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Next Level Specialty · Specialty Matcha Podcast

• 0:06
  Hello and welcome to the Specialty Match Podcast.
• 0:08
  My name is Ryan, This is my Coho Zhenjian who also goes by Sam.
• 0:11
  Hello. And we're the cofounders of
• 0:13
  Serco Match Products. Yeah, we love this podcast to
• 0:15
  discuss our learning journey, matcha, share startup stories
• 0:18
  and interview experts. In the past week or so, we are
• 0:23
  in this wonderful city, Kyoto again and visiting farmers in
• 0:27
  Wuji, and we got actually invited specifically to visit
• 0:31
  this award-winning tea farmer Suji Sang in Wuji, who is one of
• 0:37
  the very few farmers who have received Emperor Award, but the
• 0:40
  only living farmer. And he's frequently cited as the
• 0:45
  most awarded matcha farmer producer in Japan and hence the
• 0:49
  world. Very, very cool experience.
• 0:52
  A person we've heard about for years, I first heard about him
• 0:56
  after Johnny Matcha and then indirectly through Kettle and
• 1:01
  Kettle's website and book. And then Mark from Ohlika and
• 1:05
  tons of other actually specialty matcha vendors have developed a
• 1:08
  relationship with Suji Son. And it was we've heard this name
• 1:12
  and heard about his agricultural practices.
• 1:15
  He was one of the few people that we decided we were not
• 1:18
  going to reach out to because why do you is infamously
• 1:22
  difficult to get a hold of because so many people come in
• 1:26
  for inquiries because he's gotten so famous.
• 1:29
  And so we decided to kind of play cool, wait and see.
• 1:33
  We were like, you know, the the most likely way that we'll get
• 1:37
  in as someone at some point and will hopefully give us an
• 1:40
  introduction. And that's what happened.
• 1:42
  We got very lucky. Very lucky we're.
• 1:45
  Very grateful to our friends that we've met in Thailand.
• 1:48
  Yeah, big appreciation. Thank you, Arigato Kazemas, to
• 1:52
  Kunpa and Yoske San, who are the owners of Kodo Tea Space in
• 1:57
  Bangkok, who invited us to join this wonderful journey.
• 2:01
  Suji San. And they put together an
• 2:03
  educational trip. So there were a lot of people
• 2:06
  there, probably a group of seven of us or maybe eight of us.
• 2:10
  And they help with interpretation and we were just
• 2:13
  able to ask a lot of questions. It was really unique about this
• 2:16
  experience is that both Koon Pop and Yusuke San are really good
• 2:23
  at getting very nerdy very fast with people.
• 2:26
  And there's this pretty interesting dynamic that happens
• 2:28
  in Japanese tea, but it also happens in Chinese tea and
• 2:31
  Korean tea circles. Whenever you're trying to go
• 2:33
  deeper and deeper about a subject is, you know, a lot of
• 2:36
  tea people, farmers, producers, quote UN quote, tea masters were
• 2:40
  masters brewing or different types of ceremony.
• 2:43
  Try to adjust everything to where you're at, right?
• 2:48
  So in sometimes it's kind of almost an unfriendly interaction
• 2:52
  where you're kind kind of gauging, OK, how much do you
• 2:54
  know? How much do I know?
• 2:56
  Then seeing where you fit. And then you kind of adjust your
• 2:58
  conversation that way. You can imagine that like being
• 3:01
  it like at a very fancy wine restaurant and they ask you
• 3:04
  like, what do you like to drink? And they kind of gauge your
• 3:07
  level of knowledge or experience off of this.
• 3:10
  So a lot of this is going on both explicitly and implicitly.
• 3:14
  And in a lot of the better interactions, like you, it's
• 3:17
  very, very implicit. It's very, very subtle.
• 3:20
  And we were actually talking about that with them afterwards.
• 3:23
  It's like unlocking a level and with someone like Suji San, who
• 3:27
  is so familiar with the agriculture and is considered
• 3:30
  really one of the top masters in the entire team, masters in the
• 3:33
  entire world, not only for matcha, but just in team one
• 3:36
  broadly, I'm the only makes matcha or or tensha.
• 3:39
  You kind of have to unlock those levels, right?
• 3:42
  If you go in asking like, what do you think about the matcha
• 3:45
  boom, that is an inherently less interesting question than
• 3:49
  talking about soil types and quantities, the implications of
• 3:54
  different types of fertilizer, really special nuances of
• 3:58
  traditional ways of processing. So we got to go very deep, very
• 4:02
  fast. And to be honest, we've
• 4:04
  recorded, I think it's about AD episodes on the Specialty
• 4:08
  Monster podcast. And we've interviewed a lot of
• 4:11
  people and we've been doing a lot of learning over the years
• 4:15
  as we as we as we've done this podcast and I'd say in the past
• 4:19
  three or four months, we've been in kind of a learning journey
• 4:23
  plateau. And we were actually getting a
• 4:25
  little bit bored. We kept rehearing the same
• 4:28
  information over and over. Everyone's talking about the
• 4:31
  same origins, same cultivars, the same producers.
• 4:34
  And we didn't really feel like we were learning.
• 4:37
  Yeah. And it was actually a little bit
• 4:39
  boring to some point that we were doing some sort of our own
• 4:44
  exploration into some of the less known Tawa regions in Japan
• 4:50
  to see if there is anything interesting over there.
• 4:53
  And for some places, it was quite disappointing, to be
• 4:57
  honest. Yeah, just seas and seas of ya
• 5:00
  Bukita. And maybe like 10% of that
• 5:03
  region grew seminary. Yeah, and that's it.
• 5:05
  But you know, the farming technique is very homogeneous.
• 5:08
  Everything goes into the wholesalers or the local options
• 5:11
  and it was just not interesting. Yeah, we're not learning
• 5:15
  anything new. And that was very worrying
• 5:18
  because like for any specialty movement to be able to flourish,
• 5:23
  you do need a soil of different people doing interesting
• 5:28
  different things in different regions.
• 5:29
  And that's like the foundation of anything that that people can
• 5:33
  build their, you know, interest can seek different directions or
• 5:37
  depending on their preference or their curiosity.
• 5:39
  But that was not, you know, very confidence inspiring when we
• 5:43
  were doing that. So we got a little bit, you
• 5:45
  know, bored, a little bit disappointed, but.
• 5:48
  It was. We're too naive to make that
• 5:50
  assumption. This.
• 5:52
  Trip was very eye opening. Very eye opening and actually,
• 5:56
  to be honest, very humbling. We almost titled this episode.
• 6:00
  We had a couple of humbling experiences just at how much we
• 6:04
  don't know and how much how many more things there are to learn
• 6:08
  that are just incredibly interesting.
• 6:10
  So we wanted to share that First, we're going to talk about
• 6:13
  our experience meeting Suji San and everything that we learned
• 6:16
  at that experience. And then we're we're going to
• 6:18
  talk about an interesting experience that we had on our
• 6:22
  tour, a factory tour with Maruku Koyama.
• 6:25
  And we ended up learning quite a few things.
• 6:28
  And we're actually pretty surprised at what we found and a
• 6:32
  lot of their answers to our questions.
• 6:34
  It did not meet our expectations for what that was going to be
• 6:38
  like. And then last, we're going to
• 6:40
  talk about a fantastic experience at a wonderful tea
• 6:43
  house in Uji. Aisa Nakamura, Yes.
• 6:47
  This place is incredible. You know, I used to say, you
• 6:50
  know, Uji really doesn't have that many good places to drink
• 6:53
  tea and this like was hard reset.
• 6:55
  But we not only got to learn a lot there, but what is going on
• 6:59
  there is absolutely insane from a cross cultural influence on
• 7:05
  how other tea cultures are impacting the way Japanese tea
• 7:09
  producers are preparers. Tea houses are approaching tea
• 7:14
  and that was totally unexpected. So we're going to talk about our
• 7:18
  experience there. So to kick off with Suji Son, we
• 7:21
  get there and the very first thing that we Start learning
• 7:23
  about is the soil. Types.
• 7:25
  It's not just about a soil types, but like the the the
• 7:28
  mineral composition of different soils and how are they going to
• 7:32
  impact the flavor or the health of the tea bushes.
• 7:36
  Yes. Which was very, very
• 7:37
  interesting. We're going to really get into
• 7:39
  the details here and just literally read through our notes
• 7:43
  and talk about what we've digested.
• 7:45
  So you can almost think of this as note sharing, but we left
• 7:48
  this feeling like, wow, there is so much to know about
• 7:51
  fertilizer. And then we were talking with
• 7:54
  with couldn't pop afterward. And she was like, yeah, this is
• 7:57
  like 5% deep. And it was all stuff we had
• 8:00
  never heard before. Knowing that there's like 95%
• 8:05
  more of this knowledge underneath the iceberg is really
• 8:09
  exciting. Almost a little terrifying.
• 8:11
  Yeah, very terrifying. It really makes you reset how
• 8:14
  much you think you know. So what's the first thing we
• 8:16
  know? Well so there's broadly speaking
• 8:19
  there's two soil types that matter within Japanese tea
• 8:23
  cultivation. There's clay based and there's
• 8:25
  more like sandy soil and clay based is usually has worse
• 8:29
  drainage but generally leads to more full bodied tea and easier
• 8:35
  to preserve a lot of the nutrients in the tea.
• 8:38
  So even whether or not it's clay based or sand based greatly
• 8:43
  impacts fertilization practices and how the method and how fast
• 8:49
  the different fertilizers can spread.
• 8:52
  And ultimately how suitable the soil is to farm March, to farm
• 8:57
  matcha because matcha is such a, you know or I should say
• 9:00
  conventional farming of matcha is such a fertilizer intensed.
• 9:05
  Farming practice, Yeah. So it's like a delivery
• 9:07
  mechanism. So like an equivalent in the
• 9:09
  human body might be something closer to like bioavailability.
• 9:13
  What is going on and what is the methods of how easy something is
• 9:17
  to digest and how it gets to you?
• 9:19
  And so that that was super interesting.
• 9:21
  And when we were in Bangkok with a koto tea space, we did a
• 9:24
  cupping, a pretty interesting cupping of three different
• 9:27
  yabuchitas. I think they were all from
• 9:29
  Shizuoka and two of them were from clay soil types or excuse
• 9:33
  me, two of them were from sandy soil types and one was from clay
• 9:38
  soil type. And they had relatively similar
• 9:40
  processing. And the goal of this cupping
• 9:42
  goal is vertical tasting was to sort of understand the
• 9:45
  differences body and texture that those had.
• 9:48
  And by far the clay soil type had a quite a bit more
• 9:52
  noticeable rounded fuller flavor than the sandy soil types, which
• 9:57
  were a little more, had some harder edges and kind of emptied
• 10:01
  out in the middle in terms of the drinking experience.
• 10:04
  And what was super interesting is that a lot of Suji Suns
• 10:07
  fields are actually sandy soil pipes, which really surprised
• 10:11
  Kun Pop and use Kasan who the first time they tasted their
• 10:14
  tea, they were like, oh, this must be clay soil types because
• 10:17
  of how uniquely rich and Suji San's matcha is like famously
• 10:21
  rich and he's won the national tea competition many, many times
• 10:25
  and all of these crazy awards. And it really kind of checks
• 10:29
  every box for what is considered high quality tea.
• 10:32
  And actually something that's absolutely crazy to learn is
• 10:36
  that he is a first generation tensha farmer.
• 10:40
  So he's 6th generation tea farmer, but his father was
• 10:44
  making gokharo mostly from Yabukita cultivar.
• 10:47
  So in a single generation, he switched it to all of these
• 10:51
  cultivars and to tensha and won the highest awards that are
• 10:56
  exist in the category. So his ability to quote UN
• 11:00
  quote, talk to these tea plants, communicate with these tea
• 11:03
  plants, understand what they need and how flavor is driven.
• 11:07
  He is like a world class master at this.
• 11:10
  Yeah. Well, like, it's very
• 11:12
  interesting to see his approach in farming because in many ways
• 11:16
  he's like a scientist. He sends all of the clay soil
• 11:20
  samples to lab to test the exact mineral composition of these
• 11:24
  different soil types in his teeth.
• 11:26
  And he specifically optimized his fertilizer recipe for
• 11:31
  different soil types in his tea garden and also in combination
• 11:37
  or in consideration with the specific cultural parts that's
• 11:40
  growing on those soil types. And where like which position of
• 11:44
  those tea gardens is on the slope that are either sun facing
• 11:49
  side or not sun facing side which has different connotation
• 11:52
  of sunlight exposure? And apparently if we go really
• 11:56
  deep, the local UJI geography, like if you look over the course
• 12:00
  of millions of years of how the soil types ended up being with
• 12:04
  like they are, it's actually like sometimes different fields
• 12:07
  can basically sit on a knife's edge, where like half of the
• 12:11
  fields can be extremely iron rich, for example, and the other
• 12:15
  half is very not iron rich. So even within the fields that
• 12:20
  we were in in Shirakawa Uji, there was quite a bit of
• 12:23
  variance within the visual field of looking around at just the
• 12:27
  soil types. The only way that he was able to
• 12:30
  know that was by sending all of that off to a lab, which is kind
• 12:34
  of crazy. Yep.
• 12:35
  And there was a very short geology lecture that Ayoske San
• 12:40
  given to us after the meeting with Suji San is how the
• 12:44
  geological formation of Uji and also the whole Yamashita region,
• 12:49
  you know, as a whole, you know, has a very complicated
• 12:53
  connotation of like ancient ocean and also like the
• 12:57
  formation of Bewa Lake. And how a lot of these kind of
• 13:01
  marine creatures or shellfish precipitate, you know, their,
• 13:05
  you know, their carcasses, which are very calcium rich into the
• 13:10
  soil. And how the like ancient
• 13:12
  coastline has a connotation of the soil type.
• 13:17
  That's right now, you know, Tethels in the Yamashila
• 13:20
  regions. That was very surprisingly, you
• 13:23
  know, interesting sepway of where where, where can we
• 13:28
  extract information and also like where can we?
• 13:30
  Draw in other disciplines and the knowledge bases.
• 13:33
  Knowledge bases to understand the current status of TNG.
• 13:38
  A natural question to ask is like why is iron content so
• 13:41
  important? I had no idea before this.
• 13:43
  It's pretty interesting So one of the most important mineral,
• 13:47
  what a very important mineral for to take into consideration
• 13:51
  when fertilizing is manganese. So the more manganese you add of
• 13:55
  course to a limit, it makes the tea plants really strong, it
• 13:59
  strengthens the tea plants and the more iron you have affects
• 14:03
  the absorption of manganese. So if you have really high iron
• 14:08
  content soil, you need to greatly increase the
• 14:11
  concentration of manganese to actually get the proper amount
• 14:15
  into the plants. But if too much manganese, it's
• 14:20
  going to affect the taste of the tea, apparently it makes the
• 14:23
  taste empty and less rich, according to Sutisan.
• 14:27
  So it's actually a pretty delicate balancing act.
• 14:30
  It's not like you can just say I'm putting this concentration
• 14:33
  of manganese and applying this much across all of the fields,
• 14:37
  right? Some of them might have way too
• 14:39
  much and some of them might not have enough if you don't
• 14:41
  actually know the iron content of your soil.
• 14:44
  And so it's really an art and a science.
• 14:46
  And you don't want to overdo it because if you're going to have,
• 14:50
  you're going to have tea that doesn't taste as good because
• 14:53
  too much manganese makes the tea too strong.
• 14:56
  And in doing that, I don't know what the mechanism is.
• 14:58
  You didn't explain it. Maybe, you know, it spends too
• 15:01
  much energy building up other parts of the plant and not on
• 15:04
  the young tender leaves. I have no idea.
• 15:06
  And that would be like a complete random guess for the
• 15:08
  causal mechanism. But if you don't put enough,
• 15:11
  it's really bad for the plants as well.
• 15:13
  And also fertilizer as a whole cannot be overdosed.
• 15:17
  And there was this like really great quote from Sudhisan and
• 15:22
  Ryan, you can translate. So there was a very kind of
• 15:25
  yellowing color bud and cluster, like first and second leaf and
• 15:30
  bud. And we went in February.
• 15:33
  So like there's really not that many buds, which is a little
• 15:36
  interesting too. And he looked at it and it looks
• 15:39
  a little emaciated, and it was kind of weird, pale yellow
• 15:42
  color. Yeah, which is actually still
• 15:45
  quite confusing to me because that can also be a sign of the
• 15:49
  temperatures too low, like a cold damage to the teeth.
• 15:53
  But he was pointing at some leaf being yellow as cold damage and
• 15:57
  that specific leaf as over fertilized and.
• 16:03
  How he knows the difference is a great question.
• 16:05
  No idea. So even like understand and this
• 16:08
  is all goes back to communicating with the tea
• 16:10
  plants and learning how to communicate with the tea plants.
• 16:13
  So he said the when you look at this yellowing by it's having a
• 16:17
  direct connection with what's going on in the root system.
• 16:21
  And the quote that was translated for us, which I
• 16:24
  really love is, you know, this tea is over fertilized.
• 16:26
  And the analogy was it was eating too much too fast and
• 16:30
  didn't digest. Yeah, it's obese.
• 16:33
  And so you can absolutely over fertilize.
• 16:36
  And it turns out there's actually quite a bit of nuance
• 16:39
  to how you over fertilize what and when.
• 16:42
  And it's not just about putting things in the soil at a
• 16:45
  particular time. The rainfall greatly affects the
• 16:49
  way that fertilizer makes it into the plant and the
• 16:52
  temperature. And the colder the temperature,
• 16:55
  the slower the intake. So environmental factors
• 16:58
  actually play a pretty major role in the dosing.
• 17:02
  And you know, they say that matcha, the more you talk to
• 17:06
  people who are experts in matcha cultivation, the more you
• 17:08
  realize that it's not actually very tower expressive.
• 17:11
  The reason it tastes delicious is because of an enormous amount
• 17:15
  of human skill. And you know, on this trip we
• 17:17
  were saying or the people in our group were saying it's really
• 17:20
  like maybe 5% tower expressive, but 95% it was someone's blood,
• 17:25
  sweat and tears that made it taste that way.
• 17:27
  And just reading the weather and reading the plant and
• 17:30
  understanding where it's AT and what it needs and what the
• 17:32
  temperature is going to be, what the rainfall is going to be, is
• 17:36
  all the art of getting that fertilizer into the plant.
• 17:40
  Yeah, there are some just crazy practices that Wuji Farmer has
• 17:45
  been doing in their unique understanding of farming
• 17:48
  practices. Suji science basically in his
• 17:51
  garden every single day doing the shading and harvest season
• 17:55
  to just check the condition of every single tea leaves.
• 17:58
  And we have learned that some farmers when they were doing
• 18:02
  natural farming, so without pesticides, they will be just
• 18:06
  sitting in the tea garden catching insects.
• 18:10
  Like that's like next level commitment.
• 18:13
  Yes, it is like you really have to be in touch what's going on
• 18:16
  in your tea garden. We also learned something very
• 18:18
  interesting just about cultivars in general.
• 18:20
  And apparently a Sahi cultivar is really just a pain and it is
• 18:26
  super, super, super sensitive. So anytime you have delicious
• 18:29
  Asahi from someone, it was like massively more work to make that
• 18:34
  plant happy to produce great tea than other cultivars.
• 18:37
  It doesn't like it when it's it doesn't rain enough, so it's not
• 18:41
  very drought resistant. It can very easily be over
• 18:45
  shaded. When you're doing shaded
• 18:46
  cultivation, it can very easily be over fertilized and it can
• 18:52
  also be very easily light damaged.
• 18:55
  And actually one of the first times we were in Uji and visited
• 18:58
  a tea field with an Uji, a lot of the Asahi cultivar plants did
• 19:02
  not look like they were doing well.
• 19:04
  And they put up these blue tarps, like these blue mesh
• 19:08
  tarps, not to shade the plant, but to protect it from the sun.
• 19:11
  And Asahi is one of those cultivars too that has pretty
• 19:14
  bad rooting problems. So whenever there's kind of two
• 19:17
  ways you can, you can put tea in the ground and plant it into a
• 19:21
  garden. One is from seeds where you take
• 19:24
  the seeds and those seeds end up growing a taproot structure and
• 19:27
  they can dig pretty deep. Or you can use grass or clones,
• 19:31
  or you take a cutting, you take it off, it starts to go roots
• 19:34
  and you put it in the ground. So almost all Japanese tea
• 19:37
  cultivation now is all using these cultivars.
• 19:40
  And Asahi is one of these cultivars.
• 19:42
  They're all genetically identical, but they all have
• 19:45
  different levels of rooting problems compared to Zyriar seed
• 19:48
  propagated tea. So Asahi is famous terrible in
• 19:53
  terms of its its rooting. And apparently I think they were
• 19:56
  saying Uji Hikari has much better rooting performance.
• 20:00
  So we might start to see more and more Uji Hikari being
• 20:03
  planted over Asahi because it's much easier to grow and has
• 20:08
  relatively similar taste characteristics.
• 20:10
  And Uji Hikari is currently like winning all the competitions.
• 20:13
  So there's a pretty strong incentive, I think, for people
• 20:17
  to start to grow it. And actually because of the
• 20:19
  name, like farmers in Uji like to use Wujikakari as their
• 20:24
  representation to submit to competitions, which is very
• 20:27
  interesting to learn. So the other interesting thing
• 20:30
  about Asahi is that we learned how the leaf kind of gets heavy
• 20:35
  and then gets like this kind of like dropping down shape as it
• 20:39
  was reaching into maturity or as a symbol of the tea is well
• 20:44
  fertilized and very. Healthy.
• 20:45
  And very healthy develops this very like interesting Sheen
• 20:49
  under the light that that was very unique, unique compared to
• 20:53
  other cultivars. And it's slightly drips down,
• 20:56
  like it's certain pointing up at a very high angle.
• 20:59
  It's a little more horizontal to the plant, but still slightly
• 21:02
  up. And he was saying that's a very
• 21:04
  good sign that that plant is doing well.
• 21:06
  That Asahi plant is doing very well.
• 21:08
  So pretty interesting visual indicator.
• 21:11
  He was also talking a lot about how he chooses different tea or
• 21:14
  different fields or different trees for a competition for
• 21:17
  competition grade tea. And apparently they don't really
• 21:21
  start tasting very good at their peak until they're about 10
• 21:24
  years old. So when you're going from
• 21:26
  cultivars, typically you can start harvesting after three to
• 21:29
  five years that they've been in the ground, but apparently you
• 21:32
  have to wait another five years before it's really reached its
• 21:35
  peak. And what's really unique about
• 21:37
  Suji San in Shirakawa is that he renews his trees every 20 years.
• 21:43
  And this is just unheard of from everything that we've heard from
• 21:46
  everyone. That's which means the really
• 21:49
  like production years or a tea land in Sujisan's farm.
• 21:54
  It's just 10 years. Yeah, that's.
• 21:56
  For competition at least, yeah. For competitions, or maybe even
• 21:59
  nice. For competition, yeah.
• 22:01
  That's like unheard of, very extreme.
• 22:04
  And so I mean, this is true not only for for matcha, but for
• 22:08
  other types of tea as well. Younger trees generally are
• 22:11
  considered more fragrant. So you'll hear a lot in like
• 22:14
  Chinese tea culture and appreciation circles that, you
• 22:18
  know, gushu or ancient tree or old trees are really, really
• 22:22
  great, especially within the context of something Yunnan or
• 22:25
  other tea production areas. And this is true, but it's also
• 22:28
  not, it's not always true across all types of of tea.
• 22:32
  So we shine, for example, in Fujian.
• 22:35
  Those producers generally also prefer very high fragrance tea.
• 22:40
  And also younger. Trees in younger trees, so they
• 22:44
  do a lot of like ripping up very frequently to make sure that the
• 22:48
  age of the trees is always very young.
• 22:50
  And interestingly enough, there's two guards.
• 22:52
  A lot of people complain about this in the Chinese tea
• 22:56
  appreciation circles. The old guard, which you know,
• 22:59
  more of our friends associate with the old garden, the new
• 23:02
  guard actually really like older trees and deep minerality
• 23:06
  because the older those trees get, the more mineral they are.
• 23:09
  And there's an old, there's a perception of an overemphasis on
• 23:15
  high degrees of fragrance and that everyone is just optimizing
• 23:18
  for more and more aromatically expressive tea.
• 23:21
  But you can also have older trees that just have this
• 23:24
  incredible minerality, a little bit deeper and less expressive.
• 23:28
  So there's a lot of, there's just different preferences, at
• 23:32
  least in China. And in Japan as well actually
• 23:34
  like not in matcha but also but in other types of tea like
• 23:38
  sencha and and the wakota like people do prefer older trees for
• 23:43
  like these T types. You can't and even a little bit
• 23:47
  matcha. There's some producers I think
• 23:49
  in Uji Tawara that specifically talk about their 100 year old
• 23:53
  trees that they still do shaded cultivation on and they're all
• 23:57
  Zyrai or seed propagated. We had one of those teas about a
• 24:01
  year ago. It is just incredibly fragrant
• 24:04
  and incredibly mineral, has just this wonderful.
• 24:06
  It's a very intensity, definitely has some bitterness
• 24:09
  to it, but it is just incredibly complex and deeply mineral and
• 24:13
  super interesting. The next level specialty.
• 24:16
  But this is but this is also one area that we have a problem with
• 24:21
  in all of Japanese tea appreciation at the competitions
• 24:25
  is that it has farmers optimizing for very specific
• 24:29
  types of profiles like a 100 year olds.
• 24:32
  I ride from Uji Tawara that's organically grown like almost by
• 24:36
  definition, could never place anywhere close to what they
• 24:41
  consider to be the top of the top of the top quality in the
• 24:45
  way that these teas get scored. But of course, it's all about
• 24:47
  control. And what's super interesting is
• 24:50
  just what you can do when you have deep knowledge of the
• 24:53
  plant, right? Like you're kind of driving a
• 24:55
  car and you're steering it towards certain flavor profile
• 24:58
  outcomes. And really it's just all about
• 25:00
  perspective. And Suji San's tea is just some
• 25:03
  of the most rich, incredibly complex tea that you can find in
• 25:08
  Japan, and it's highly priced because of it.
• 25:11
  All over the world. Yeah, it's.
• 25:13
  Really about like what you are optimizing for and what
• 25:16
  criterias you care about. And it's the difference of
• 25:19
  building a luxury car versus a race car.
• 25:22
  Fuji Sounds Tea is definitely a very fast race car.
• 25:25
  It's a perfect analogy. We also learned a lot of other
• 25:28
  things about fertilizer and the new byproduct that goes into
• 25:31
  fertilizer. So some of the things that are
• 25:32
  commonly talked about in general, not just at Tsuji Sun
• 25:35
  but in other places, are things like sesame oil byproduct, like
• 25:40
  the leftovers when you press oil is a common fertilizer.
• 25:44
  Probably the most common one is rapeseed oil or canola oil.
• 25:48
  After you press those seeds, those like cakes are frequently
• 25:52
  used and composted and basically turned into fertilizer.
• 25:57
  Different types of fish, rice and rice straw are commonly
• 26:01
  talked about. And we recently learned that
• 26:03
  people use. Meat and even meat, yeah, meat
• 26:06
  and bones. It was pretty interesting.
• 26:08
  And one of the things that Suji someone is talking about was
• 26:11
  actually sugar cane byproduct. So in sugar cane processing and
• 26:15
  apparently and that byproduct is pretty easy to apply and become,
• 26:20
  it can become incredibly amino rich or amino acid rich after
• 26:25
  it's fermented. So a lot of these products, you
• 26:28
  know, the rapeseed oil byproduct is not really the fertilizer,
• 26:32
  it's the result of the rapeseed oil byproduct getting broken
• 26:36
  down, fermented, composted, digested by local yeast and
• 26:42
  fungi and bacteria. And those fermentation, that
• 26:47
  fermentation results in the actual fertilizer that the plant
• 26:51
  absorbs. And it turns out that the
• 26:53
  manufacturing of MSG is actually common that uses sugar cane
• 26:57
  because it's very amino rich. So basically applying MSG to the
• 27:02
  soil. Yeah.
• 27:03
  So when you take this byproduct, it's super easy to absorb
• 27:07
  glutamic acid, which is, you know, MSG after it gets
• 27:11
  fermented, but apparently it is very, very, very easy to over
• 27:16
  fertilize. So it is like a precision
• 27:19
  instrument. You really have to know what
• 27:21
  you're doing and to understand where the plant is at, what the
• 27:24
  weather is going to be, how cold it's going to be, if it's going
• 27:27
  to rain, to determine how quickly the plant is going to
• 27:31
  absorb that. And this is just for one
• 27:34
  component of fertilizer. And some of the other
• 27:38
  interesting ingredients that Suti San use are fish from
• 27:41
  Brazil or Russia and soybeans from the States.
• 27:45
  It's a very actually very globalized recipe.
• 27:48
  Yeah. We asked him how the fertilizers
• 27:51
  changed over the decades. How has your fertilizing
• 27:53
  practice changed? And he said we'll just have much
• 27:56
  more options now. Yeah, it's globalization.
• 27:59
  And for any new types of fish that he end up acquiring, he
• 28:05
  will actually eat it and taste it.
• 28:06
  And he said that one batch of fish from Russia was apparently
• 28:10
  too salty. So it didn't end up using them.
• 28:14
  And apparently fish in general is fertilizer has a quite a few
• 28:18
  problems because it adds salt to the soil.
• 28:21
  So you can very quickly deteriorate your soil quality if
• 28:25
  you're over aggressive in fertilizing the fish because it
• 28:29
  leaves residual salt behind. And we learned that the smaller
• 28:33
  fish like anchovies, etcetera, and mackerel, you know, are much
• 28:37
  more salty than the larger fish. So that's even a consideration
• 28:42
  of how much goes into Suji. Son's philosophy for fertilizing
• 28:48
  is he will not put anything in the ground that he doesn't eat
• 28:51
  himself, which I think it's a very nice, healthy, healthy,
• 28:56
  yeah, action standards. We also learned about more
• 28:58
  industrial types of fertilizer, which he does not use, but he
• 29:02
  was talking quite a bit. And we've we've heard of this
• 29:05
  being used in more mass plantation based higher volume
• 29:09
  places that use ammonium sulfate, which is incredibly
• 29:12
  fast acting. Yeah.
• 29:14
  And the timing for using it apparently is super important.
• 29:18
  And if you overdose it in my parent, the books of the tea
• 29:21
  plants. And you're really only supposed
• 29:23
  to put it on right when the shoots are coming out for it to
• 29:26
  take maximum effect. It's basically energy shot.
• 29:30
  Yeah, it's like a 5 hour energy for the plants.
• 29:33
  Ammonium sulfate. Yum.
• 29:36
  That must smell good. Yeah, that must smell.
• 29:38
  That smells so bad because you have both sulfur and ammonia.
• 29:44
  So another major thing that we talked about were actually were
• 29:49
  sort of terroir. What they would talk about
• 29:51
  terroir and the impact of sunlight and in orientation to
• 29:56
  where the tea plant is on a hill or in a valley, UV light is
• 30:00
  highest at sunset. So if a mountain is blocking the
• 30:05
  light at sunset, it's actually much better for matcha.
• 30:09
  So it's a pretty quantifiable, easy to reference thing for how
• 30:14
  matcha can be affected by, you know, the natural local
• 30:18
  landscape. It's just the orientation of the
• 30:20
  sun and sunset and whether or not it's getting hit with that
• 30:24
  light. And also the best of the best
• 30:26
  composition is that the tea sits in some sort of a valley so that
• 30:30
  the sun exposure is really minimized due during, you know,
• 30:34
  every time of the year. That's actually what part of the
• 30:37
  reason why Sudi Sun specifically selects some of the tea plants,
• 30:41
  the gardens in the region. So there's a lot of secondary
• 30:45
  implications to fertilizer too. We were learning that a lot of
• 30:48
  the organic fertilizer is applied in the spring and
• 30:52
  something like grapeseed oil cakes or canola oil byproduct
• 30:57
  cakes. You also have to be very
• 30:58
  sensitive to it because if you put too much, it generates a lot
• 31:02
  of gas during the fermentation and it's very it can really
• 31:07
  damage the root structure. So all of these things have a
• 31:10
  lot of secondary implications as well or things like gas can.
• 31:14
  So it the analogy that they use is kind of like having an
• 31:17
  Olympic athlete. He actually is a pretty
• 31:19
  interesting philosophy. He doesn't necessarily want
• 31:22
  very, very healthy tea plants, which is why he changes from
• 31:26
  every 20 years, which is an insane standard.
• 31:29
  He wants to push them right up into the edge so we can maximize
• 31:34
  fertilization, maximizing money, keep the plant as healthy as it
• 31:38
  can be, but as performant as it can be.
• 31:41
  And this is the true art of fertilization is keeping it
• 31:45
  exactly up at that point. And that's really what it takes
• 31:49
  to win all of these competitions and be considered some of the
• 31:52
  best match of produced in the world.
• 31:53
  And learning all of this for like we know that fertilizer was
• 31:56
  important, learning this philosophy behind it and you
• 32:00
  know, we're only touching the tip of the iceberg is just next
• 32:03
  level specialty. Like we just did not understand
• 32:05
  that. To me it was like you have some
• 32:07
  secret recipe, like a secret like formula for Coca-Cola or
• 32:11
  you know, pick your random like secret recipe product and you
• 32:14
  sprinkle it on the ground twice a year.
• 32:17
  It's like raising like 10,000 children and they all require
• 32:22
  different things from you at different times for different
• 32:25
  reasons. Yeah.
• 32:26
  And we I also learned that in the early days, Sushi Sound only
• 32:30
  has Zyri in his fuel. And at the time for him to be
• 32:35
  able to, you know, understand the tea plants and control the
• 32:38
  fertilizers, he had to send multiple batches of his tea
• 32:43
  leaves into the lab to do multiple testings to understand,
• 32:48
  you know, each Zyri or Zyri clusters and apply it
• 32:53
  fertilizers accordingly. So that was really crazy and
• 32:57
  also like, it's quite understandable why a lot of
• 33:00
  people, including Sue Designs, switched to cultivars later on.
• 33:05
  There was this mysterious 30 year gap between cultivars start
• 33:10
  to becoming a thing versus everyone starting to convert
• 33:13
  into cultivar farming, which we still trying to understand or
• 33:17
  get the stories behind all of these conversions in the early
• 33:20
  days. Yeah, it's very unclear how that
• 33:22
  entire industry switched from all seed propagated xyri.
• 33:26
  The implications of that is that the genetics of each plant is
• 33:29
  different. So cultivars are a form of
• 33:32
  asexual reproduction. You're producing clones, xyri,
• 33:35
  matcha, basically sexual reproduction, all of those.
• 33:39
  Each individual plant is unique. So if you walk through a Zyri
• 33:42
  field, the leaf size, the leaf shape, how serrated the leaves
• 33:47
  are, how glossy they are, if they curl, if they don't curl
• 33:51
  when they're ready to be harvested, when they put up new
• 33:55
  shoots, how deep the root structure goes.
• 33:58
  All of this is unique on these plants look very different from
• 34:01
  one each other from one another typically.
• 34:03
  And the annoying part is you can't just harvest all at once.
• 34:07
  Or if you do, half is quote UN quote overripe, half is under a
• 34:11
  third is overripe, 1/3 is under ripe and maybe a third is about
• 34:14
  perfect. I'm so, you know, back in the
• 34:16
  days like 100 years ago when everything was I right.
• 34:18
  There are a lot of operational implications because you you
• 34:22
  have to really know every single tree in your entire field and
• 34:26
  determine when it is best to be picked.
• 34:29
  And you have you need to have the like the labor power pre
• 34:32
  arranged to pick those teas. So I bet that's also part of the
• 34:35
  reason why so many people end up converting into cultivars is
• 34:39
  like back in the days there were like the labor power involved in
• 34:43
  the tea industry. Wuji was in the thousands.
• 34:46
  Now we only have a handful of macho farmers left in the city
• 34:50
  of Fuji and which makes, you know, a prearranging labor to
• 34:54
  pick team much, much harder. There was a big wave of Kosovar
• 34:58
  conversion in the 70s, and that could be the reason or tipping
• 35:03
  point, like why so many people people end up, you know, ripping
• 35:08
  their thyroid and converting. Into A and there's a lot of
• 35:11
  implications about that. Like you hear about other
• 35:14
  industries like coffee, where a lot of coffee varieties are very
• 35:17
  sensitive to certain viruses such as rust, where there's sort
• 35:21
  of the systematic thing where all the best cultivars are
• 35:25
  suffering from all these diseases, which puts the future
• 35:28
  of sustainability of coffee in question.
• 35:31
  You hear similar stories about the Cavendish banana.
• 35:33
  Almost all the bananas that are cultivated in the world come
• 35:36
  from the Cavendish. Are Cavendish bananas.
• 35:39
  They're cultivars. I mean, it makes everything
• 35:42
  incredibly fragile. And what's interesting about Ugi
• 35:45
  is some of the greatest matcha cultivars ever to exist, such as
• 35:50
  Narino, such as Uji Hakari, such as, such as the Sahi all came
• 35:54
  from Uji Zairai, which means they all came from these while
• 35:59
  or not while they all came from these sexually reproduced
• 36:02
  fields. And when you RIP up the entire
• 36:05
  city of Uji Zai Rai, they're like taking the pop genetic
• 36:10
  diversity in the population from let's say like 100% to maybe
• 36:16
  less than two. Like I don't think anyone has
• 36:19
  any Zai Rai left. Like the the mother trees, I
• 36:22
  think maybe they save but we just lost a lot of genetic
• 36:25
  diversity. Although we recently learned
• 36:28
  that there's still some thyroid left in the Okonoyama tea.
• 36:31
  Garden Yeah, we actually we had the chance to meet Horizon from
• 36:34
  Hori Shimayan and have about a 20 minute chat with him.
• 36:38
  And we were just endlessly talking about the change from
• 36:41
  Zyrai, how he discovered Narino, how they discovered Okonoyama
• 36:46
  cultivar. Horizon actually a part of this
• 36:49
  old catalog from his father notebook Notebook that documents
• 36:54
  the discovery of Narino and Okonoyama cultivars back in the
• 36:59
  days and they were all like code numbers.
• 37:02
  And we got to see it when it was numbers and this table had like,
• 37:05
  I don't know, maybe 12 different columns the numbers.
• 37:08
  Like numbers of butts on each tree.
• 37:11
  Each day. Each state and the weight of
• 37:14
  each spot. The taste, the shape, the look,
• 37:17
  the color, the yield. Like it?
• 37:20
  Because when you're deciding what cultivar you want to pick,
• 37:23
  you really want to be sure it's good.
• 37:25
  And it was a point system, so everything adds up to a certain
• 37:28
  score at the end. And then you know, now Reno was
• 37:32
  one of the highest scored a Bush in the in the in the notebook,
• 37:36
  in the table. And so is Okonoyama it.
• 37:38
  Was Okon. And there were a couple other
• 37:40
  rows in that table that also had a very high score.
• 37:44
  I'm like, what are these? Apparently one of them is just a
• 37:48
  Yahoo. I wonder how good that can.
• 37:52
  Be it's pretty interesting, but it's pretty sad because who
• 37:55
  knows, maybe when everyone, you know, these fields have been
• 37:59
  cultivating. These IRI fields have existed
• 38:01
  for hundreds of years and you know, the plants that aren't
• 38:04
  suitable to survive and that climate die and the ones that
• 38:07
  are are good. And back in the day, the
• 38:10
  Chashi's, the tea blenders were kind of stewards of the field
• 38:14
  and they would go around to each tree and tell people when it was
• 38:17
  ready to be picked. So they really got to know each
• 38:20
  plant. And this is one of the origins
• 38:22
  of the shiro and mukashi naming conventions.
• 38:26
  A lot of tea is called like hatsune mukashi or something
• 38:29
  something mukashi or yame no shiro or uji no shiro or
• 38:34
  something no shiro. And a lot of the Because the
• 38:37
  Zyrai trees were so genetically diverse, some naturally produce
• 38:42
  lighter tea than others. And shiro means white in
• 38:47
  Japanese. So apparently the chashis would
• 38:49
  go around and label some of the trees.
• 38:52
  These are shiro trees. They're like a light tree.
• 38:55
  And those were batched separately during tension
• 38:58
  processing. So these chashis who got to know
• 39:01
  these fields that were cultivated for hundreds of years
• 39:04
  and from the Edo period all the way through today or all the way
• 39:08
  through the 70s, represented an enormous amount of genetic
• 39:12
  richness, of genetic diversity, which was all lost.
• 39:16
  So we're so really trying to uncover this, the more we talk
• 39:20
  and meet and get to know these farmers.
• 39:22
  Yeah, that's one of the interesting answer to the
• 39:26
  question of why someone something, some tea is named as
• 39:30
  something something no shiro or something something something no
• 39:33
  mukashi. There are many other theories,
• 39:35
  but it's it's all very interesting how a lot of these
• 39:38
  kind of norm that we take as granted today can be like not
• 39:43
  documented at all by anyone, which is.
• 39:46
  In the words of David from Tazumi, no one really knows
• 39:49
  what's going on with this poetic naming convention.
• 39:52
  If you go to Uji today, they'll say Oh no shiro or shiro names.
• 39:57
  Blends are for usicha and mukashi's for koicha.
• 40:00
  And that might be true for like 2 vendors but then it just
• 40:03
  doesn't hold true. So the whole thing is very
• 40:05
  confusing. But anyway, there is a lot of
• 40:07
  dark genetic diversity lost during this for sure.
• 40:11
  Maybe some of the Research Institute did preserve some of
• 40:14
  it. We hope we don't know.
• 40:15
  We keep asking to go visit. And they're very nice.
• 40:18
  They get back to us in like 24 hours every time I e-mail them.
• 40:21
  One of these days we will finally visit the center where
• 40:24
  we can ask to look through some of the records and maybe see if
• 40:28
  a lot of that was preserved at these research centers in Kyoto.
• 40:32
  But we did try asking Suji San about this transition.
• 40:35
  Actually, I'm not sure He he, he didn't elaborate very much.
• 40:38
  But actually that's when we learned that he was the first
• 40:41
  person to grow tensha. And they were just growing
• 40:43
  Gokara before his father's generation, mostly from Yapukita
• 40:46
  and I think. Yeah.
• 40:48
  Well, like you mentioned, you know, all these tea institutes
• 40:52
  exist in different prefectures in Japan and I guess that's kind
• 40:56
  of lighthouses in the darkness in the seed of cultivars like
• 41:00
  all of these institutes do preserve a lot of these thyrides
• 41:05
  in different regions and they are kind of like the genetic
• 41:08
  pool of the local tea landscapes.
• 41:10
  And as they keep propagating new types of cultivars in the
• 41:15
  future, we can experience some new possibilities, hopefully
• 41:19
  beyond what we are used to drink today.
• 41:22
  And actually they were part of the driving force and the pusher
• 41:27
  of farmers converting to cultivars in the early days as
• 41:29
  well. And a lot of these institute's
• 41:32
  offering free lectures to teach farmers how to farm specific
• 41:35
  cultivars, or they would let farmers to experience certain
• 41:39
  cultivars and talk to the farmers about their experience
• 41:43
  and learn from them and keep optimizing for the new
• 41:47
  cultivars. So there's some very interesting
• 41:48
  dynamics between the academia and the farmers and also the
• 41:53
  consumers or the Tashi's or the tea brands, which forms the
• 41:57
  whole very complex ecosystem of Japanese tea as a whole.
• 42:01
  Which is always changing. Something else that we learned
• 42:03
  that was interesting when he was explaining that his father is
• 42:07
  mostly growing Gokoro. Is that actually all the way
• 42:10
  through the Meiji period, I guess until his father's
• 42:12
  generation, one generation ago, is that Goku actually was sold
• 42:16
  for a higher price. It was an economic incentive.
• 42:19
  And we've read this before. So you know, a lot of the macho
• 42:22
  production, it was so insanely expensive in the ITO and towards
• 42:26
  the end of the ito, which is around the mid 1800s, that a lot
• 42:32
  of farmers and a lot of tea companies, tea blenders,
• 42:36
  Chashi's went out of business during the Meiji Restoration
• 42:39
  because it was largely sort of a patron of the arts model.
• 42:42
  If you can imagine like in Venice, you had like the Medici
• 42:45
  family and they would sponsor all of these different artists.
• 42:48
  Imagine if the Medici family just fragmented and some of them
• 42:52
  got very poor. And all of these relationships
• 42:55
  with the funders, if you look at how the money flowed and there
• 42:59
  were a lot of downstream consequences of the Meiji
• 43:02
  Restoration after the fall of the shogunate and which really
• 43:05
  disrupted the tea industry. And we were reading some old
• 43:09
  books, accounting this history. And not only a lot, a lot of
• 43:12
  them go out of business, but it's shifted the industry.
• 43:16
  And apparently Gokoro is much more profitable to farm Uji.
• 43:19
  And that was the case until relatively recently, which is
• 43:23
  pretty interesting dynamic. You can now everyone's switching
• 43:27
  to 10 job. You can sort of still see that,
• 43:29
  you know, mentality being or the a legacy of being part of the
• 43:34
  current day's Japanese perception of Gilcro.
• 43:37
  Like it's still considered as the pride of farmers in a very
• 43:42
  large way. Like farmers will talk very
• 43:45
  proudly about their Gilcro, but they quite infrequently brag
• 43:49
  about their attention because a lot of them just go straight
• 43:52
  into large procurers and they end up in either large blend
• 43:57
  houses or auctions. They remain basically nameless
• 44:01
  in the end Prop. Yeah, they become a component
• 44:04
  and potentially A swappable component because the blends are
• 44:07
  never the same interchangeable component.
• 44:09
  Something else we learned from Suji San is some really good
• 44:12
  references for understanding taste.
• 44:15
  And this is something we talked about in our episode.
• 44:17
  It's all about the references, understanding the causal
• 44:20
  mechanisms for how, Sir, how and why certain flavors happened.
• 44:25
  So these are from my notes that I were incredibly useful tips.
• 44:29
  So after taste is he was telling us is optimizing for good after
• 44:34
  taste is really autumn applied fertilizer.
• 44:37
  If you do not apply enough fertilizer in autumn, typically
• 44:41
  it means you'll have a worse after taste and the first sip
• 44:46
  umami that you get is typically from spring fertilizer.
• 44:50
  So that lasting, wonderful taste is the art.
• 44:54
  You know, six months before that tea is even harvested and
• 44:57
  applying fertilizer and the initial sip is spring
• 45:01
  fertilizer. And specifically, March and
• 45:04
  April are the most fertilizer absorption of tea plants.
• 45:09
  Those are sort of the busiest days of any tea farmers in Uchi,
• 45:13
  I guess. And picking time apparently is
• 45:15
  really important for controlling for astringency.
• 45:19
  So if you miss the optimal picking window for any cultivar
• 45:23
  as it's being shaded, apparently if you get that wrong by a day
• 45:27
  or a few days, it has a pretty major implications on how
• 45:31
  astringent that tea is. So tea that was really picked
• 45:34
  really perfectly right on the right day really leads to, you
• 45:39
  know, fantastic tea quality. And this is something that it's
• 45:42
  a tea farmer and Goku show for a Kawasaki Cha up to about on
• 45:46
  their Instagram post. Really great account to follow,
• 45:49
  by the way. They really have break it down
• 45:52
  everything that's going on in the garden with as the seasons
• 45:54
  change. A lot of great official
• 45:57
  documentation. Wonderful visual documentation
• 46:00
  including some of the fertilizer being broken down by microbes
• 46:04
  and you can see rows and rows and tea and it looks like there
• 46:08
  was snowfall, but it's not snowfall.
• 46:10
  White mold. It's a white mold as it's
• 46:13
  breaking down and it's that local microbial flora that's
• 46:18
  breaking down and creating the fertilizer, which will then get
• 46:21
  later integrated into the plants.
• 46:24
  I guess that's part of the argument of trying to argue
• 46:28
  that, you know, fertilizer is part of the tawa, really is
• 46:31
  created by the local environment by the end of the day.
• 46:34
  Yeah, actually, you know, you can say that much is very
• 46:37
  terroir driven if you take into account like second order
• 46:41
  terroir like not what people primarily think of, but if you
• 46:45
  think of like the human skill and culture of being able to
• 46:50
  have this knowledge to make the product and it's like the local
• 46:54
  microbial flora tunnel and. Specific local ingredients for
• 46:58
  the fertilizers. Arguably, it matters less and
• 47:01
  less now because it's such a global world.
• 47:03
  You can get access to almost any fertilizer anywhere.
• 47:07
  And these different products like they're using Brazilian
• 47:10
  fish. Well, Sushi Isan is
• 47:12
  exceptionally has exceptionally globalized access into
• 47:16
  fertilizers, but the some farmers in Shiragawa and also
• 47:20
  Gold Coast show that we have talked to they only use local
• 47:23
  ingredients for their. Fertilizers.
• 47:24
  So it's really all like mostly blood, sweat and tears.
• 47:28
  But if you count take into account like the human factor,
• 47:31
  you can say it's very tower driven.
• 47:33
  But arguably this quality of tea can be grown anywhere.
• 47:37
  And even in the beginning, you know, say the Kuhn Papa is very
• 47:40
  surprised that it was sandy soil because typically clay soils are
• 47:44
  yield much higher quality, very full body teeth like she's
• 47:48
  experienced in other things. And that it's just a testament
• 47:51
  to how like the incredible craftsmanship that Suji San is
• 47:55
  doing to impart those flavors in spite of the soil quality in
• 48:00
  certain places. And it's about the decisions you
• 48:03
  make in the field to really maximize that potential.
• 48:06
  So we only got to spend one single afternoon with Suji San
• 48:10
  and we already learned tons and tons of new information from
• 48:14
  him. We left there a little
• 48:15
  overwhelmed a little. Overwhelmed, to be honest.
• 48:18
  Well, hopefully we can keep meeting him in the future and
• 48:20
  learn more, but it's just like like such like you realize this
• 48:25
  is such a tip of a iceberg by the end of the.
• 48:28
  Day like you hear about fertilizer being an art and like
• 48:32
  a skill and like all of this effort goes into it, but until
• 48:35
  you like really understand like this level of sophistication
• 48:41
  that goes on to creating such an amazing product, like you just
• 48:45
  don't fully appreciate it. And actually this is something I
• 48:48
  wish that the whole specialty matcha industry could do better
• 48:52
  is to describe like this level of insane effort that goes in to
• 48:56
  produce these flavors. Yeah, I agree.
• 48:58
  And very unfortunately, you know, this is one thing that a
• 49:03
  lot of the tea farmers do not want to be too transparent about
• 49:07
  is their fertilizer recipe. Suji San was being very, you
• 49:10
  know, honest and transparent to us, but you know, like it's I
• 49:14
  wish this can be something that's, you know, more widely
• 49:17
  available to consumers because like it's such a important
• 49:20
  factor or ingredient to the flavor profile of any matcha
• 49:25
  that's being farmed or conventional farming of matcha.
• 49:28
  I'm. Actually a little skeptical of
• 49:29
  claim that a lot of farmers are very cagey or secretive about
• 49:34
  their fertilizer recipe. I think that, you know, maybe
• 49:37
  between each other they don't talk.
• 49:38
  But I think if you show enough interest and ask enough
• 49:42
  questions, I think people will start talking and like having
• 49:45
  that be such an early conversation topic.
• 49:48
  When we went on there and everyone was just asking more
• 49:51
  and more questions, we kind of unlocked that level showing
• 49:54
  that, yes, we understand what you're talking about.
• 49:56
  We appreciate what you're talking about.
• 49:58
  And then we just kept being told more and more and more and more
• 50:02
  like it's all about unlocking these levels.
• 50:04
  And I think the reason, you know, you wouldn't tell it to
• 50:07
  someone who's not at that level is the answer.
• 50:09
  There is no fertilizer recipe. There is like 10,000 flavor,
• 50:14
  There's 10,000 fertilizer recipes.
• 50:16
  And it just so happens to be based on like 10, maybe more
• 50:20
  than 10 different factors, dozens and dozens of factors
• 50:24
  from the rainfall to how much you did last year, to how salty
• 50:28
  that batch of fish is, to how cold it was to the soil type, to
• 50:33
  how much iron was on it. Like all of these.
• 50:35
  And this is supposedly it's just the tip of the iceberg.
• 50:39
  It's really next level specialty.
• 50:41
  That's true. Way too much information.
• 50:43
  There is no such thing as a fertilizer recipe.
• 50:45
  There is no one fertilizer recipe, and if there is just
• 50:49
  one, it's probably not very high quality tea because they're not
• 50:52
  taking any of this stuff into consideration so it would be not
• 50:56
  super interesting or specialty. Oh no, I just want to learn
• 50:59
  about the fish that's indeed went from Russia or Brazil.
• 51:03
  That it's endlessly fascinating. So sort of on the opposite end
• 51:06
  of the spectrum. So this we're talking about
• 51:09
  probably one of the most famous quote UN quote single estates
• 51:12
  and in all of Japan for producing matcha.
• 51:14
  We also visited the largest and one of the oldest blend houses
• 51:19
  in Japan, Mario Q Koyama and you can schedule, you can ask to get
• 51:23
  a factory tour. I think this is the fourth time
• 51:26
  I have applied on their website for a factory tour and we've
• 51:31
  never gotten din. And this trip they were like,
• 51:33
  oh, you can come after. Actually, it was rejected first
• 51:36
  and then we got an e-mail saying it was an error, we can come for
• 51:40
  the tour. So we got lucky.
• 51:41
  So have low expectations for getting in the first time you
• 51:44
  apply. But we got in and we finally got
• 51:46
  to see it and I had heard good things about this tour, but it
• 51:49
  was very different from my expectations.
• 51:51
  It went way deeper than I thought.
• 51:53
  It is definitely an introductory tour, but we actually ended up
• 51:57
  learning way more than I thought and they were able to answer the
• 52:00
  questions in greater depth. We didn't go there specifically
• 52:03
  to learn about Matcha. I was really interested to learn
• 52:06
  more about Maruq Kukoyama at all of the shortages, all the
• 52:09
  counterfeit, the soon as the most drama is associated with
• 52:13
  Maruku. That's when we all realized
• 52:15
  there was a matcha shortage. When they put up that famous
• 52:18
  Instagram post and blog posts saying that they might run out
• 52:22
  of matcha before the end of the year.
• 52:24
  That's where it all started. So a couple of my notes from the
• 52:27
  tour is they spent a lot of time talking about traditional
• 52:30
  processing techniques for making tensha and specifically shiage
• 52:34
  processing. So taking a more crude version
• 52:37
  of tensha like ara tensha into millable tensha on an issue used
• 52:42
  to. And one of the things that they
• 52:44
  were talking about all this hand sorted stuff and I was like, are
• 52:47
  any of your products still hand sorted?
• 52:49
  Do you use these techniques or are they only for competition
• 52:52
  tea that's not commercially available?
• 52:54
  I mean, it turns out one of their most famous products, one
• 52:57
  of the most famous blends in their standard portfolio is
• 53:01
  called Tenju and it is hand sorted.
• 53:03
  So all of that Jiago processing is hand done and then it is hand
• 53:07
  sorted a leaf pie leaf by someone with chopsticks, which
• 53:10
  is kind of cool to know that they keep that alive and that
• 53:13
  it's commercially available. Currently are doing the harvest
• 53:16
  season or doing usually doing summer.
• 53:19
  You can apply for internships to help hand sorting all these
• 53:22
  things. So if you're feeling very
• 53:25
  inspired to help make Tanjiro, currently that opportunity is
• 53:29
  available. I don't know if you have to
• 53:31
  speak Japanese. So another thing that we've been
• 53:33
  talking a lot about on the podcast is this concept of the
• 53:36
  name of Ujicha and how Ujicha really isn't a single origin
• 53:40
  product. It refers to a much broader
• 53:43
  thing. So if you look at the trademark
• 53:44
  definition, it can be from any tea from Miyashika or Nara or
• 53:49
  Kyoto Prefecture. And we asked like, is this just
• 53:53
  Ujicha? Is it just Yamashir region which
• 53:55
  is the surrounding towns around Uji like Wazuka, Uji, Tawara,
• 53:59
  EDA, Kyoto, Nabe, Joeyo among others?
• 54:03
  And they said no, no, it's from 4:00 prefectures and they
• 54:06
  weren't even very shy about that.
• 54:07
  I was kind of shocked like we source our teeth from 4
• 54:10
  prefectures like that. Was it like very factual?
• 54:13
  Something I wanted to also get into.
• 54:15
  So there's ten different mainstream Maruq blends and I'm
• 54:19
  very curious about how and why they're 10.
• 54:22
  Why are there 10? There always been 10.
• 54:25
  Why did they add a new one like and they weren't able to really
• 54:30
  clarify like the OR justify the existence of all of these
• 54:36
  plants. There's probably is some
• 54:37
  historical reason, but it's not publicly available.
• 54:40
  Actually they were telling us a few generations ago there were
• 54:43
  only was it 5 or 6 matcha in their portfolio and two of them
• 54:50
  still exist in today's you know, tanned product portfolio which
• 54:55
  shares the oldest history. I think they are you can and
• 54:59
  Unkaku, but the portfolio just keeps rotating and expanding
• 55:03
  over the course of time and a lot of the products are actually
• 55:08
  end up getting named by either a high priest in important temples
• 55:12
  or by, you know, Yamoto's of different tea ceremony schools.
• 55:17
  So that was all very interesting, like very unique
• 55:21
  way does I guess doing guanxi management with some of these
• 55:24
  high status society SAT house. Anyone who is not the For the
• 55:30
  uninitiated, how would you describe what Guanci management
• 55:34
  means? It's a Chinese word.
• 55:35
  It is a Chinese word, but, you know, a lot of people probably
• 55:38
  have heard heard of it already. It's, you know, maintaining
• 55:41
  social connections basically. It's like networking, but way
• 55:45
  deeper and more genuine than the semantic connotations of English
• 55:50
  of quote UN quote networking. Yeah, I heard this subtle.
• 55:54
  I think at the career fair university, we were being given
• 55:58
  some Eric advice to quote UN quote, water our network and
• 56:02
  like reach out to like 10% of our LinkedIn connections a month
• 56:06
  and just say hello, how are you doing?
• 56:09
  How are your kids like very transactional watering my
• 56:13
  network. She is crunchy and crunchy
• 56:16
  management is like that but actually meaningful.
• 56:19
  Yeah, yeah. And you know, the matcha and
• 56:22
  channel Yu has been such AI guess a platform or a gateway
• 56:28
  for people to, you know, doing social network in Japan in of
• 56:32
  the past few 100 years. It was really at some point the
• 56:36
  only safe space for samurai or, you know, warriors or these
• 56:41
  generals in Japan to talk business amongst each other
• 56:45
  because you have to give up your weapon before entering into the
• 56:48
  tea house. So that's part of the, I guess,
• 56:52
  matcha as, say, a telescope into the constellations of complexity
• 56:59
  of social elements of Japanese history.
• 57:01
  Yeah, no, for sure. And it's interesting too.
• 57:04
  I was talking with an industry friend about, you know, the
• 57:07
  implications of adding a product to a portfolio and I made a
• 57:11
  really interesting point and it kind of half answers the
• 57:14
  question that I was trying to ask.
• 57:16
  The tour guide is like, why did these products exist when you
• 57:19
  only had six products and you had 7th product?
• 57:22
  Like what is the reason beyond like maybe wanting to build
• 57:26
  connections of having someone name it?
• 57:28
  Why did you decide to make that new taste and the 8th and the
• 57:32
  9th and the 10th? Like why weren't this other six
• 57:36
  good in like what was the impetus like in the just because
• 57:40
  there's so much interest, like what I'll call historic
• 57:43
  specialty interest there like understanding these poetic and
• 57:48
  they like you don't know the cultivars and back in the day
• 57:50
  weren't even cultivars. They were all zai, right?
• 57:52
  But the scale of blending is probably even more intent in the
• 57:55
  way that tea gets batched and harvested and then blended.
• 57:59
  That would be a really interesting thing to learn.
• 58:01
  Yeah, actually we did learn about something very interesting
• 58:05
  is that back in the days there are these special events hosted
• 58:08
  by Tashi's to invite important clients, usually summarize or
• 58:14
  very important high status people into their venue to
• 58:18
  select specific blends that they created.
• 58:22
  As you know, they're commissioned.
• 58:24
  So that's that was very interesting.
• 58:26
  And they have all these like very cute and, you know, well
• 58:30
  created illustrations of that specific scenes being had in the
• 58:34
  factory that we get to. See, yeah, that was very cool.
• 58:37
  And on that tour you get to see these historic scenes and things
• 58:39
  like that. So actually, in some ways it's
• 58:42
  very possible that each one of these products is actually a
• 58:47
  personalized blend to meet the preferences of a single
• 58:51
  individual. It's certainly the case for the
• 58:54
  Iyamoto endorsed products. It is a personalized blend to
• 58:58
  meet the preferences of what is almost always one man.
• 59:02
  And this is actually where specialty matcha and our rant
• 59:05
  about like more like inclusive approaches and how all the
• 59:09
  flavor profiles and quality decisions are for the
• 59:13
  understanding of what old Japanese men consider good among
• 59:17
  themselves and not paying enough attention to what's going on in
• 59:21
  the way matcha is being used in the rest of the world.
• 59:24
  Which is actually what the last part of this episode is about
• 59:27
  that our last experience. It really is the next level
• 59:30
  specialty. But before we get there, you
• 59:32
  know, this matcha boom has a lot of interesting implications.
• 59:36
  And we were, I asked them like, are you ever going to release a
• 59:40
  single cult of our product? And they said, you know, a lot
• 59:43
  of people ask us this. And we do aware.
• 59:47
  We are aware this was a very surprising and not surprising
• 59:52
  sentence and I sure that they would not tell us if they were
• 59:57
  planning on it. So they said no, we don't have
• 1:00:00
  plans to do it. I don't know if I believe that
• 1:00:02
  answer 100%. If anyone could take specialty
• 1:00:07
  to the next level, it's a blend house like Maruku Akoyama.
• 1:00:11
  And if you think about the amount of tension that they
• 1:00:14
  probably have deep in their warehouse from 4 different
• 1:00:17
  prefectures, from probably dozens and dozens of farms, from
• 1:00:22
  many different cultivars, and perhaps from different vintages
• 1:00:25
  and cold storage. Although they might have run
• 1:00:27
  through quite a bit of it during the matcha boom where they
• 1:00:30
  didn't have enough aged material because typically you want to
• 1:00:32
  age tension for a little bit and then you can blend it to get
• 1:00:35
  different profiles because it tends to mellow out as it ages.
• 1:00:39
  But they could overnight flip a switch and let's release like, I
• 1:00:43
  don't know, 1000 cans of like 2015 Asahi from Joel.
• 1:00:51
  They have the library and the depth and breadth to like make
• 1:00:55
  such a cool specialty that literally no farmer or company
• 1:01:00
  in the world has. And the amount of leverage that
• 1:01:04
  they have to be able to extract information from the farmers or
• 1:01:10
  like extract interesting information, useful information
• 1:01:13
  that they consider, as you know, important to the tea.
• 1:01:17
  Or control the flavor profile outcome to all the farmers.
• 1:01:20
  I wanted to taste more like this or I want you to do this.
• 1:01:23
  And just put those information on the label and educate
• 1:01:27
  consumers on, you know, how they understand tea based on their
• 1:01:31
  generations of knowledge in this industry.
• 1:01:34
  I think that will be something next level and actually see kind
• 1:01:38
  of see this kind of practice in some other regions in Japan.
• 1:01:42
  For example, sake, in a lot of these socket breweries in Japan
• 1:01:46
  on the labels, you can learn specific Koji that they use to
• 1:01:50
  inoculate the sake, specific rice cultivars, how polished the
• 1:01:54
  rice are, specific from specific fermentation methods, specific
• 1:01:59
  environment, moisture in the local venue, temperature during
• 1:02:04
  the fermentation. You can learn everything about
• 1:02:06
  the socket. And that's one of the most
• 1:02:10
  traditional industry in Japan. And they're doing something, you
• 1:02:13
  know, very transparent. And I think the tea industry can
• 1:02:17
  really learn something from them.
• 1:02:18
  I don't think these blends are going away, but you have to ask
• 1:02:21
  yourself in the next 20-30, forty years, we'll probably move
• 1:02:26
  from a world where there's a million like tea practitioners.
• 1:02:31
  I think there's about a million or a sink a tea practitioners in
• 1:02:33
  Japan at the moment. It's very likely.
• 1:02:36
  I don't know what the graph is, but if you look at the
• 1:02:38
  trajectories that that goes to half a million and that is an
• 1:02:41
  enormous difference. And then you project out even a
• 1:02:45
  few more decades. There is a structural decline in
• 1:02:49
  the tea ceremony, traditional audience of people drinking tea.
• 1:02:53
  And if a sophisticated enough market merges abroad that really
• 1:02:57
  appreciates matcha as a specialty product, they have the
• 1:03:00
  most power, leverage the structure, control all of words
• 1:03:04
  like this to unleash a level of specialty that we can only dream
• 1:03:10
  of that is literally only accessible to the chashi's at
• 1:03:14
  that single company and the handful of other traditional
• 1:03:18
  blend houses. In hearing the sentence, a lot
• 1:03:21
  of people have been asking this and we are aware.
• 1:03:24
  Is interesting, encouraging based on our past into reaction
• 1:03:30
  with a lot of these old legacy Japanese companies.
• 1:03:34
  That's almost a affirmation. You know, Maru Q also made a
• 1:03:39
  very clear point of mentioning that they are not afraid of
• 1:03:43
  innovation. Like they use some very
• 1:03:45
  sophisticated T processing equipment, including an
• 1:03:49
  electrostatic sorter. It was the first time I'd
• 1:03:51
  actually heard of that to help really clean up the tank job
• 1:03:54
  before it's milled as well as like a really sophisticated lab
• 1:03:59
  what really checks every single batch.
• 1:04:02
  The other thing that I was very surprised that, and that's much
• 1:04:05
  more specialty than I ever would have guessed, is that they
• 1:04:08
  indeed mill everything with a traditional stone Ishusu,
• 1:04:13
  including like the stuff that they put in mixed with sugar and
• 1:04:17
  their latte mix. They have a little can of matcha
• 1:04:20
  that has like a spice, a perforated spice lid so you can
• 1:04:24
  shake it. So it's like you can use matcha
• 1:04:26
  and like sprinkle it on some cupcakes without getting a
• 1:04:30
  sifter mess everything. I asked it like twice in
• 1:04:33
  different ways. Like there's no ball mills, you
• 1:04:37
  use everything for each. You used to even like the latte
• 1:04:40
  mix. Yes, crazy.
• 1:04:42
  That was crazy. That is an insane standard.
• 1:04:46
  Another interesting things is, well, like in the beginning of
• 1:04:49
  the tour, they showed us a kind of like a video of, you know,
• 1:04:53
  the history of tension making the history of Maruq and all
• 1:04:56
  that. And there's some pretty like
• 1:04:58
  long section of how much I can be used in other contexts like
• 1:05:03
  ice cream, cakes, confectionaries.
• 1:05:06
  Avocado Gelato was it was one of those things where, you know,
• 1:05:10
  you visit a 300 year old institution that most people
• 1:05:13
  would describe as really the most traditional and the quote
• 1:05:16
  UN quote, the most authentic, like much that you can get in
• 1:05:19
  Japan. And then all I'm thinking about
• 1:05:21
  are these like quote UN quote Karens on Reddit talking about
• 1:05:24
  how we shouldn't be using ceremonial grade tea on culinary
• 1:05:28
  applications or lattes for that matter.
• 1:05:31
  Here is the 300 year old company spending 5 minutes of this
• 1:05:35
  promotional video talking about all the different ways you can
• 1:05:39
  use. Very delicious is the topping on
• 1:05:43
  ice cream. Very delicious and cheesecake.
• 1:05:46
  And in their souvenir store in the factory, you can even buy a
• 1:05:50
  Bard of matcha soap. And you know, a lot of the, I
• 1:05:53
  mean, they do formulate for latte and some of them say like
• 1:05:56
  it's, you know, suitable for latte, which is also kind of
• 1:05:59
  promising. But you know, if you take a look
• 1:06:02
  at it, if you follow the standards of the Western
• 1:06:04
  Internet about all the things you need to look for to find
• 1:06:07
  ceremonial grade matcha, First Harvest, beautiful green color,
• 1:06:12
  it fits the bill. I think a lot of people who
• 1:06:15
  would blindly taste a lot of these confect the matcha that
• 1:06:19
  they're promoting to be used as a culinary ingredient would fit
• 1:06:23
  every box of a quote UN quote ceremonial grade matcha.
• 1:06:27
  So we both actually started laughing.
• 1:06:29
  It was almost awkward. In the middle of the video, our
• 1:06:32
  thoughts converged about just how ridiculous this would be if
• 1:06:35
  you put this up to some like quote UN quote Karen on the
• 1:06:38
  Internet complaining about the way people were used.
• 1:06:42
  The matcha The matcha they end up putting into their soap bar
• 1:06:45
  is probably better than the ceremonial.
• 1:06:47
  Grace that those terrors drink. But we hate this type of
• 1:06:50
  judgment and really take pleasure in these ironies.
• 1:06:53
  Yes, indeed, We don't rise above that.
• 1:06:55
  Well, that was our experience at MK.
• 1:06:58
  Very, very inspiring to in a different way.
• 1:07:02
  Yeah, actually we left there very energized and felt like we
• 1:07:05
  learned a lot. We really recommend, even if you
• 1:07:07
  know a ton about matcha to go on this tour.
• 1:07:09
  It's not very expensive and you actually get to taste some
• 1:07:13
  pretty cool matcha, the very beautiful little tea house
• 1:07:16
  inside. And the tour is really well
• 1:07:18
  done. And the tour guide, we asked her
• 1:07:20
  like, how long have you been working here?
• 1:07:21
  She was like 8 years. Like she is not like some random
• 1:07:24
  summer intern that doesn't know very much like her.
• 1:07:28
  The depth and breadth of knowledge about not only Matcha
• 1:07:31
  but about Maruq as a company was really deep.
• 1:07:36
  That was very impressive. She was.
• 1:07:38
  I was blown away. Actually.
• 1:07:40
  I was had very low expectations there.
• 1:07:43
  Well, because I kind of came in with what are could be
• 1:07:47
  considered kind of obnoxiously specific questions.
• 1:07:50
  So they're probably someone doing the tour guide wouldn't
• 1:07:52
  know, but it was not the case at all.
• 1:07:55
  Yeah, yeah, they I bet they'd probably rotate like these are
• 1:07:58
  actual staff of the of the factory.
• 1:08:01
  It was a very well done tour and they were very very nice and
• 1:08:05
  very just world class. Couldn't recommend it more.
• 1:08:09
  And we'll say English so you can understand.
• 1:08:13
  Very helpful too. All right, Dunjin.
• 1:08:16
  Last but not least, what was our next level specialty matcha
• 1:08:21
  experience in Uji? Well, it kind of happened over
• 1:08:24
  accidents. We were spending time with one
• 1:08:27
  of our tea friends from Mazuka, and then by the end of the day,
• 1:08:30
  as we were driving back to Kyoto, he kind of proposed that
• 1:08:34
  we spent some time in his friend's tea house.
• 1:08:36
  So we went to this wonderful place that we had no expectation
• 1:08:41
  than idea of Nakamura. We had heard about this place a
• 1:08:44
  little bit. We.
• 1:08:46
  Actually interviewed one of the staff who works at the bed.
• 1:08:49
  Yeah, Kungan, who was the first Thai Nihoncha instructor, first
• 1:08:54
  Thai national to ever achieve that rank, which is a really big
• 1:08:58
  deal. And, you know, he mentioned he
• 1:09:00
  worked at this place and they make fresh sunshine.
• 1:09:02
  We were like from frozen wet leaf.
• 1:09:05
  And I think that's interesting. That's what's pretty weird.
• 1:09:08
  It's different. Unconventional.
• 1:09:10
  That's. Cool.
• 1:09:10
  OK. Yeah, but after we after we went
• 1:09:14
  there, all starts to make sense, like they are doing something.
• 1:09:17
  Else that was crazy. So they actually special ordered
• 1:09:22
  lab scale sencha processing equipment and they can make one
• 1:09:26
  kilogram batches anytime. And the owner, Nakamura San, has
• 1:09:31
  very good relationships with tea farmers in like Guazuka, I think
• 1:09:35
  some in Kagoshima and Karishima specifically.
• 1:09:39
  And he goes there, he steams the tea, he freezes it at -60°C,
• 1:09:45
  packs it into blocks, keeps it in -60°C. -60°C.
• 1:09:53
  That is almost the temperature of liquid nitrogen.
• 1:09:55
  I think liquid nitrogen is -68 super cold faucet out, takes the
• 1:10:01
  wet leaf and then finishes the processing and 1 kilogram
• 1:10:06
  batches. And he's got tons of different
• 1:10:08
  cultivars, all sorts of interesting or sort of base
• 1:10:11
  material to work with. And the coolest thing is, is
• 1:10:14
  that he gets to make it like experiment with different
• 1:10:16
  parameters. And what's even cooler is that
• 1:10:20
  all of the equipments and all of the activities is behind the
• 1:10:24
  counter bar. Yep, everything is done in front
• 1:10:27
  of you. You.
• 1:10:27
  Can see it, you can now that you can touch it.
• 1:10:30
  People talk about multi sensory experiences.
• 1:10:32
  This is smell, touch, taste, see and hear all of this equipment
• 1:10:37
  in the backroom. The Sentra shaping machine going
• 1:10:40
  click clack, click clack, click clack.
• 1:10:43
  You can hear the Ishiusu motors going in the background.
• 1:10:46
  You can smell the beautiful fragrance in the air.
• 1:10:50
  It's really and then you obviously taste and smell the
• 1:10:53
  tea. Wonderful sensory orchestra,
• 1:10:55
  yeah. It's it's unbelievable.
• 1:10:59
  And the coolest thing is it's like the closest thing to a
• 1:11:02
  coffee roastery that we have ever seen where there's so much
• 1:11:06
  transformative value creating steps that are happening.
• 1:11:11
  You know, there's a really interesting line, I think it was
• 1:11:13
  from Zach Mungan's book, Zach Mungan of Kettle in his book, I
• 1:11:17
  think it's stories of Japanese tea and it says, you know, most
• 1:11:20
  tea farmers have get to process tea 30 to 50 times in their life
• 1:11:25
  if they're only producing once a year.
• 1:11:26
  They got 30 to 50 shots to learn.
• 1:11:30
  And what's so interesting about this is that you get 30 to 50
• 1:11:34
  shots probably every half year. If you can process in one
• 1:11:39
  kilogram batches and you have all this material, the amount
• 1:11:43
  that you can learn in the kitchen, all of that learning,
• 1:11:46
  when you have all of this miniaturized equipment in front
• 1:11:49
  of you, you can optimize things faster, you can change things
• 1:11:52
  faster. You can understand cause and
• 1:11:55
  effect relationships faster about what's driving flavor,
• 1:11:58
  what's driving quality, run experiments and run grids.
• 1:12:01
  And that's definitely what's going on there.
• 1:12:03
  Yeah. And it's not only just happening
• 1:12:05
  for Sancha, it's happening for Matcha too.
• 1:12:07
  That was so cool. And they're doing a lot of
• 1:12:11
  tension sourcing and they're also starting to transform
• 1:12:14
  Tanja, including to roast Tanja. Not as a hoji cha, but like just
• 1:12:20
  the right amount of roast stitch to bring up some very
• 1:12:23
  interesting flavor. High temperature, very short
• 1:12:26
  time, transforms some tea and imparts some crazy delicious
• 1:12:32
  naughty chocolatey flavors that we all love from places like
• 1:12:37
  Yami. And you can taste that.
• 1:12:38
  In comparison, you can taste the Unroast version and the roast
• 1:12:41
  version, which is very very interesting.
• 1:12:44
  And I've, we've had some very amazing, incredible experiences
• 1:12:48
  in Bangkok of having a cold whisked matcha.
• 1:12:51
  And so they, it's, it's low temperature extraction, no water
• 1:12:55
  is used. People just take milk and mix it
• 1:12:58
  with matcha. And we've talked about this in
• 1:13:00
  the past, but you can close your eyes and you would literally
• 1:13:03
  think you're drinking hot chocolate.
• 1:13:05
  It tastes like chocolate. Your expectation if you were
• 1:13:08
  blindfolded would be that the product is brown and it ends up
• 1:13:12
  being this bright green color. And we finally kind of
• 1:13:15
  understanding where those flavors are coming from.
• 1:13:18
  And they can be totally introduced later by this type of
• 1:13:22
  roasting because tried the unroasted version and the
• 1:13:24
  roasted version, exact same tension.
• 1:13:26
  The only difference is that they ran it through this roaster.
• 1:13:30
  Very high temperature, very short period of time, and wow,
• 1:13:33
  that sensory experience was replicated there.
• 1:13:36
  Like that is what specialty matcha should be like.
• 1:13:40
  Understanding that, holy crap this tastes delicious, what can
• 1:13:43
  we do about it? Well, it turns out you can
• 1:13:44
  produce those flavors on your own.
• 1:13:47
  And also just the fact that seeing this, you know, quote, UN
• 1:13:51
  quote, nicknamed Thai style latte being done in center of
• 1:13:57
  uji by local Japanese tea producers.
• 1:14:01
  It was super interesting. That was next level kind of
• 1:14:04
  culture exchange. I never was expecting to see a
• 1:14:08
  Thai style called Whist Latte in Uji done by a Japanese farmer
• 1:14:15
  and tea or former farmer and tea producer, Tea producer.
• 1:14:19
  Oh, he's a tea producer now and cafe owner Nakamuraisan in Uji,
• 1:14:24
  downtown Uji Central. And he loves it.
• 1:14:27
  And then he would add a little bit of sugar to it and say, wow,
• 1:14:30
  like now it tastes like like chocolate ice cream.
• 1:14:33
  Like the level of cross cultural exchange and seeing a place like
• 1:14:39
  the Thai appreciation, the Thai culture but for appreciating
• 1:14:45
  matcha swing back to Japan is insane.
• 1:14:50
  Yep, Yep. And just seeing how young
• 1:14:53
  Nakamura song is and how open printed it is is like really,
• 1:14:57
  really hopeful. Like this is like really the
• 1:14:59
  future of the next, you know, evolution of Uchimasha or
• 1:15:03
  Japanese matcha or matcha as a whole.
• 1:15:06
  That's really something that inspired a lot of hope and
• 1:15:10
  confidence. That's something that every
• 1:15:12
  single person in the world can do that has the ability to mill
• 1:15:17
  is this transformative step to get this what they would call
• 1:15:20
  hahika, this roasted smell which gives a lot of nuttiness in tea
• 1:15:25
  or a lot of chocolatiness in tea.
• 1:15:27
  So long as you have access to a roaster like this where you do
• 1:15:30
  quick high temperature and it preserves the color, it does
• 1:15:33
  make it slightly more yellow, but it's almost not even
• 1:15:36
  noticeable unless you make that comparison.
• 1:15:39
  You boom, that's where that flavor comes from.
• 1:15:42
  Has nothing to do with like other factors other than
• 1:15:45
  processing and maybe the cultivar that you use, maybe
• 1:15:48
  some certain taste characteristics different than
• 1:15:51
  others. But the fact that someone could
• 1:15:53
  do that, especially when those flavor profiles are really hard
• 1:15:57
  to find. Like my girlfriend, for example,
• 1:15:59
  loves this like Yami matcha nuttiness this intense, like
• 1:16:04
  hazelnut and chocolate aromas and flavors that can appear in
• 1:16:08
  tea. They're really difficult to find
• 1:16:10
  sometimes even like the most famous producer is Hoshino
• 1:16:15
  Secha. But like, where are you?
• 1:16:17
  Where can you even buy Hoshina Hoshino Secha?
• 1:16:20
  Like everyone sold out of their stuff.
• 1:16:22
  It's very hard to get your hands on, especially internationally.
• 1:16:26
  And if you do find it internationally, if you compare
• 1:16:28
  it to the Japan prices, but you realize that there's like a 5X
• 1:16:31
  markup on the retail price that it's available if you can buy,
• 1:16:35
  if you can find it in Japan. So the fact that those flavors
• 1:16:38
  can be turned retrospectively is is just so exciting.
• 1:16:42
  Yeah, very exciting. And some other interesting
• 1:16:45
  things that we end up trying is that a lot of the matcha that
• 1:16:48
  Nakamura Azam makes are naturally farmed.
• 1:16:51
  So it's more like tawad and cultivar driven.
• 1:16:55
  And we got to try some of the very like esoteric cultivar made
• 1:16:59
  matcha. One of them is Asanoka, actually
• 1:17:01
  the father of that. He is a Chinese cultivar.
• 1:17:05
  Even more cross culture. More cross culture, genetically
• 1:17:09
  speaking, which was very, very interesting.
• 1:17:12
  It has this like really interesting like fragrance oral
• 1:17:16
  notes that you would only find in some of the more fragrant
• 1:17:21
  Chinese tea in the coastal regions.
• 1:17:24
  And you kind of see that being expressed in the Japanese matcha
• 1:17:27
  was very, very interesting. And the other thing is just how
• 1:17:30
  open minded what Nakamura song is.
• 1:17:33
  We were kind of like bashing on Chinese matcha, you know, all
• 1:17:37
  these time and we finally end up discovering some of the OK or
• 1:17:41
  better Chinese matcha. But we were kind of talking
• 1:17:44
  about that doing a conversation with Nakamura Assam.
• 1:17:46
  And he like turns back to us and OK, try this, try this Chinese
• 1:17:51
  matcha and it would change your mind.
• 1:17:52
  He was like actually like very open minded about, you know,
• 1:17:56
  matcha being made elsewhere. We were drinking a Chinese
• 1:17:59
  matcha in the center of Uji being served at that tea house.
• 1:18:03
  I don't think it's on the menu but like he had it as a
• 1:18:06
  reference. Sound and and as a
• 1:18:07
  recommendation to us that he. This might change your mind.
• 1:18:12
  He thinks this is good and interesting, and what's more
• 1:18:15
  interesting is that after that matcha he pulls out a Thai.
• 1:18:19
  Matcha from Cheng Lai Kungan. Kungan brought it from Thailand,
• 1:18:22
  yeah. His colleague, yeah, but they,
• 1:18:24
  they were, they were also talking about this matcha being
• 1:18:27
  very interesting and had us try. It it was a Jin Shuang, which
• 1:18:31
  it's a milk oolong quote UN quote milk oolong.
• 1:18:33
  It's a Taiwanese. Culture which was developed in
• 1:18:35
  by the Thai Taiwanese Research Center, I think in the 1980s
• 1:18:39
  very common cultivar for high mountain oolong and it was Tana
• 1:18:43
  shelf shaded for three weeks hand picked Tanzumi in like I
• 1:18:48
  think December or January. I guess what it was like an
• 1:18:52
  appropriate temperature. It's a pseudo like autumn or
• 1:18:55
  winter harvest, which is super weird.
• 1:18:58
  And because Nadi matcha is very popular in Thailand, it was
• 1:19:02
  given a very high hika. So there's a lot of heat
• 1:19:05
  treatments and there's kind of almost it.
• 1:19:07
  It smelled almost like dried peanut powder and sort of this
• 1:19:10
  earthy roasted notes to it. And we tasted it and wow, it was
• 1:19:15
  good. They were both good.
• 1:19:17
  I don't know how well it was milled and it was a little bit
• 1:19:19
  pasty, but honestly, the flavor was was really stunning.
• 1:19:23
  And that was the I guess it was the second Thai matcha that we
• 1:19:26
  had ever had been very impressed.
• 1:19:28
  Yeah. I mean, having those two samples
• 1:19:30
  and just like they were like they're like other tea people.
• 1:19:33
  We call them like in Chinese tea culture.
• 1:19:34
  We call them cha Ren. Or in Japanese.
• 1:19:37
  Tajin, Tajin, like they're just generally interested in tea and
• 1:19:40
  like all of these judgments that get cast about fake matcha, real
• 1:19:44
  matcha, traditional, authentic, it's like, let's just let the
• 1:19:47
  product speak for itself. And it turns out like this tea
• 1:19:50
  is very delicious and seeing other open, we don't experience
• 1:19:54
  this attitude very much in Japan.
• 1:19:59
  So it was very refreshing. Very refreshing.
• 1:20:03
  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's honestly, it was a really target or tea
• 1:20:07
  people meeting. By the end of the day, we were
• 1:20:10
  sitting at the counter and we just had like, like this array
• 1:20:14
  of different trays and teacups laying on the table that we end
• 1:20:18
  up trying, you know, that's made by different cultivar, made by
• 1:20:22
  different farming techniques, like made by different, you
• 1:20:25
  know, countries. And, and, and that's was just
• 1:20:29
  like such a tiring moment because like, it's about
• 1:20:32
  sharing, it's about curiosity. It's not about like judging or
• 1:20:37
  being, you know, critical about specific definition.
• 1:20:42
  That was like being, you know, arbitrarily made by someone in
• 1:20:46
  the past. It was just genuinely curious
• 1:20:49
  and appreciating the diversity of different expression of
• 1:20:53
  communion sentences, you know, by by different people.
• 1:20:56
  And, and I think that that that's very important for the
• 1:21:00
  tea community as a whole and for us being part of the tea
• 1:21:03
  community is to like keep this curiosity and keep exploring.
• 1:21:07
  And this is also a really important part, I think, as the
• 1:21:11
  foundation of the creativity for a specialty product Movement,
• 1:21:16
  like a movement, needs to be a life and moving forward, you
• 1:21:20
  really need to preserve this precious credit that is getting
• 1:21:24
  constantly suffocated by all of these arbitrary rules and
• 1:21:28
  judgments, passing by other people or passing by some
• 1:21:32
  authorities. Absolutely.
• 1:21:34
  It's next level specialty, appreciating the product for
• 1:21:37
  what it is and seeing what can be achieved by the combination
• 1:21:43
  of creativity, curiosity about other TNT cultures and agency.
• 1:21:49
  All of this lab scale equipment. He owns an ishiyusu, he's able
• 1:21:53
  to roast his own tensha, he's able to go directly to the
• 1:21:56
  farmers, able to steam his own tea in a lot of cases.
• 1:22:00
  So that combination of resources agency in the form of equipment,
• 1:22:06
  creativity and curiosity is where specialty gets born, where
• 1:22:11
  all of these entrants interest. Human stories get told.
• 1:22:16
  It's not a can of ceremonial grade.
• 1:22:18
  It's not even a can of organic Ocala Midori, right?
• 1:22:22
  Like it's much, much, much, much more specific around all of the
• 1:22:25
  intent and the effort that goes into creating these fantastic
• 1:22:30
  products that ultimately tell a very, very interesting human
• 1:22:34
  story and product story. Seeing that in action in the
• 1:22:37
  center of Fuji is just so refreshing for us.
• 1:22:42
  It's humbling. It's makes us feel optimistic.
• 1:22:44
  It's like next level, a specialty.
• 1:22:47
  People are moving the ball forward.
• 1:22:49
  Yeah, yes they are. Yes, they are.
• 1:22:52
  And seeing that being pushed and done by people within Japan is
• 1:22:56
  very, very confidence inspiring. Like the specialty is very much
• 1:23:00
  well and alive here inside Japan, inside the birth place of
• 1:23:05
  contemporary matcha. And and I think that's really
• 1:23:08
  super important because, you know, as a lot of people talking
• 1:23:12
  about the whole specialty movement is as if, you know, we
• 1:23:15
  are patronizing a culture that's not part of us.
• 1:23:19
  Like we are as a outsider trying to influence a country's history
• 1:23:24
  and culture. But seeing, you know, they eat
• 1:23:26
  themselves being part of the player, I think it's very, very
• 1:23:29
  important. And that's what they say to act
• 1:23:31
  being from the outside is death, but the AG being break from the
• 1:23:35
  inside is new birth. And I think this is really the
• 1:23:39
  epitome of that analogy. We're seeing something being
• 1:23:42
  warned within this thousand years old culture and it's
• 1:23:46
  sparking something very, very. Delicious.
• 1:23:48
  I can't think of a better place to end.
• 1:23:50
  If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with
• 1:23:53
  The Front and we'll see you in the next one.
• 1:23:55
  See you in the future. See you.