, which is a certain time of year versus post
• 32:34
  Ching Ming tea. And if you don't have those
• 32:37
  references, you are going to be part of the problem.
• 32:41
  And I went into this, you know, telling all of my other tea
• 32:44
  friends as I was learning about the Japanese tea.
• 32:46
  Oh, if you're buying tea in Japan, you don't have to worry
• 32:49
  about any of this mislabelling. I mean, it's, it's a first world
• 32:53
  country. It's a very different, much more
• 32:55
  developed, much more mature market society, high trust
• 32:58
  society. This should be no problem.
• 33:00
  And the deeper you go the more you realize.
• 33:03
  Even like 10 years ago, I think if you bought Shizuoka Cha,
• 33:07
  there's a very high probability chance that there was Kagoshima
• 33:10
  tea based material in that. So what is the point of even
• 33:15
  putting the Shizuoka? Label, it's really all the same.
• 33:18
  It's really all the same. Even like even in Wuji, the
• 33:21
  likelihood of you end up drinking a matcha from Guizhou
• 33:26
  is very high actually. And you know, to to everyone's
• 33:31
  surprise, you know, Guizhou not only is a high quantity supplier
• 33:36
  for a lot of Chinese tea, but also for Japanese matcha.
• 33:39
  One plant from the largest tea manufacturing Guizhou.
• 33:43
  Guizhou can produce more than 5000 tons of matcha.
• 33:47
  Yeah, which is larger than the total production of matcha in
• 33:50
  Japan. That, that, that's really a
• 33:52
  shocking number to to learn about.
• 33:54
  Let alone that a lot of it's getting exported.
• 33:57
  So even distinctions like Ujicha or even amongst the
• 34:02
  traditionally blended products like Hatsune Kashi or ceremonial
• 34:06
  grade or all of the dozens and dozens of made-up grades are
• 34:10
  really just sort of man made abstractions.
• 34:13
  And the problem is if you don't have verifiable references for
• 34:16
  the people who are labeling these products, let alone the
• 34:18
  consumers, you really become part of the problem.
• 34:22
  Wine has verifiable references. It is pretty easy to taste the
• 34:27
  wine that comes from South Africa or California or France.
• 34:32
  You can be pretty confident, especially if it's as bottle on
• 34:35
  premise that the grapes come from that place.
• 34:38
  You can be pretty confident, very high degrees of likelihood
• 34:41
  that the cultivar of grape Pinot Noir, Abernius, Avignon, Merlot,
• 34:46
  Gamay, et cetera, are not going to be mislaten.
• 34:50
  They are full of verifiable references, which creates a
• 34:54
  smarter industry and can create smarter and more sophisticated
• 34:59
  consumers. And the problem, and I put
• 35:01
  problems in air quotes here, is that Matcha has such a
• 35:06
  interesting culture around it that it blinds us to what is
• 35:12
  actually driving price and quality distinctions.
• 35:17
  If you ask a tea ceremony practitioner that has been
• 35:20
  studying for three decades about the cultivar of matcha that
• 35:25
  either serving at their tea ceremony or what they consider
• 35:29
  to be a very high quality product, I put it there's a 99%
• 35:33
  likelihood they're going to talk about the brand.
• 35:35
  They're going to talk about how it's endorsed by the Emoto that
• 35:39
  it's ceremonial grade or maybe they wouldn't say ceremonial
• 35:42
  grade, but it's a koi cha grade as recommended by the consumer.
• 35:46
  And maybe they have found a particular poetic named product
• 35:50
  like Tenju that they love. And they always serve it on the
• 35:54
  holiday. Roby Rocky every year.
• 35:56
  And it has always been to everyone's liking and to
• 36:00
  everyone's preference. They have still only told you
• 36:04
  abstractions, things that are made-up by other humans, not
• 36:08
  objective truth, which is where references come.
• 36:11
  And references can be good or bad, just as there is good and
• 36:14
  bad matcha are good and bad references, and there should be
• 36:18
  bad reference samples. We need to learn about like what
• 36:22
  generally tastes good and what doesn't taste good, and where
• 36:25
  our preferences converge and diverge.
• 36:27
  Even amongst Sam and myself, we find profiles all the time that
• 36:31
  I'm much more primed to like than he does, and that he likes
• 36:35
  way more than me, sometimes for the same reason, sometimes for
• 36:38
  different reasons. But the only way that you can
• 36:41
  understand where they came from is if we have that references to
• 36:44
  learn from which which the coffee industry has, which the
• 36:48
  wine industry has, cocoa industry has.
• 36:51
  It doesn't exist past the level of the chashi's within matcha.
• 36:56
  And it is so incredibly frustrating because it creates
• 37:00
  stupid consumers and it creates stupid matcha brand owners
• 37:04
  because no one is able to taste something and say this was not
• 37:09
  actually from Uji Gron Tencha. Why am I labeling it as a
• 37:13
  product from that's Ujicha as a single origin product, for
• 37:18
  example, or someone tastes something and they're like, you
• 37:21
  know this doesn't really taste like a Asahi dominant blend,
• 37:26
  right? Is it actually the case that
• 37:28
  there's more of these other cultivars than Asahi?
• 37:32
  Or this doesn't really taste Ishiusu milled?
• 37:36
  Are you sure that this isn't ball milled and all of these
• 37:40
  things that really matters? It creates a Dumber industry and
• 37:44
  to be a smart industry with people that have these things,
• 37:48
  we all need these references so that power doesn't concentrate
• 37:53
  in the pockets of knowledge that exist within this industry,
• 37:58
  which are all from like these big traditional blend houses.
• 38:01
  I, I absolutely agree. And I think, you know, it's
• 38:06
  generally beneficial for the industry to learn from each
• 38:10
  other together, but I guess it's still very difficult and first
• 38:15
  of all, for brand owners or for manufacturers to share so many
• 38:21
  information to begin with. Sometimes they don't even know.
• 38:24
  That's a systematic obstacle that I don't know if there's any
• 38:29
  foreseeable force that can make a very quick change.
• 38:32
  Second of all, it's less of a incentive for a lot of brand
• 38:37
  owners to share that many information or even share the
• 38:40
  flaws in the product to the consumer.
• 38:43
  Like it doesn't do any goods in the near term for them to share
• 38:48
  something that's, you know, that to to share the the negative
• 38:52
  part of the product that they want to sell, right?
• 38:55
  Eventually they want to make a profit.
• 38:56
  They want to, you know, have happy customers.
• 38:59
  They want to sell the product as quickly as possible.
• 39:03
  That's the purpose of most of the businesses.
• 39:05
  And 3rd, it's very hard to construct a of reference samples
• 39:11
  that people can learn 1 parameters at a time, parameter
• 39:16
  at a time. Frequently these products are
• 39:19
  crafted in a way that the multiple parameters have been
• 39:22
  changed during the production or doing the farming or doing the
• 39:25
  tawa or tawa selection process. So I guess maybe a new set of
• 39:31
  product category needs to exist in the future.
• 39:34
  And this do exist sometimes in some wine regions for
• 39:37
  educational purpose. And, and, and I know that it
• 39:42
  also exists in some, you know, it lives in some brands or some
• 39:47
  societies in whiskey, for example, the, the Scottish
• 39:51
  Whiskey Society that does educational samples for its
• 39:55
  society members. And for Matcha.
• 40:00
  I think a new category of such product needs to exist for
• 40:04
  educational purpose because it's incredibly difficult to acquire
• 40:08
  those information to begin with. It's incredibly difficult to
• 40:12
  share all of the information to sell a product as a product that
• 40:17
  meant to be, you know, enjoyed by people versus educating
• 40:21
  people and. And I think that, you know,
• 40:27
  like, especially for macho that has so much, you know, cultural
• 40:32
  baggage or cultural, not necessarily the baggage, but
• 40:35
  cultural attachments, it's very hard to treat the product as it
• 40:40
  is, you know, for the current status quo.
• 40:43
  Very difficult, especially across all the parameters that
• 40:46
  matter. I mean, it's not a very small
• 40:48
  list. You have shading time and
• 40:50
  duration. You mean your shading method,
• 40:52
  right? Hanzu versus raised, Tana, Kanle
• 40:55
  Shah versus direct covering, which all have their pros and
• 40:58
  cons. And then you have very specific
• 41:00
  things like what is the taste of a week if you're not a Japanese
• 41:03
  person and a native Japanese speaker talking with other
• 41:07
  people about the flavor of tea and of matcha specifically to be
• 41:11
  inculturated to truly understand this new word that literally
• 41:16
  doesn't have a translation, that best translation is the taste of
• 41:20
  shade. But it's not a particularly
• 41:22
  descriptive term for someone in, you know, in pick your country.
• 41:26
  Doesn't really matter. The taste of shade doesn't
• 41:28
  really mean much to a lot of people, right?
• 41:32
  But you can have a bunch of reference samples and say, hey,
• 41:34
  most of the Japanese people that we taste these products would
• 41:37
  agree that this product is Zoica.
• 41:39
  And you can start doing your concentric circles and figure
• 41:42
  out what these samples will have in common and then become
• 41:45
  inculturated, become a member of that culture and really grok,
• 41:50
  really understand, comprehend, internalize that word to adopt
• 41:55
  it into your vocabulary. So we have things at the
• 41:57
  vocabulary level. We have all of the different
• 42:00
  fertilizer types, mix of synthetic and natural, the
• 42:03
  different types of natural and how those introduce flavors.
• 42:08
  Of course, you have cultivars, you have growing regions, you
• 42:11
  have all of these things that make matcha so interesting and
• 42:14
  it's so much to learn. And as you said, it's very hard
• 42:17
  to get controlled reference samples, which we're hoping will
• 42:20
  be more available in the future and more available in the future
• 42:25
  for content marketing purposes. It's like super cool.
• 42:29
  And actually, I recently came across this.
• 42:31
  I was doing a search because we recently had Oscar Breckel on
• 42:35
  and he was talking a lot about the Koshin cultivar, which is a
• 42:39
  very highly fragrant, very floral cultivar typically used
• 42:44
  for sencha. And he mentioned that it'd be
• 42:47
  interesting to see what it tastes like in a matcha.
• 42:50
  So it's like, OK, I'll search the Internet, see what I can
• 42:52
  find. Well, turns out, believe it or
• 42:55
  not, there is someone in Cheese Woka that is doing single
• 42:59
  cultivar matcha. And it's sold by Mizuba, an
• 43:02
  American matcha brand. And it's been highly revered.
• 43:05
  And a couple of our past guests have actually talked about them.
• 43:07
  So I really need to buy one of those samples.
• 43:09
  But you are really starting to see a lot of this with all of
• 43:13
  these new matcha companies that are creating smarter consumers.
• 43:17
  Who would have thought that we could have found a Cochin
• 43:19
  cultivar matcha, right? Even Oscar Breckel didn't wasn't
• 43:23
  aware, as he said on his episode, that anyone was doing
• 43:26
  shaved cultivation with that cultivar.
• 43:29
  And here it is coming from an American vendor no less.
• 43:31
  So it's really exciting to see these developments that are
• 43:34
  coming. And there's never been a better
• 43:36
  time to learn about specialty matcha.
• 43:38
  I think all these matcha brand owners and vendors really plays
• 43:43
  a very important role because like as a consumer, it's very
• 43:46
  difficult to pull any information as an individual
• 43:50
  from these tea farmers or from this these large legacy tea
• 43:55
  brands that they really have 0 leverage in making these people
• 44:00
  tell what they want to know. But as a brand owner or as brand
• 44:05
  owners collectively, if we all end up pulling information from
• 44:09
  from the tea farmers, from these large tea manufacturers, tea
• 44:12
  suppliers, it will be changed as at some point like it will
• 44:16
  become a industry expectation that this information needs to
• 44:21
  be shared. And then, you know, like it.
• 44:23
  It can really bridge the gap of consumer curiosity and consumer
• 44:26
  education with what is a actually very complicated and
• 44:30
  interesting and sophisticated specialty product.
• 44:34
  Yeah, absolutely. And it can get us away from
• 44:37
  these abstractions. Like Sam and I just tasted 8
• 44:40
  different matcha samples today. And we like I, I tasted 1.
• 44:45
  And I looked at Sam and I, I said this is a joke.
• 44:48
  I said this one ceremonial great.
• 44:50
  But like, I really think a lot of these product distinctions
• 44:53
  are that easy. They're literally just someones
• 44:56
  gut. Like OK yeah this one tastes
• 44:59
  like a bunch of other things that are labeled ceremonial
• 45:02
  grade. This is my opinion, what we can
• 45:04
  slap this on. Maybe the other one could also
• 45:07
  classify, but it's a slightly worse ceremonial grade.
• 45:11
  You know, you know, it's an interesting tasting experience
• 45:14
  because like, even though we've been, you know, heavily
• 45:17
  criticizing the word ceremonial grade, but after tasting the
• 45:21
  spectrum, it really clicks until, like, Gray letter.
• 45:28
  What was it, C or DC or D? Like it was like, yeah, this is
• 45:32
  ceremonial. And it's like there was a
• 45:35
  ceremonial greatness in that matcha that I'm having trouble
• 45:39
  articulating. Well, I mean it's it should be
• 45:42
  able to taste good as usucha. I mean, that's how I interpret
• 45:45
  ceremonial grade Should mean that in the most basic version
• 45:49
  of a tea ceremony where the tea is only being prepared with
• 45:52
  water, no sweeteners, no attitude, it is no nothing or
• 45:56
  it's being served in the form of a new sucha.
• 45:58
  Is this palatable as a new sucha?
• 46:01
  And of course, that's subjective.
• 46:03
  We have different standards and other people and we are
• 46:06
  literally like dividing up these samples to give to industry
• 46:09
  frets. They're not even for us to
• 46:11
  randomly sell. So it was also like half a joke.
• 46:14
  But also if we were doing to sell, I'm sure we would be much
• 46:17
  more generous if we had economic consent.
• 46:20
  Like it's easy to follow the path of incentives here for
• 46:25
  these man made terms and actually the spirit of it is OK.
• 46:30
  But like having everyone assign themselves their own grade.
• 46:34
  Imagine your, you know, your third grade class and if
• 46:37
  everyone had to grade their own essay, you could imagine the
• 46:41
  spectrum you had the people that grew up in households that were
• 46:45
  taught to be over critical of themselves.
• 46:48
  That would have been Sam from a Chinese household would have
• 46:50
  given us a very low grade versus I'm joking versus people that
• 46:55
  are directly on point versus people who like to exaggerate
• 46:59
  their their products, their abilities.
• 47:02
  Giving myself an F for fantastic.
• 47:04
  And those people that are just so confused by the naming
• 47:07
  convention, they completely misuse it, which appears to be
• 47:11
  quite a few people who slap ceremonial grade on a product.
• 47:15
  Like all things that probably started off the best of
• 47:17
  intentions. But if there was an independent
• 47:20
  body, for example, that said, OK, is this palatable as usucha?
• 47:25
  And it was a desert, like a label that was given to you
• 47:29
  versus you being assigned yourself and actually is 1/2
• 47:32
  interesting and decent label. Is is this palatable as in
• 47:36
  usucha like a 1 to 30 ratio so would be interesting.
• 47:41
  It's not a reliable reference. Uji matcha is not a reliable
• 47:44
  reference. Nearly any origin, even Nishio
• 47:46
  matcha from ice sheet is not a reliable reference because
• 47:50
  nearly anything can go into these products.
• 47:52
  There's a very interesting story about Nishio that will save for
• 47:55
  another day around its protective status and how a lot
• 47:59
  of producers actually asked to have that protective status
• 48:03
  removed for some very interesting reasons.
• 48:06
  Purely economic purpose. The the the magic of money
• 48:10
  really makes a difference in a lot of things.
• 48:13
  Very easy to follow the path of incentives, but I think
• 48:16
  references are so important, they're so important and T in
• 48:19
  general, they're also so important to match up.
• 48:22
  So we have a couple call to actions.
• 48:24
  One is for any of the matcha brand owner, listen, owners
• 48:27
  listening out there collectively, if we all approach
• 48:30
  producers and I know we're not in any positions of power to
• 48:33
  demand anything from anyone in Japan considering this matcha
• 48:37
  boom, you're really just lucky if you get any product at all.
• 48:40
  But collectively, if we start asking more questions, is the
• 48:44
  Uji matcha you're selling me from Uji grown Tancha?
• 48:48
  No. Is this from Uji Tawara from
• 48:50
  Mazuka or can we label it that as such?
• 48:53
  Or maybe we should start labeling thing as Fuji style?
• 48:56
  Or maybe we start asking a lot more about fertilizers and these
• 48:59
  other things that really are driving quality.
• 49:02
  If someone's giving you a blend, ask what the blend components
• 49:05
  are. If we all start asking this, we
• 49:08
  can collectively change the standard for this type of thing
• 49:12
  because even 1015 years ago from people who are much more
• 49:15
  experienced in the industry than us, right?
• 49:17
  Even in like 2019, as early as 2019, right, single Kalsavar was
• 49:22
  just like an infancy of an idea. And now it's ubiquitous.
• 49:26
  If you're a brand owner in Thailand and you're not selling
• 49:29
  single Cultivarty, you don't have a business.
• 49:32
  Quite literally speaking, that's how high the standards have
• 49:35
  gotten and that's where the consumers have gone.
• 49:37
  So this is going to continue to evolve across all of these
• 49:40
  markets. And so for the brand owners, for
• 49:41
  the consumers, try to pull this information from the brands that
• 49:45
  you love, right? We need to start electively
• 49:48
  demanding the higher quality product and any of the producers
• 49:50
  listening out there. There's such a massive
• 49:53
  opportunity in content marketing.
• 49:55
  People are very interested in all of these elements that lead
• 50:00
  to these flavor profile outcomes.
• 50:01
  It is no longer a world that is trapped in tea ceremony and
• 50:05
  blended products. That's dependent on top down
• 50:09
  marketing where consumers need to be told this is suitable for
• 50:13
  koichar, this is suitable for usicha.
• 50:15
  That is literally a dying movement.
• 50:17
  Every year more and more and more T sermon practitioners.
• 50:21
  So the base is slowly declining. It's not where the future lies.
• 50:26
  The future relies for the people that are willing to spend more
• 50:29
  money for a better product. That future lies in the
• 50:32
  specialty market and it's large and it's growing.
• 50:37
  And if we don't produce smarter vendors and smarter consumer
• 50:40
  through reliable references, by giving people objective truths
• 50:43
  about the products that they're buying, this culture is going to
• 50:47
  end up not forming at all. And that is the real long term
• 50:50
  sustainability danger for this industry.
• 50:53
  Absolutely. To be honest, dramatic inertia
• 50:57
  of this turning into a true specialty movement is actually
• 51:02
  pretty high even within Japan. All of these regions that are
• 51:07
  making like very interesting tea just end up getting laundry into
• 51:12
  a giant supplier or a procurer for these larger plants that
• 51:16
  would turn them into a plant and honestly like if.
• 51:21
  Unknown Blend. A unknown blend like their
• 51:23
  names, their regions, their production, or their culture
• 51:27
  would actually never be shown, you know in the final product
• 51:33
  like it's the final product has 0 characteristic of their
• 51:37
  creation of their forgery. It's part of the reason why a
• 51:40
  lot of these tea farmers in Japan doesn't feel tensha or
• 51:44
  Mata as something that cannot represent themselves.
• 51:47
  They, they, they, they more see, they see sencha or Gilkaro as
• 51:51
  more of the product that, that, that they can be proud of
• 51:55
  because they have total control of the final flavor profile of
• 51:58
  the final product. And all of these matcha just
• 52:01
  getting blend into some poetic names that that that that their
• 52:07
  contribution basically has no recognition by the end of the
• 52:10
  day. Their hatsu mukashi, their
• 52:12
  material that gets dumped in that hatsu mukashi, their human
• 52:16
  effort has literally been erased with the pen stroke.
• 52:18
  So yeah, but it's easy money for them.
• 52:21
  It's steady cash flow, it's a very warm water and thus boiling
• 52:25
  the frog situation. They are pretty comfortable,
• 52:29
  like everyone is pretty comfortable with the current
• 52:32
  status quo, the inside Japan. And if the newer generation
• 52:36
  doesn't see this as a profitable or interesting future, like no
• 52:40
  one is going to keep doing this and this will turn into a
• 52:44
  commodity market. It will not become a specialty
• 52:48
  of soil for a specialty product. There's no specialty.
• 52:52
  And what's really interesting long term, what's fundamentally
• 52:55
  happening if you zoom out is you have two existing practitioner
• 52:59
  bases. You have the tea ceremony
• 53:01
  practitioners, which are totally fine with top down marketing,
• 53:04
  which can be told, and products which can be told what's good.
• 53:08
  And products can be endorsed by thing like the Iyamoto.
• 53:11
  And there's really strong brand recognition with the old
• 53:14
  traditional blend houses. This market is literally dying
• 53:19
  and it will never be as large as it was in the 1980s during
• 53:24
  Japan's gigantic economic boom. And it's been slowly and
• 53:28
  steadily declining in terms of the purchasing power of the
• 53:30
  people who are willing to spend more money for a better product,
• 53:34
  creating a rich and interesting and dynamic industry, albeit
• 53:38
  still very traditional. The rest of the market is not
• 53:41
  going to accept this level of top down marketing forever.
• 53:44
  It works upon new market entry. That's why ceremonial grade I
• 53:48
  think has been such a remarkable success.
• 53:50
  But it's not going to stay that way forever, especially as you
• 53:54
  see a new matcha company arrive every week.
• 53:56
  People need to start making product distinctions and they're
• 53:59
  going to start doing that based on objective reality.
• 54:02
  And there is so much systematic inertia.
• 54:05
  There is a very much a non 0 probability that we never get to
• 54:10
  like maximum specialty matcha world.
• 54:13
  I am actually relatively pessimistic.
• 54:16
  I probably put it at less than 50% that Matcha can truly live
• 54:20
  up to its full potential in living up to the expectations of
• 54:24
  what will be a very new culture willing to pay to support this
• 54:30
  entire industry of farmers and producers doing very interesting
• 54:35
  things. And it's very clear where the
• 54:38
  growth is and where the decline is in amongst these markets.
• 54:41
  And the infrastructure, the wholesale infrastructure, the
• 54:44
  way contracts are set up, who can buy T at auction versus who
• 54:48
  cannot buy T at auction, the fact that all of the old
• 54:51
  customers get prioritized before the new customers literally
• 54:55
  leaves everyone else trying to do interesting things and
• 54:58
  develop this new specialty market.
• 55:00
  Just like we've seen in 3rd wave coffee or natural wine or all of
• 55:04
  these other movements with the scraps.
• 55:06
  We have worked so hard trying to find an interesting tension
• 55:10
  supply. And I'm a little bit
• 55:12
  embarrassed, but like 80% of our portfolio that we're about to
• 55:15
  release, they're all Yabuquita. We can't even showcase more
• 55:19
  interesting cultivars. I mean, like we haven't been
• 55:22
  venturing into a lot of regions in Japan for some of the regions
• 55:26
  we end up like venture into, it's actually pretty desperate.
• 55:31
  Like it's plots and plots and plots of ya Bukita.
• 55:35
  Like there's no specialty living in those regions.
• 55:40
  I mean, like it's great that those regions exist.
• 55:42
  I mean, they're, they're the backbones of, you know, we still
• 55:45
  have matcha on the shelf for a lot of places.
• 55:48
  But on the other hand, the reality is there's no specialty
• 55:52
  living in those places. There's no culture, there's no
• 55:55
  difference. There's very standardized,
• 55:58
  clean, uniform like practices living in those places and
• 56:02
  they're all the same. And the most interesting stuff
• 56:05
  is either spoken for by a brand that's been around much longer
• 56:09
  than a lot of the new entrants or those farmers that are doing
• 56:12
  these interesting things. We've heard that a lot of the
• 56:14
  traditional Uji Macha farmers that have these ancient
• 56:18
  wholesale relationship with these blend houses, you know,
• 56:20
  need to commit way far north of 50% of their volume to go into
• 56:26
  these blended products and it leaves nothing leftover for the
• 56:30
  new entrants doing interesting things.
• 56:32
  I understand that everyone's coming in and it makes sense
• 56:35
  that old clients are prioritized.
• 56:37
  But all of the resources and infrastructure are helping and
• 56:41
  pointed in a direction of a declining consumer base.
• 56:45
  And it is at the expense of cost and at the expense of
• 56:49
  availability for what could be a blossoming market with people
• 56:55
  that have the references because it's being able to be truly
• 56:59
  labeled honestly as single origin product or a single cult
• 57:04
  of our product. Like a interesting single cult
• 57:06
  of our I mean like a Yabukita in Shizuoka is a single region,
• 57:10
  single cult of our product, but it's not interesting.
• 57:14
  And if a farmer decided to eradicate all of the Yabukita
• 57:18
  and Planet Kosher like he or she is going to take the risk that
• 57:23
  the market doesn't like this product and they are going to
• 57:26
  not going to make any profit for the upcoming years or they're
• 57:30
  going to be kicked out from the current procurement system by
• 57:34
  all these reach all these existing large procurers in
• 57:37
  different regions. There is a very large risk for
• 57:40
  these farmers to undertake or be part of a specialty movement to
• 57:44
  diversify their portfolio or their the product planning.
• 57:48
  Yapukita is safe, it's guaranteed profit and doing not
• 57:53
  doing so is risky and not all farmers have the capability
• 57:58
  capacity to take such risk. It's a it's a very actually
• 58:03
  pretty difficult and challenging situation from a farming or
• 58:08
  farmers level. Especially because it, you know
• 58:11
  it, it's a 5 to 10 year time horizon before you get yield
• 58:14
  from anything. So it's a really long term risky
• 58:18
  bet for not only new cultivar selection, but for a wide
• 58:21
  variety of these different processing methodologies and
• 58:25
  anything that can lead to different flavor profile
• 58:28
  outcomes. I mean, if you move from one to
• 58:30
  two layers of Conley Shaw, like who's going to care?
• 58:34
  And if there's a large, I mean, is your wholesaler going to
• 58:37
  care? Probably not.
• 58:39
  Does that work for marketing if it really does improve quality,
• 58:43
  if you're able to have that labeled?
• 58:45
  Absolutely. And then you have the farmers
• 58:48
  that, you know, advertise the fact that they do double shading
• 58:51
  or triple shading, which is even more rare.
• 58:53
  But you know, those products can reach top dollar just for one
• 58:58
  more layer from 2:00 to 3:00. So let alone all of the other
• 59:02
  practices, but we only get to this type of world.
• 59:05
  People know what they're drinking, which is why it's all
• 59:09
  about the references. And we are so grateful to
• 59:13
  everyone who has come before us, all of the matcha brands that
• 59:17
  have started the single origin, single cultivar movement.
• 59:21
  And I'm bringing this level of transparency.
• 59:23
  I'm not going to start naming names because I am afraid I'm
• 59:26
  going to leave too many people out and it would take way too
• 59:29
  long. But to everyone in the industry
• 59:31
  who has started doing this, we are so grateful because it's
• 59:35
  building the foundations for what can become a very
• 59:39
  interesting specialty movement and quite honestly, save the
• 59:42
  Japanese tea industry if ever everyone is focused on serving a
• 59:47
  literally dying practitioner base.
• 59:49
  Japan is an aging country. Every year, more and more tea
• 59:53
  ceremony practitioners die because the majority of the
• 59:57
  consumer base are old women. That's just the demographic
• 1:00:01
  realities of who practices tea ceremony and the products that
• 1:00:04
  they buy to support this traditional industry.
• 1:00:07
  And we really would love to see this blossom in a much more
• 1:00:11
  interesting direction. Or even just to stop like
• 1:00:15
  already homogenized a culture to become more homogenized.
• 1:00:19
  I mean, when a culture dies and when there's no successor of
• 1:00:23
  such culture, it will just forever disappear.
• 1:00:27
  Like even if you look around in in, you know, like if you, you
• 1:00:31
  end up visiting the Kambayashi Matcha Museum in Wuji and you
• 1:00:36
  look around to all the equipments that used to be used
• 1:00:39
  to make tensha. A lot of them are just there for
• 1:00:43
  the show. I guess.
• 1:00:44
  Some of the equipments can actually produce very
• 1:00:46
  interesting flavor profiles. And imagine like matcha is still
• 1:00:50
  being steamed in wood cases. Like it's it's forever gone.
• 1:00:55
  That technique now all of the matcha being steamed using all
• 1:00:58
  these steamers either like in trays or either through conveyor
• 1:01:02
  belts. And, and when a culture
• 1:01:05
  disappear, it would really just disappear like that flavor, that
• 1:01:09
  memory of such flavor, that cultural history of such flavor.
• 1:01:14
  That technique, that trial and error of how to do that well.
• 1:01:17
  It would just so into oblivion like no one will ever know.
• 1:01:22
  And if someone decided in the future to revive that culture or
• 1:01:26
  that technology, it would not be the same.
• 1:01:29
  It's like people trying to revive more child some dynasty
• 1:01:33
  in China like it will not be the same.
• 1:01:37
  A continuous culture is so important.
• 1:01:39
  Even if it evolved into slightly different forms in the future,
• 1:01:43
  there's still a lineage that you can trace back.
• 1:01:46
  But if that gets cut and that's discontinued, it will just even
• 1:01:50
  if someone decided to invent something, the old revive
• 1:01:53
  something, the same thing in the future, the same idea in the
• 1:01:55
  future, it would actually be a new creation and new imagination
• 1:01:58
  and such. And it all comes down to
• 1:02:00
  building demand, which means that you have the reference and
• 1:02:04
  that you're able to say this indeed, representative of this
• 1:02:08
  cultivar, this region, this process, this history, this
• 1:02:11
  whatever. Versus like this is ceremonial
• 1:02:14
  grade A1 organic Katsu Mukashi from this blend house Fuji
• 1:02:19
  Matcha, which literally is just a bunch of buzzwords and doesn't
• 1:02:23
  tell you anything about the product.
• 1:02:25
  What's really in reality is Yabukita, Yabukita, Yabukita,
• 1:02:29
  and Yabuquita. Nothing wrong with Yabuquita.
• 1:02:32
  There's some interesting yabuquita certainly being made.
• 1:02:36
  That's true. That's true.
• 1:02:37
  We have some very interesting yabuquita in Korea that doesn't
• 1:02:40
  taste like any yabuquita in Japan that ever tasted.
• 1:02:44
  So tawa does make a difference. And a lot of the ones in China
• 1:02:48
  have a very interesting burnt rubber note.
• 1:02:51
  It's along with the lower quality ones in Japan I might
• 1:02:54
  say. Wow, great news to anyone that
• 1:02:56
  loves drinking Moscow. It's.
• 1:03:00
  Actually, yeah, the time and place maybe actually can might
• 1:03:04
  be a very interesting addition to some mezcal inspired smoky
• 1:03:09
  notes and different forms of mixology perhaps.
• 1:03:12
  But the only way you would know that is if you were able to
• 1:03:16
  taste the reference. So we are launching and
• 1:03:19
  hopefully by the time this has been released, we will have
• 1:03:22
  launched the Santo Reference Library.
• 1:03:24
  It has very humble origins and we have some blends that we
• 1:03:28
  don't know what they consist of, but we know where they we were
• 1:03:32
  grown. We have Sun Yabukita from Kyoto
• 1:03:35
  Prefecture, from Fuchiyama, where we even know the exact
• 1:03:39
  recipe of the fertilizer. We have Siamo County.
• 1:03:43
  We have a lot of Yabukita grown in China and some grown in
• 1:03:47
  Wazuka, some grown in Kyoto Prefecture, some grown I think
• 1:03:52
  somewhere else. Yeah, the, the, the extensive
• 1:03:56
  information really vary from samples to samples, A
• 1:04:02
  challenging reality that we're facing right now because, you
• 1:04:05
  know, not everyone has the same expectation of sharing
• 1:04:08
  information to people. But we really hope that will
• 1:04:12
  change in the future. And any listeners that have any
• 1:04:16
  access and this is where we're really hoping to tap into the
• 1:04:19
  community and can be totally transparent the way that we are
• 1:04:22
  pricing everything. All reference samples for
• 1:04:25
  Tenshaw will be sold at A3 to 4X mark.
• 1:04:30
  So for example, if something is being sold at, you know, $200 a
• 1:04:36
  kilo is what we're paying for it.
• 1:04:39
  If we multiply that by four, we get 800.
• 1:04:42
  And if we turn it into 25 gram samples, it would cost about $20
• 1:04:49
  a bag. So it's, it's not that crazy of
• 1:04:53
  a market markup. So that we're doing everything
• 1:04:57
  pretty transparently based on what we have paid for and we're
• 1:05:01
  going to just apply it into that formula.
• 1:05:03
  We're going to tell you exactly what our margin is.
• 1:05:06
  It might sound like a high margin.
• 1:05:08
  However, from we're a small business and from a cash flow
• 1:05:11
  perspective, we have to sell through 25% of the stock before
• 1:05:15
  we can even recoup just the cost of the tea, not including the
• 1:05:19
  shipping, the tariffs, the warehousing fee, the repackaging
• 1:05:23
  fee, the repackage the package itself.
• 1:05:27
  And then we need to pay extra for the warehouse to have
• 1:05:29
  refrigerators and to keep the product cold.
• 1:05:32
  So it's a lot of added cost let not including any of the trips
• 1:05:36
  to Japan or to Origin and to all of the other samples that we
• 1:05:41
  were not able to to purchase or decided not to include.
• 1:05:45
  Yeah. But really the purpose of such
• 1:05:47
  library is purely for education and we are going to try to share
• 1:05:52
  as much information as possible to any products that we can find
• 1:05:57
  or even back products that we end up getting access to.
• 1:06:01
  Like one of my very early idea of a brand is called the Bad Tea
• 1:06:06
  Company, which the intention was to acquire teas that contains
• 1:06:11
  known flaws that we can that that they can serve as a, you
• 1:06:16
  know, a piece of reference sample for education for people
• 1:06:19
  to learn about the flaw. And we hope we can do the same
• 1:06:22
  for all the Tantra samples that we're going to acquire in the
• 1:06:24
  future. And we hope that for anyone that
• 1:06:28
  end up trusting us can leave the room with, you know, feeling
• 1:06:34
  that, you know, you end up knowing a little bit more about
• 1:06:37
  tensha or Matcha today. Absolutely.
• 1:06:39
  So we're going to do this all with Tensha and it's going to be
• 1:06:42
  sort of a living library that exists on our website.
• 1:06:45
  All of the products, it's much cheaper for us to centralized
• 1:06:49
  warehousing and fulfillment in mainland China.
• 1:06:52
  We've explored a lot of different options, but we're
• 1:06:55
  actually importing a lot from Japan to Mainland China.
• 1:06:59
  We hope that we'll be able to continue to do that in the
• 1:07:01
  future. And I've also found some
• 1:07:03
  interesting Chinese tensha as well to make available and
• 1:07:06
  hopefully some Korean tensha as well very soon.
• 1:07:09
  So it's a small and very humble list.
• 1:07:11
  If you have access to any reference sample of any
• 1:07:14
  interesting cultivar from any region that's Tensha, we would
• 1:07:19
  be very grateful if you let us purchase about a kilo of it to
• 1:07:23
  repackage and to offer into this library.
• 1:07:27
  We don't have a ton of money to invest in inventory, so it will
• 1:07:31
  be a relatively small order from us, but we'd actually really
• 1:07:34
  love to draw in the community. If you have access to to zumi
• 1:07:39
  tea or handpick tea or to interesting cult, other
• 1:07:42
  interesting cultivars, Asahi Semidori, Karari 31, etcetera.
• 1:07:47
  Different processing styles, different countries.
• 1:07:50
  We would love to include it as part of the library.
• 1:07:53
  Yeah. And if you do let us, you know,
• 1:07:56
  acquire the sample from you and you do allow us, we would love
• 1:08:00
  to share, you know, your information on the package or on
• 1:08:03
  the as part of the information for people to learn.
• 1:08:06
  You know that you know in the future, you can also acquire tea
• 1:08:09
  from you. Anyone can acquire tea from you.
• 1:08:13
  And even better, if you're able to supply that 1K on consignment
• 1:08:18
  for our own cash flow would be, would we be even more grateful
• 1:08:22
  speaking as a small startup that is developing what turns out to
• 1:08:26
  be a very, very expensive long matcha mill project?
• 1:08:31
  So that's the Senko reference library.
• 1:08:33
  We're doing a pretty transparent markup of three to 4X and it's
• 1:08:38
  also a way if you're interested to support us and our company,
• 1:08:41
  if you're not buying the milk to help us continue to grow this
• 1:08:44
  library and thrive as a company. Our wholesale rates, we also
• 1:08:49
  have started A10 shot catalog to have much larger volumes,
• 1:08:53
  commercial grade volumes of 10 shot made available to anyone,
• 1:08:56
  not just people who own one of our mills.
• 1:08:59
  But if you have an issue or any other milling mechanism, we are
• 1:09:02
  compiling this of 10 shot and those wholesale rates are much
• 1:09:07
  lower markup and we give a very transparent markup along with
• 1:09:11
  the same level of product detail.
• 1:09:13
  So that's that, that's something that we would like to do this to
• 1:09:16
  support the entire industry and hopefully gain enough buying
• 1:09:19
  power that we can start and having some leverage to ask for
• 1:09:22
  more and more information about the way these products are
• 1:09:25
  processed and cultivated. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:28
  And that's really our take or our effort to try to make
• 1:09:34
  contribution about, you know, the theme of today's episode.
• 1:09:39
  Reference really matters. Context really matters.
• 1:09:41
  And everything can only be credible if you know exactly
• 1:09:47
  what you are consuming and if you can know that as a fact, and
• 1:09:52
  if you can turn that into, you know, not just experience but
• 1:09:55
  knowledge. Absolutely turn experiences into
• 1:09:58
  knowledge. I can't think of a better way of
• 1:09:59
  putting that. And also for the for the Sanco
• 1:10:02
  Tension reference library, we do not promise quality and we do
• 1:10:07
  not, I mean, it's not going to poison you.
• 1:10:08
  Everything has gone through very, you know, rigid
• 1:10:10
  manufacturing processes and quality checks.
• 1:10:13
  However, it the reference samples for a reason.
• 1:10:16
  It's not a curated list. And the only reason why we might
• 1:10:21
  choose not to include something is because we don't trust we are
• 1:10:24
  sourcing it from. But we actually think it's very
• 1:10:27
  important that there's a wide range of quality and not
• 1:10:32
  everything delivers through in the cup from a sensory
• 1:10:35
  perspective. So this is not a curated list.
• 1:10:37
  This is not a reflection of our preferences, and it's not a
• 1:10:41
  reflection of our standards. We just want to make things
• 1:10:44
  available so that everyone can make up their own mind.
• 1:10:47
  Yeah. I I totally agree and also like
• 1:10:51
  as AI would say a disclaimer or warning.
• 1:10:54
  Like if you also have a sensitive sensitive stomach like
• 1:10:58
  I do, I strongly recommend you not to drink the tension
• 1:11:04
  directly or drink a very small amount of tension directly.
• 1:11:07
  It can be very, very pungent to your digestive system.
• 1:11:11
  Or you might have a very iron stomach like I do and doesn't
• 1:11:15
  bother me at all. But the work that these chashi's
• 1:11:18
  are doing really is. Mad mad respect, mad respect.
• 1:11:24
  It's very difficult to consume Mark Quantity's tensha, although
• 1:11:28
  I've heard a lot of people that actually just enjoy drinking
• 1:11:31
  tensha's green tea, which is a little weird to me.
• 1:11:35
  Actually. To be totally honest, I don't
• 1:11:37
  like the taste of any tensha I've ever had, no matter the
• 1:11:41
  quality. It is like literally work.
• 1:11:44
  I think all tensha tastes extremely weird green tea to me,
• 1:11:50
  but I kind of grew up with like Chinese and and Japanese and
• 1:11:54
  Korean normal green teas and tanja just tastes so different
• 1:11:59
  to me that I can't square that. I don't like it personally.
• 1:12:03
  I can tell the difference between what Japanese people
• 1:12:06
  would consider a high and low quality 1 and I'm slowly
• 1:12:09
  learning. OK, this is the taste of the
• 1:12:11
  tanja. This is the taste of the matcha
• 1:12:13
  after it's milled. I'm very much a novice at that.
• 1:12:16
  But until you have agency over milling, you just can't learn
• 1:12:19
  more. So when until I get my own mill
• 1:12:21
  at home, it's when I can really accelerate that learning
• 1:12:24
  journey. But for anyone who hasn't had a
• 1:12:26
  lot of tensha, I wouldn't buy it with the expectations of
• 1:12:30
  enjoying its taste, Especially if you're someone that's really
• 1:12:34
  into sencha or gokoro or any other type of green tea out
• 1:12:38
  there. It's not a finished product.
• 1:12:41
  It's considered a crude product actually.
• 1:12:44
  Actually that's, I would say the first very interesting piece of
• 1:12:48
  experience that you can learn from.
• 1:12:50
  You know, having tension or having to taste tensha is the
• 1:12:53
  transformation of flavor profile from tensha to matcha is
• 1:12:57
  enormous. It's magical.
• 1:12:59
  It's very interesting. Yeah, 'cause what you're really
• 1:13:02
  tasting is like what is the when you taste the tensha, what's
• 1:13:05
  happening when you're trying that is matcha.
• 1:13:07
  OK, let's literally explode the surface area of this leaf and
• 1:13:14
  drink the whole leaf. And it's so fine that we, the
• 1:13:17
  naked eye, cannot distinguish between those two particles.
• 1:13:21
  And that's where the magic of matcha is.
• 1:13:23
  Yeah. And also a lot of these
• 1:13:26
  fragrance components inside, inside the tension is going to
• 1:13:31
  the flavor intensity will be magnified 10X20X.
• 1:13:36
  And from a human sensory perspective, when you really
• 1:13:40
  increase the concentration of the certain chemicals, the the
• 1:13:43
  taste from a human perception level is not linear.
• 1:13:47
  Like if you increase a compound that make you feel like you're
• 1:13:51
  tasting rose, it's not going to taste more rosy.
• 1:13:55
  If you increase the concentration of that compound
• 1:13:57
  by 10X or 20X, it's going to taste completely different.
• 1:14:02
  It's going to turn into other, you know, flavor notes or flavor
• 1:14:05
  note of notes to you. So not only are you, you're
• 1:14:09
  really just fundamentally changing extraction when you
• 1:14:12
  mill a tea that finely. That's I really actually find it
• 1:14:16
  at no surprise that really doesn't taste that great in its
• 1:14:20
  crude format and that all of those flavors are really locked
• 1:14:24
  up in those leaves still tastes interesting.
• 1:14:26
  And you can definitely tell the difference between a high and
• 1:14:29
  low quality one. For those of you who've never
• 1:14:30
  had it tastes like a really heavy body, really full bodied
• 1:14:36
  green tea, and there's some missing flavors.
• 1:14:39
  It's like you take a really well crafted, like let's say Caboose
• 1:14:44
  Cha or Gokaro, and you just cut, cut out certain parts of the
• 1:14:49
  flavor profile and it's like it looks like you're seeing a
• 1:14:52
  picture, but you can't see the full picture.
• 1:14:55
  And like there's some pieces of someone's face are missing and
• 1:14:58
  their torsos missing and like you can't see what makes them
• 1:15:03
  human. It's like the same thing with
• 1:15:05
  the T. They're these weird voids from
• 1:15:09
  the fact of the way tensha is processed and the fact that it's
• 1:15:12
  not rolled that don't get filled.
• 1:15:14
  And it just ends up tasting to me kind of imbalanced and
• 1:15:18
  awkward. But it's really just data.
• 1:15:20
  This is what it tastes like before it goes through that.
• 1:15:22
  And it's this data that determines wholesale prices.
• 1:15:25
  It's this data that every single matcha, all, all the base
• 1:15:29
  material that creates these products are traded as tensha.
• 1:15:33
  And that's why it's so important that we all have these
• 1:15:37
  references as we move into a world of matcha companies being
• 1:15:42
  companies that are basically marketing companies that are
• 1:15:45
  repackaging someone else's product into becoming the matcha
• 1:15:49
  companies of the future, which actually play a hand in that
• 1:15:53
  products creation as fresh milling or maybe people do more
• 1:15:56
  shiage processing in in the future.
• 1:15:58
  And what it means to be let's say like a coffee company before
• 1:16:02
  like you see all all these micro roasteries or what it meant to
• 1:16:05
  be like a beer company before all of these microbreweries
• 1:16:09
  existed everywhere. We are at the early phases of
• 1:16:12
  the infrastructure being available for the actual meaning
• 1:16:16
  of what it is in the domain of agency to be a matcha company is
• 1:16:21
  about to change pretty fundamentally in the next 10
• 1:16:24
  years. And it's so important we all
• 1:16:27
  have the references. Yeah, absolutely agreed.
• 1:16:30
  And you know, for a lot of these, you know, people, these
• 1:16:33
  experts or these Tashi's in Japan, they do have the
• 1:16:36
  capability to establish the linkage of what a Tancha taste
• 1:16:40
  like versus what the matcha coming from that Tancha it's
• 1:16:44
  going to taste like. So I think that this will be a
• 1:16:48
  very interesting capability to kind of unlocked to more people
• 1:16:53
  to, to, to have the capable, not capability, but potential or
• 1:16:57
  opportunity to, to, to acquire such talent.
• 1:17:01
  And I think that's part of the interesting things that this
• 1:17:06
  whole new infrastructure can unlock that so many talents from
• 1:17:10
  different corners world can end up having the opportunity to
• 1:17:14
  learn such things that has been so sheltered by so very few
• 1:17:18
  people in Japan because of the current system, because of
• 1:17:21
  history, because of the culture, because of access to
• 1:17:24
  information, because of access to, you know, actually play with
• 1:17:29
  or experience or experiment those things information and
• 1:17:33
  turn those information into true knowledge.
• 1:17:35
  And I think, you know, like this is very important and very
• 1:17:39
  critical that we have a library out there for people to
• 1:17:44
  experiment with, you know, along with this mill that we are
• 1:17:48
  developing really in combination unlocks a lot of potentiality
• 1:17:53
  and lot of imagination that that, that, that that I am very,
• 1:17:58
  very looking forward to. Matcha culture doesn't have to
• 1:18:02
  stop and start in Japan, and it this is really much where like
• 1:18:06
  the principles behind just diversity and inclusion come in.
• 1:18:10
  I really fundamentally almost all of the matcha that is
• 1:18:14
  produced in Japan is controlled by the pallets of old Japanese
• 1:18:17
  men. And I fundamentally do not
• 1:18:19
  believe that they can truly understand the flavor
• 1:18:23
  preferences of a millennial in Vietnam or in Thailand or of an
• 1:18:29
  old person from the West Coast of the United States or of like
• 1:18:32
  a teenager in Saudi Arabia. And these are vastly different
• 1:18:36
  consumer cohorts that probably a very different preferences are
• 1:18:40
  for very different flavored products and this type of tea
• 1:18:44
  culture and and should live outside of this Japanese system
• 1:18:49
  in the same way that we see specialty coffee roasters all
• 1:18:53
  over the world doing interesting things, crafting things for the
• 1:18:56
  people who are actually doing the consumption.
• 1:18:59
  Why do we have to project on and tell from a top down perspective
• 1:19:05
  to all of these people in every corner of the earth that this is
• 1:19:09
  high quality matcha? What if we invert that question?
• 1:19:12
  What flavor profiles might these people like in this market
• 1:19:18
  versus that market versus the other market?
• 1:19:20
  And how can we improve it for them based on the way that
• 1:19:23
  they're using the matcha? We learned from former guests
• 1:19:27
  who was based in Mexico that matcha, that matcha lemonades
• 1:19:30
  were huge. Like that is one of the things
• 1:19:33
  as dominating cafe menus, that's something you just don't see
• 1:19:36
  that often in other places. But there's some matcha.
• 1:19:40
  It's probably very well optimized to take that level of
• 1:19:43
  acidity. And there's very few people who
• 1:19:45
  are actually probably thinking about it, which is why giving
• 1:19:48
  this domain, this agency, these abilities, these are reference
• 1:19:51
  standards, this knowledge on this level of primary experience
• 1:19:56
  to people, to a much wider diverse group of people can lead
• 1:20:00
  to an interesting and dynamic future, not just a future.
• 1:20:03
  It's constantly looking backwards asking about how did
• 1:20:06
  we do this a few 100 years ago. Yeah, I, I absolutely agree for,
• 1:20:10
  for the current status quo. I mean, there's a lot of
• 1:20:13
  restrictions or obstacles that have been blocking people from
• 1:20:18
  doing so, which is I guess a excuse for, for the current
• 1:20:23
  movement. But we really hope that in the
• 1:20:25
  future that these potentials, opportunities can be unlocked
• 1:20:30
  because we have more access to processings, we have more access
• 1:20:34
  to information, and we have more access to ways that can verify
• 1:20:39
  some of the imaginations or some of the interpretations that we
• 1:20:44
  have for the preference that we have grown.
• 1:20:48
  Human preferences, perceptions are widely different across the
• 1:20:51
  world because of their formative experience.
• 1:20:54
  People eat differently, people drink differently, people like
• 1:20:57
  things differently. And we hope that the future
• 1:21:00
  flavors of matcha is not being dictated by a very few then
• 1:21:05
  lifts on one corner of the world because of historical and legacy
• 1:21:10
  reasons. I mean, like still huge respects
• 1:21:12
  to all those old Japanese men, quote UN quote, that has been
• 1:21:17
  continuously practicing this art to these states.
• 1:21:21
  Without them, we're not going to have any much to consume.
• 1:21:24
  But moving to the future, a lot of these imaginations, a lot of
• 1:21:28
  these new creativities, we do see that the blossoming
• 1:21:33
  creations that can be unlocked if we offer them tools and if we
• 1:21:37
  offer them knowledge and if we offer them opportunities.
• 1:21:40
  Well said. It all comes down and it's all
• 1:21:43
  about the references. And without that, what it really
• 1:21:47
  is is its dependence. Its dependence that we need to
• 1:21:50
  be told what's good and what we should like, which is not a rich
• 1:21:55
  or interesting world at all. Everyone should be able to form
• 1:21:58
  their own judgments and not be dependent on others.
• 1:22:02
  Consumers, brand owners, people all throughout, up and down the
• 1:22:06
  matcha supply chain, the matcha industry.
• 1:22:08
  And the only way to do that is to actually understand through
• 1:22:13
  references what is actually driving product distinctions and
• 1:22:17
  what is good, what should be valued, what should be valued in
• 1:22:20
  different ways at different time by different people in different
• 1:22:23
  circumstances. And, and really capturing all of
• 1:22:27
  that complexity versus boiling it down into a single label or a
• 1:22:31
  single term. It's so important.
• 1:22:33
  And so that, one, we don't have the sea of misinformation which
• 1:22:36
  we currently have. And two, that people's
• 1:22:39
  creativity can be expressed, which can only be done through
• 1:22:42
  knowledge. So we are very firmly against a
• 1:22:47
  blanket statement of we all should just enjoy the tea
• 1:22:50
  because then we are all complicit in the problem.
• 1:22:53
  And I think enjoying tea is a beautiful thing, but I think
• 1:22:56
  there's a time and place for it. I certainly are not constantly
• 1:22:59
  thinking about all of these labels, but it absolutely cannot
• 1:23:02
  be at the expense of not learning or not being capable of
• 1:23:08
  learning, both from a knowledge and availability perspective
• 1:23:11
  with these references. Actually.
• 1:23:13
  But Ryan, I have a partial difference to to your claim.
• 1:23:16
  I think enjoying some product is so important.
• 1:23:19
  I would love to see someone in the future can create a product
• 1:23:22
  that I would enjoy more. And for them to do so, they need
• 1:23:27
  to have the capacity, the agency to be able to make a product or
• 1:23:31
  tweak a product that they think will taste will be more suitable
• 1:23:35
  to my preference. And I will see that future
• 1:23:38
  happening at some point of of the days in the future.
• 1:23:42
  Maybe we'll even be AI. Maybe if you have a custom blend
• 1:23:46
  that you know is able to learn all the flavor attributes and
• 1:23:50
  characteristics of different cultivars in different regions,
• 1:23:53
  and the Super memory can live and create a blended product
• 1:23:57
  that's personalized blend. You know, we just don't know
• 1:24:00
  what the future holds. But still, you need to have
• 1:24:03
  ground truth. You cannot have ground truth
• 1:24:06
  without references. So we're a very long way away
• 1:24:09
  from that world, but we're getting closer and closer every
• 1:24:12
  day, and we're very grateful to everyone who came before us.
• 1:24:15
  I think it's a great place to stop.
• 1:24:18
  If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing this
• 1:24:20
  front. If you have access to Tensha
• 1:24:22
  that we would like to contribute to the library, we'd be very
• 1:24:25
  grateful. Please do reach out so that we
• 1:24:27
  can continue to let that library grow.
• 1:24:29
  And if you're interested in tasting Tensha, please check out
• 1:24:31
  our website sankomacha.com. It should be up relatively soon.
• 1:24:36
  Very humble origins. I can't say that we have the
• 1:24:39
  most interesting selection, but we need to start somewhere.
• 1:24:43
  And it is not a reflection any level of curation.
• 1:24:46
  We just want to make things available and we will tell you
• 1:24:49
  everything that we know about that product and be very
• 1:24:51
  transparent about that product's price.
• 1:24:54
  That's our small way of trying to help craft a solution to a
• 1:24:58
  lot of the things that we're complaining about on this
• 1:25:01
  episode. So on the hierarchy of helpful
• 1:25:03
  and hopefully we have not only identified the problem, but can
• 1:25:06
  help provide a solution, which is very important to us.
• 1:25:10
  Otherwise we're just a bunch of complainers.
• 1:25:13
  We don't want to be either. So thank you so much for
• 1:25:15
  listening and we'll see you on the next one.
• 1:25:16
  Take care. See you in the future.