Latest / Specialty Matcha Podcast / An Afternoon with a Chashi

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An Afternoon with a Chashi · Specialty Matcha Podcast

• 0:07
  Hello Ryan from the Future here. We're doing a survey.
• 0:10
  It's only 5 questions I've posted in the show notes, so if
• 0:14
  you're a regular listener, we would love to learn about what
• 0:17
  you like about the show, what you don't like about the show,
• 0:20
  what topics we should cover. If you have a moment, we would
• 0:23
  love to hear your feedback, good and bad so that we can improve
• 0:27
  the podcast. Thanks so much.
• 0:28
  Hello, and welcome to the Special C Match podcast.
• 0:30
  My name is Brian and this is Michael Ho Zhongjun.
• 0:33
  Hello. Hello also goes by Sam and we're
• 0:35
  the cofounders of Sanko Macha Products.
• 0:37
  Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey,
• 0:39
  Macha, share startup stories and interview expert.
• 0:42
  Today we have a very unique episode that we didn't really
• 0:46
  think we'd have the opportunity to get to talk about.
• 0:48
  So something we've talked about frequently, especially in the
• 0:51
  last season, is this very interesting profession called
• 0:54
  chachi or tea blender or Dee purveyors.
• 0:57
  And so these are the people behind the large traditional
• 1:00
  blend houses. They have people whose job it is
• 1:03
  to create new blends or to make sure that blends stay
• 1:06
  consistent. And other than hearing a few
• 1:09
  like bits and pieces and from people that have met them, we
• 1:12
  actually knew relatively little about their profession other
• 1:15
  than that it was very difficult in an art.
• 1:17
  Yeah. So actually my anticipation or
• 1:21
  expectation of these people has always been like a very
• 1:25
  traditional old Japanese grandpa, like with a lot of
• 1:28
  white hairs in this traditional, you know, Japanese dressing,
• 1:32
  living in the little Hut, doing some kind of, you know, like the
• 1:36
  herbal blending in a Miyazaki movie.
• 1:39
  Giant spittoon where he goes up, does his slurping, spits it into
• 1:44
  the bucket 3 meters away. Yeah.
• 1:46
  And then whispering to himself like, so, so, so, so.
• 1:50
  But yeah, so we met this person about a year ago, but at the
• 1:55
  time we actually didn't know that he is a chashi.
• 1:59
  Yeah, no idea. And I guess like, I guess
• 2:02
  partially because he is really not that image that we were
• 2:07
  imagining and the person was super down to earth, very, very
• 2:11
  transparent about all the knowledge that he has about tea
• 2:16
  and tea business and actually very business oriented.
• 2:19
  Yeah, very business oriented talking these, especially
• 2:22
  compared to a lot of other Japanese tea producers or people
• 2:26
  in various points in the value chain that we've interacted
• 2:30
  with. It was actually kind of
• 2:31
  shocking, especially being in like Kyoto Prefecture and
• 2:34
  spending a lot of time in Kyoto Prefecture where it's a little
• 2:37
  more traditional, little more like you need to be a little
• 2:39
  more culturally sensitive. People don't really say what
• 2:42
  they mean all the time to a world where it's like, wow, it
• 2:47
  almost feels like we're in China.
• 2:48
  Like it's just so direct. Very direct, very
• 2:52
  straightforward. And it it was really until that
• 2:55
  we start asking about very like deep questions related to tea,
• 3:00
  tea blending tea business that he starts to give us some very,
• 3:04
  very in depth and informative answers that I had the gut to
• 3:08
  ask him, Are you a Tashi? And he said yes.
• 3:12
  And actually he won the National award for Tashi.
• 3:15
  So he was the number one tea blending master in Japan one
• 3:20
  year. And he also happens to also be a
• 3:23
  tea farmer and apparently is one of about 5 or 6, apparently
• 3:27
  Tashi's that are also tea farmers and have complete
• 3:31
  knowledge all the way from agriculture to the finished
• 3:35
  product, which is apparently pretty uncommon.
• 3:38
  So we, the moment we learned that the poor guy, they probably
• 3:42
  got bombarded with like 100 questions from us over the
• 3:46
  course of lunch in the sea, generously drove us to, to the
• 3:50
  airport. So we took full advantage of
• 3:52
  every second to, to learn as much as we could.
• 3:55
  Because, you know, it's something that we've talked
• 3:57
  about on this podcast, especially last season, is that
• 3:59
  these, this profession within the tea community of these tea
• 4:03
  blenders and the work that they're doing is just so widely
• 4:06
  unknown. You know, in other industries
• 4:08
  you'll hear about like master roaster, master blender at a
• 4:13
  coffee house, you'll hear about people who do this in chocolate
• 4:17
  to make sure that chocolate is tasting consistent or unique or
• 4:21
  different, and a huge history of this in wine or even within the
• 4:25
  context of tea. It's also very common, you know,
• 4:27
  all the products that people love, like English breakfast,
• 4:30
  Earl Grey, all of these types of teas are blended products.
• 4:34
  And there's people somewhere in the world cupping a whole lot of
• 4:37
  tea and making sure that this slot makes sense in this blend
• 4:41
  and creating new blends as well. And so it's a really interesting
• 4:44
  profession. But in Japan, just like
• 4:46
  everything else, they kind of take it to a whole new level.
• 4:48
  So before we jump into this, Sam, why don't we talk a little
• 4:51
  bit about everything we knew about Tashi's before we had the
• 4:55
  opportunity to ask all these questions?
• 4:58
  Wow. Very little, actually.
• 4:59
  So they use a Don system. Yeah, it's.
• 5:02
  But historically, Tashi is really a social class in Japan
• 5:07
  that granted the privilege to use shaded cultivation for the
• 5:12
  gardens that that they controlled.
• 5:14
  And historically there were three types of chashi.
• 5:18
  Each was responsible historically for a specific
• 5:21
  segment of Tantra manufacturing and all the way serve it to the
• 5:26
  shogunate. So the border between those
• 5:29
  chashis kind of get fussed, you know, later on in the Japan
• 5:35
  slowly enter into the major restoration and actually there
• 5:39
  were chashis outside of the historical region that got the
• 5:44
  permission to also use shade the cultivation.
• 5:47
  Historical region, of course, being Uji, that's right where
• 5:50
  during the majority of the adults the only place where you
• 5:53
  could legally have shaded cultivation of tea that could be
• 5:56
  then turned into matcha. So.
• 5:58
  But apparently there were other regions probably stretching out
• 6:02
  into perhaps Huazuka, perhaps Uji Tawara that as everything
• 6:06
  started to loosen up saw some shaded cultivation.
• 6:09
  But we're having actually a lot of trouble proving that than any
• 6:12
  records or books that we've read but these.
• 6:14
  But I guess there was this last class of chashi as everything
• 6:17
  loosened up that helped from what you've read.
• 6:20
  Yeah, that's right. But you know, the, the, the role
• 6:24
  of Tashi is really to aggregate all of these crude material that
• 6:28
  they source from all corners of, you know, Kyoto Prefecture.
• 6:32
  But at the time, Kyoto Prefecture wasn't well defined
• 6:35
  yet too. So like any kind of places that
• 6:38
  they end up sourcing tea from, but they aggregated that into
• 6:42
  into into a single or a handful of products.
• 6:47
  Blended products and the idea is that they taste the same year
• 6:50
  after year after year. I mean, tea is an agricultural
• 6:53
  product and depending on weather and how much fertilizer you
• 6:57
  applied and how many days it was shaded, a pretty significant
• 7:01
  taste variations. So their job is to make sure
• 7:04
  that like hatsu mukashi every year from their brand, from
• 7:07
  their brand tastes like hatsu mukashi should.
• 7:11
  So something that David said, and I believe it was the last
• 7:14
  season of the podcast, David from Tizumi, the American matcha
• 7:17
  brand, is that a lot of these chashi's role historically was
• 7:22
  to understand both the agricultural practices that were
• 7:26
  going on in the cultivation and processing of macha and tensha.
• 7:31
  But their job was also to have one foot in high society.
• 7:35
  All of these nobles and feudal Lords and samurai that were
• 7:41
  consuming it. And they acted as this bridge or
• 7:44
  this conduit between farmers and people doing like, agriculture
• 7:49
  and labor and the people who were consuming the tea in what
• 7:53
  can be described as very affluent sentence in creating
• 7:57
  products for them. So their role historically has
• 8:00
  been that, but it has also slowly changed as Japan has
• 8:03
  changed. Yeah.
• 8:04
  But they still kind of still serve that role even till this
• 8:08
  day, like a very unique form, I would say, of client management.
• 8:15
  They're still responsible for creating special blends for, you
• 8:19
  know, different Yamato's from different schools and
• 8:22
  maintaining that kind of a Guangxi or relationship with all
• 8:27
  these, you know, very high class quote UN quote high class
• 8:31
  buyers, but within Japan. So you will see a lot of these
• 8:35
  plans being kind of endorsed by different Yamoto's with
• 8:39
  different names, but frequently they're actually the same
• 8:41
  product, but or they're slightly different depending on, you
• 8:45
  know, the Yamoto's own preference.
• 8:47
  Yeah, it's very unclear like how much iteration is done on behalf
• 8:52
  of these Yamoto's, whether or not they taste it and say Yep,
• 8:54
  taste good, I'm going to endorse it or if they're giving
• 8:57
  feedback. And we also heard from David,
• 8:59
  from Tuzumi from his samurai school of tea ceremony that he
• 9:03
  practices that their Yamoto does really engage back and forth
• 9:07
  with their schools Chashi giving them direct feedback about what
• 9:12
  they want to change within that blend that have apparently used
• 9:14
  Narino as one of like I believe 20 different blend components.
• 9:18
  So it actually gets quite complicated.
• 9:20
  But so there is some definite feedback, but there's also a lot
• 9:24
  of tea that is the identical blend and that's just given
• 9:27
  different names depending on who it was endorsed by.
• 9:30
  And actually it's, we recently learned this an interesting
• 9:33
  piece of tea industry gossip. A lot of these have names like 1
• 9:37
  was endorsed by one school of tea ceremony, let's say Amato
• 9:40
  Sanke, the others by Urasanke. And they have two different
• 9:43
  names. And then typically that blend
• 9:45
  also exists, has a different name within the same portfolio.
• 9:50
  It just doesn't have the endorsement.
• 9:52
  And typically it's much cheaper. It has a cheaper price.
• 9:55
  You are basically paying for the name essentially.
• 9:58
  So you have to be in the know to understand what's going on with
• 10:01
  these poetic naming conventions. So, you know, we talked a lot
• 10:05
  this about before. If you haven't heard, we
• 10:06
  recorded an episode called our Poetic Matcha Names Harmful from
• 10:10
  a consumer perspective. I still believe this is the case
• 10:14
  because you still don't hear any chashis in any of these large
• 10:17
  blend houses talking about the relationship between the poetic
• 10:21
  name. Which you know a poetic name
• 10:23
  should have deep meaning, but otherwise you would just call it
• 10:25
  an arbitrary name, which is what it basically is to to to most
• 10:29
  people. But if it's a poetic name,
• 10:32
  supposedly there is something behind it, some connotations,
• 10:36
  some reference to something. Maybe it's a fleeting thing,
• 10:40
  maybe it's a color thing, maybe it's a paste thing, or maybe
• 10:44
  it's a link to someone's very specific preferences.
• 10:46
  But you know, we just have no idea and people give it these
• 10:50
  random names, which is quite frustrating as a consumer from
• 10:53
  trying to learn anything. Well, from what I have been
• 10:55
  reading from all of those names, I can read some, most of the
• 10:59
  congies, if they're the names are in country.
• 11:01
  Sometimes they're not in country.
• 11:02
  Actually very infrequently that these names has actually have
• 11:07
  any implication to the product itself.
• 11:10
  It's usually implying like a like, like like a reference from
• 11:14
  the Tale of Genji or a reference from a, you know, ancient
• 11:19
  Japanese literature. And my suspicions is that these
• 11:24
  references are probably serve the purpose of kind of denoting
• 11:29
  a theme in the tea ceremony or tea gathering for a kind of
• 11:32
  attach a meaning to that. But you know, like frequently
• 11:35
  you know, you would actually learn the very little about the
• 11:38
  product itself based on the name.
• 11:40
  Yeah, it just doesn't say anything at all.
• 11:43
  So we've also learned before we learned this, we have asked some
• 11:46
  people that have interacted with Japanese Tashi, like how are
• 11:51
  they able to bind, identify things like how do they actually
• 11:54
  work in creating these blends? And what we've learned from
• 11:58
  Mark, from Ohika is that it's a self referential architecture.
• 12:02
  So they have this idea of like, let's say an archetypal
• 12:06
  Okumadori cultivar, for example, or an archetypal Yabukita or
• 12:11
  Samidori or Asahi or Uji Hakari or same, or any of the common
• 12:16
  cultivars used. And then based off of that
• 12:18
  reference point, they say it's more or less this one thing than
• 12:23
  the other. And then they kind of have that
• 12:25
  as like little drawers in their brain to stores references when
• 12:29
  they're evaluating new samples and anchoring to those
• 12:33
  references to decide how much they'll bid an auction for a
• 12:37
  particular lot or selecting a pre contracted tensha that
• 12:42
  they're buying from farmers and then blending into different
• 12:46
  products. And then supposedly using this
• 12:48
  framework to to try to make a good, well tasting blend across
• 12:53
  the attributes that they care about.
• 12:55
  There's still a little bit of a mystery and probably a question
• 12:59
  that I should have asked is that how do they keep that flavor
• 13:04
  memory up to date? Because, you know, all these,
• 13:10
  all these, you know, cultivars, depending on the weather,
• 13:13
  depending climate, depending on, you know, people's different
• 13:16
  usage of fertilizer will probably drift year by year.
• 13:19
  Indeed. But there must be some sort of
• 13:21
  mechanism. But, you know, like, it's also
• 13:24
  very interesting because, like, we, we learned about that this
• 13:26
  whole community inside Japan is actually quite small.
• 13:29
  Yeah. About 200 people. 200 people and
• 13:33
  and these 200 people like at least will all gathered once a
• 13:37
  year and a lot of these regional Tashis will have their own
• 13:42
  community, their own correlation and they're like in constant
• 13:46
  communication with. So here's an interesting
• 13:48
  question. How do you make sure that my
• 13:50
  archetypal Yabukita is the same as yours?
• 13:53
  Yeah. Across all of these other
• 13:56
  people, are they creating all like independent cousin systems?
• 14:01
  Yeah, probably like impossible. It's like for even for their
• 14:06
  regional access of different teas must be like different too.
• 14:10
  There's probably less value that these Tashi can extract from
• 14:15
  talking to another Tashi that's from the far away region, maybe
• 14:19
  some blending techniques. But in terms of the tea itself,
• 14:23
  I don't know. I'll put a question mark on
• 14:24
  that. Yeah, I mean, it's really hard
• 14:26
  to say. And the other difficult thing
• 14:28
  is, like, Sam, if you and I wanted to become Achashi, it'd
• 14:31
  be almost impossible. And apparently a lot of this is
• 14:34
  passed down from father to son primarily.
• 14:37
  Or like, you know, their brother's achashi.
• 14:40
  They're Achashi, their father's achashi.
• 14:42
  And part of the reason why it's almost impossible for anyone to
• 14:45
  come from the outside to learn the skill is 1.
• 14:48
  I don't think there's like, really a school where they teach
• 14:50
  this sort of thing. But also, it's almost impossible
• 14:54
  to acquire the references, right?
• 14:56
  So for example, we were just gifted another pair of
• 14:59
  fertilized and unfertilized tea from the same region, from the
• 15:04
  same producer, from the same harvest, processed on the same
• 15:07
  equipment. And unless you have that
• 15:09
  reference, like you're just not going to really understand what
• 15:12
  fertilizer does. And now you compound that across
• 15:16
  everything, the cultivars, the growing regions, the tension
• 15:20
  processing steps in particular, like where and how heat
• 15:24
  treatment is applied and have a huge impact on taste.
• 15:28
  How long it's been aging for, how well the tea was fertilized,
• 15:32
  the way it was shaded, the way it was picked, how long it was
• 15:35
  shaded, All of these things, whether or not you were picking
• 15:38
  a little bit too early or a little bit too late from a
• 15:41
  cultivar standpoint. Turns out that like most of the
• 15:45
  tea in Japan is not picked perfectly on the perfect day
• 15:48
  could possibly do because the tea factory is totally full,
• 15:51
  right? So there's a lot of like real,
• 15:53
  like physical, real world infrastructure constraints and
• 15:57
  they taste for that. Absolutely.
• 15:59
  And also like depending on the region, like different chashi's
• 16:02
  must have a very different accessibility to all the
• 16:06
  processing equipments. So Al Chashi has direct access
• 16:10
  to his own machineries to process tensha and does shiage.
• 16:15
  But for a lot of you know, other chashis, they probably need to
• 16:19
  work with the existing mechanisms, whether it's a
• 16:23
  cooperative or a different factory or a different company
• 16:27
  to to achieve the taste profile. So probably for some chashis
• 16:33
  they have way less control of the end product than others.
• 16:36
  So yeah, no, absolutely. And especially with access to
• 16:39
  references, because if you watch any of like the wine
• 16:41
  documentaries of people becoming like Master of Wine or the court
• 16:45
  of Master Sommelier, the biggest problem, one of the biggest
• 16:49
  barriers to entry is just accumulating and actually like
• 16:52
  being able to afford the references to say this is a
• 16:55
  California Chardonnay that has never seen oak from this year,
• 17:00
  probably from this region, right?
• 17:02
  Like you got to compound that across every single thing that
• 17:04
  matters in wine. And unless you're tied to some
• 17:07
  sort of institution like a restaurant or someone that has a
• 17:10
  deep, deep seller or you have your own deep pockets, you just
• 17:14
  never going to accumulate the references to be able to do this
• 17:18
  type of like master level tasting and master level work.
• 17:22
  And that's just talking about identification.
• 17:25
  And that has nothing to do with actually starting to blend
• 17:27
  things together and understanding the way flavor
• 17:30
  interacts. Not only the way flavor
• 17:32
  interacts as tencha when you blend it, but the way then the
• 17:35
  flavor is going to then be transformed into matcha.
• 17:38
  This is actually one of the most exciting things about our mill
• 17:42
  Sanko Usu One. We just launched a beta program
• 17:46
  for which mills matcha to five microns.
• 17:49
  It has a cooling system and even the shape of the matcha
• 17:52
  particles themselves are characteristic of an Ishiyusu.
• 17:56
  What's so awesome about this equipment is that the scale can
• 18:00
  now be people now have access to this infrastructure that are
• 18:05
  outside Japan and they can taste tensha and then immediately
• 18:09
  taste what it tastes like as which is so difficult right now
• 18:14
  because tension is not even available.
• 18:16
  But even now, as every new meal we have out into the world is a
• 18:20
  potential new person who can learn this back-to-back
• 18:23
  transformation within the value creation and the physical
• 18:27
  creation of matcha of what it tastes like from one step of
• 18:30
  processing to the next. That makes me so incredibly
• 18:34
  excited. Oh, yeah.
• 18:35
  It really unlocks a lot of possibilities.
• 18:38
  I mean, essentially, like people can do their own blends
• 18:40
  theoretically. That's a part of a very
• 18:44
  important value creation segment that has been so abstracted away
• 18:49
  historically from from you know, anyone that's outside of the
• 18:53
  industry because like even to this date, building a milling
• 18:57
  facility, acquiring all the those mills to get you to create
• 19:02
  the products, it's incredibly expensive even for people that
• 19:07
  lives inside of Japan, not to mention about people trying to
• 19:09
  import issue used to their own country.
• 19:11
  Absolutely. So Sam, what were some of the
• 19:13
  things that oh, actually I wanted to say one more point
• 19:16
  about things that we knew about Chashi and to shout out Koto tea
• 19:19
  space and they have a fantastic YouTube video.
• 19:22
  It's about 45 minutes long talking.
• 19:24
  I think the main topic was about like what is ceremonial grade
• 19:27
  matcha? And they're kind of
• 19:28
  deconstructing that marketing term.
• 19:31
  But he they referenced a particular book that is written
• 19:35
  in Japanese also talking about the work of Chashi's way back in
• 19:39
  the day before cultivars even existed.
• 19:42
  So to give everyone a little context, almost now everything
• 19:45
  that is produced is some form of cultivar.
• 19:49
  Just like we have different grape varieties like Pinot Noir,
• 19:51
  Chardonnay, same exists within tea.
• 19:54
  And the reason that we do this or the reason that the industry
• 19:56
  does this, one, it does create different tastes, but two, the
• 20:00
  tea is all within that cultivar is ready to be picked at the
• 20:03
  same time. So typically you have early
• 20:06
  cultivars like normal cultivars and late cultivars, and you
• 20:11
  stagger out. What tea, quote UN quote ripens,
• 20:14
  if you think about it, in the case of fruit, what tea is ready
• 20:17
  to be picked when so you don't clog your tea factories, it
• 20:21
  means that you can like be processing a whole lot longer,
• 20:25
  but still picking everything when it's supposed to be picked.
• 20:28
  But back in the day, everything was what we call zyri, which are
• 20:33
  a seed propagated tea. So basically the plants are not
• 20:35
  genetically identical and they're allowed to have some
• 20:38
  form of sexual reproduction, which leads to seeds and those
• 20:42
  seeds have a lot of genetic diversity.
• 20:44
  It's kind of like apples. If you take like an apple seed
• 20:47
  from a random apple that you eat, you're not going to get a
• 20:49
  honey crisp apple tree and you're going to get something
• 20:52
  else which might taste great or might taste horrible.
• 20:55
  And so very similar thing with tea.
• 20:57
  If you go to a xyri field, the shape of the leaves looks
• 21:01
  different, the glossiness of the leaves look different, the thick
• 21:05
  and thinness look different, how jagged they are all sorts of
• 21:09
  thing and and when they're totally ready to be picked.
• 21:11
  So Achachi's part of their job was actually to know the tea
• 21:14
  plants quite intimately and go around and they would also
• 21:18
  exhibit very different colors. And so they would go to some of
• 21:21
  the lighter plants and label it shiro, which means white.
• 21:25
  And those were picked and separated and sorted separately
• 21:28
  to create these pseudo categories.
• 21:30
  And they would label these different things.
• 21:32
  And that was part of their job is actually much earlier on the
• 21:35
  process. Before the the tea was even
• 21:37
  picked, they were already doing some categorization about what
• 21:41
  should be picked when and how, how it should be organized into
• 21:44
  batches during processing. That was arguably one of the
• 21:47
  origin of why some of the macha is called something something No
• 21:51
  0. Yes.
• 21:53
  Which is very interesting. I have three different reasons
• 21:58
  why, but that's one of the potential.
• 21:59
  Theory. That's one of the potential
• 22:01
  theory. And I believe the book is called
• 22:02
  Macha No Subite, which is one of the, I would say, most
• 22:07
  comprehensive book about, you know, different information of
• 22:11
  different history and different, you know, matcha making science
• 22:16
  and also a lot of historical records of how matcha gets
• 22:20
  produced in different parts of Japan.
• 22:24
  But the book I think is only available in Japanese and
• 22:26
  Chinese traditional Chinese. Traditional Chinese.
• 22:29
  Yeah, so but a very interesting book and also talks about the
• 22:34
  history of the three types of chashi, which I which I only
• 22:39
  happens to find two other sources also in Japanese on the
• 22:43
  Internet that also talks about that part of this.
• 22:46
  So highly recommend anyone to read this book.
• 22:49
  If you can. So Ryan, that was I guess, most
• 22:53
  of the things that we learned before we talked to our Chashi
• 22:57
  friend. So what do we learn after?
• 23:00
  Yes. So one of my first questions and
• 23:03
  I felt very embarrassed asking this, but thankfully I think we
• 23:06
  had built up enough rapport. It's like how accurate are
• 23:09
  chashis at identifying this? So like if they taste tensha,
• 23:14
  like how accurate is a normal chashi?
• 23:17
  It's saying, oh, this is from Wazuka conventional agriculture,
• 23:23
  meaning there was fertilizer and pesticide usage from Oku Midori,
• 23:27
  etcetera, a cultivar. And he didn't fully answer the
• 23:31
  question, but I will give you what we have gotten is it's
• 23:35
  talked about level of points. So this is the chashi system
• 23:39
  uses something called the Don system or like a belt system.
• 23:43
  Is it the like like in karate? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 23:46
  They use a similar system for like Kendall, like Japanese
• 23:50
  traditional fencing and you know, other art that has a
• 23:53
  ranking system. And apparently the lowest level
• 23:56
  is 1 done and the highest level is having 1010 level done.
• 24:03
  So he said for level 1 done, it's about a 50% accuracy in
• 24:09
  identification. That's as about accurate as
• 24:12
  flipping a coin well. Actually it's not.
• 24:15
  I mean it's about accurate. It's like flipping a die.
• 24:17
  I think with multiple faces it's a lot.
• 24:20
  I mean there's a lot of different possibilities where T
• 24:22
  comes from and different cultivars.
• 24:24
  Hey, I'd be happy with the percent.
• 24:27
  Well, I mean the kind of the the entry bar, the kind of is not
• 24:31
  not as high as I anticipated. Surely it requires some practice
• 24:36
  and knowledge. Yes, indeed.
• 24:37
  And apparently level 2 is about 55% accuracy, so not a very
• 24:41
  large jump. But I guess it's pretty
• 24:44
  difficult to hit a very accurate score because there's just so
• 24:49
  little standardized training material for anyone to be able
• 24:53
  to kind of practice and gain knowledge with.
• 24:56
  And the variation of all these materials are so large year by
• 25:00
  year. Yeah, and apparently they source
• 25:02
  a lot of these material from the competition collectively.
• 25:06
  So like, it's like a potluck, like everyone brings a bunch of
• 25:09
  references. Which?
• 25:11
  Was kind of an interesting, interesting point.
• 25:14
  After level 2, we have no idea, but we've heard from Mark from
• 25:17
  Ohika that after about level 5, you basically commit to doing
• 25:22
  this for the rest of your life, but you can like just kind of
• 25:25
  put your foot in the door on earlier levels of of Don and
• 25:30
  Chashi. I mean, we also know that Level
• 25:32
  10 is very, very rare and that they also hold the competition
• 25:35
  every year to see who's kind of #1 And it's very unclear if the
• 25:38
  competition has anything to do with the Don system because
• 25:41
  we've also heard there's like theoretical exams, but at what
• 25:45
  point and when and what it gives you access to is also a little
• 25:49
  unclear. Everyone seems to be very
• 25:51
  confused about how the system actually works, and we've talked
• 25:54
  to people who've been in the industry for decades and it's
• 25:57
  still we have a more clear picture, which is why we're
• 26:00
  recording this, but it's certainly very fuzzy.
• 26:02
  Yeah. But this, these competitions are
• 26:05
  held, you know, every year and in different regions too.
• 26:08
  So the regions kind of rotate from, you know, this year's in
• 26:12
  Shizuoka, next year is back to Kyoto, and all of the Chashis
• 26:15
  will participate in these events.
• 26:18
  And apparently the competition is very, very competitive.
• 26:22
  And it lasts for only a day. And we think that one day you
• 26:26
  need to do all of these blind tastings and things That is part
• 26:30
  of the examination criteria. So very, very competitive.
• 26:34
  How Tashi Friend actually described it with a very frowned
• 26:38
  face. Like if it's something that's
• 26:41
  hard memory, yeah. Probably hard on.
• 26:44
  Your stomach, probably. So one of my questions was, so
• 26:48
  right now we're like really learning about pesticide residue
• 26:51
  requirements for different countries because if you source
• 26:55
  outside the standard group of producers and tea farmers within
• 27:00
  Japan that have experience exporting tea abroad.
• 27:03
  So if you want to expand that circle to people that have more
• 27:06
  supply, but in exchange they have less, the reason they have
• 27:10
  more supply is because they have less experience exporting
• 27:13
  anything from from their stocks. My thought was, oh wow, you
• 27:17
  know, I wonder because we know within tea blending, you need to
• 27:21
  maintain flavor, you need to maintain color and you need to
• 27:24
  maintain cost. And all three of these things
• 27:27
  are like the things that you're optimizing around every year
• 27:30
  when you're creating these different blends.
• 27:32
  But then I thought, oh, wow, you also need to maintain compliance
• 27:36
  for pesticide residue because what's allowed to enter, let's
• 27:39
  say, like a very low compliance country like Thailand versus a
• 27:43
  very high compliance region like the European Union?
• 27:48
  I wonder, like these stocks must be differently available.
• 27:51
  And I wonder if you can take some very like medium level
• 27:54
  pesticide tea, mix it with a bunch of organic tea and get it
• 27:58
  to fall just below the threshold requirement.
• 28:01
  So I asked that in a much more simple way, and they said no,
• 28:05
  that actually this is really not part of a chashi's job.
• 28:08
  They do not focus much on at all pesticides or any form of
• 28:13
  compliance beyond knowing that the components they're working
• 28:16
  with already are compliant or not.
• 28:19
  Yeah. I mean, the gain of that is
• 28:21
  probably very low because like for places like EU, for a lot of
• 28:26
  these criterias, it's like absolute 0, like you cannot have
• 28:30
  anything related to certain items on the examination sheet.
• 28:34
  So, yeah, I don't know. And also for like accessibility
• 28:38
  on you know, testing equipments, you know, doing tea testing and
• 28:42
  all these chemical residual testing is very, very cumbersome
• 28:45
  and expensive. So it's probably not worth the
• 28:48
  gain of trying to do a compliance blending of sneak
• 28:53
  some of the non compliance things underneath the table.
• 28:56
  Yeah. It's actually very unfortunate
• 28:58
  how expensive this is because you know, unless you're doing
• 29:01
  very large volumes it literally doesn't make any sense
• 29:04
  economically. Do any form of pesticide
• 29:07
  residual testing. Apparently the thresholds is at
• 29:11
  least one to two KG of T. Sacrifice a lot.
• 29:15
  So and even in China, you know, we're in and out of China
• 29:18
  because we're developing and manufacturing this mill now.
• 29:21
  It's like, oh, got to be highly commoditized over here.
• 29:24
  But even in China costs I think 350 U.S. dollars plus all the
• 29:29
  sample that you need to part with. $300 yeah, just to test a
• 29:33
  very basic techless like if you get it to if you want to test
• 29:40
  the tea, if if the tea is EU compliant, you need to upgrade
• 29:44
  to a much more expensive package.
• 29:45
  But apparently too, if you're not, so long as you're not
• 29:48
  importing metric tons, a lot of the stuff flies under the radar.
• 29:51
  So everything is just built on trust and that yes, it's EU
• 29:54
  compliant. No, it's not EU compliant.
• 29:56
  And we've also heard from some people, not not this Chashi, but
• 29:59
  from someone else, that a lot of producers will just blend
• 30:03
  together a bunch of material that they're reporting and then
• 30:06
  send that off for pesticide residue testing to make sure
• 30:10
  that the average is within compliance.
• 30:12
  If they got audited, it wouldn't pass, but at least they can have
• 30:15
  some Peace of Mind that there isn't like, you know, something
• 30:18
  really horrific in that tea. We also asked about color and I
• 30:21
  like my specific question was like, what is the your
• 30:23
  vocabulary to talk about the color matcha?
• 30:26
  Many use two different descriptors.
• 30:29
  One is brilliant green. And then I clarified, you know,
• 30:32
  like Sami Dori, like a very light color called for.
• 30:34
  He said yes, exactly. And then he said deep green,
• 30:37
  which is, and I used Oku Midori as a clarification.
• 30:41
  And he said yes, like like Oku Midori.
• 30:43
  Oku actually just means like deep or profound in Japanese
• 30:47
  language and Sai like the IT means like bright or like very
• 30:52
  sharp. So they're descriptive.
• 30:54
  Very descriptive names actually, so that that that was actually
• 30:59
  very interesting. And they don't necessarily have
• 31:01
  the very kind of like a point system to describe the color.
• 31:06
  It's kind of, you know, arbitrary.
• 31:09
  Yeah. And from what we understand like
• 31:12
  because we tried to clarify this too, it's very little objective.
• 31:16
  Color measurement is done like any form of color imagery or
• 31:20
  direct like analytical measurement.
• 31:22
  But I guess that should exist or probably definitely exist at
• 31:27
  some point because you have all these, like, automated color
• 31:29
  sweater for tensha. You definitely, you know,
• 31:32
  someone definitely has the knowledge of how to set the
• 31:35
  machine to sort the color of, you know, all these tensha
• 31:39
  leaves. So I guess maybe that specialty
• 31:41
  is not part of Chachi's job. It's unknown, Yeah.
• 31:44
  Very unknown. Technically, I guess they would
• 31:47
  help maybe overseas parts of Xiage or maybe it's very context
• 31:51
  dependent whether or not they have any control over the Xiage
• 31:54
  processing. But you know, we don't know.
• 31:56
  We also asked like, are you friends with other Tashi's?
• 31:59
  Like what is the community like? But he says he talks to them all
• 32:02
  the time from all over, from different prefectures and that,
• 32:06
  you know, they're constantly asking questions to each other
• 32:08
  and sharing references. So there is an internal
• 32:10
  community as far as we can tell. Probably there is a secret forum
• 32:15
  you know somewhere that that is some sort of a Tashi haven.
• 32:21
  All easy you regulations, they're horrible, so difficult
• 32:25
  to make anything taste good for this market.
• 32:28
  That's funny. What's next?
• 32:30
  Oh, we asked him what his cultivars were that he was most
• 32:34
  excited about new cultivars when he talked about Kirari 31, which
• 32:39
  if you haven't had it yet, you absolutely have to go find a
• 32:42
  matcha or even a sencha or Gokiro.
• 32:45
  That's Kirari 31. Really worth it to have the
• 32:47
  reference. Tastes very good, very creamy,
• 32:49
  very interesting. And the other one is same, which
• 32:53
  I know they're doing a lot of growth in the Kagushima on.
• 32:56
  Yeah. And we also asked him about
• 32:57
  what's his opinion about this recently popular new cultivar
• 33:02
  for matcha. And it's not a new cultivar for
• 33:03
  tea, but new cultivar for matcha is Sayama Kaori.
• 33:07
  And he said that, you know, it's definitely doesn't carry a lot
• 33:11
  of the traditional matcha characteristic.
• 33:13
  It's more bitter and stringent, but the flavor is very complex.
• 33:17
  So we actually end up procuring a bag of Salma Cowley tensha.
• 33:22
  So we are going to melt that into macho powder with our
• 33:26
  machine and see if it's indeed, you know, good or bad.
• 33:29
  And something that we are doing in sort of our attempt to help
• 33:32
  people not necessarily become chashis, but at least start
• 33:35
  deconstructing and self teaching the skill of learning to taste
• 33:40
  different tensha on different tensha samples.
• 33:42
  And we're going to be launching something akin to like a Tensha
• 33:44
  library where we're going to unbundle these, these like 1 to
• 33:49
  2K reference bags that we have into probably 25 or 50G sample
• 33:54
  to make available to anyone, not just mill owners.
• 33:56
  And so if you want to try this at some point in the near
• 34:00
  future, it will be on our website and you'll be able to
• 34:03
  order it and have that taste reference.
• 34:05
  One thing that the quite surprised me after talking to
• 34:09
  our Chashi friend, well, after learning that he's a Chashi is
• 34:13
  how like not cagey they are. Like we have this kind of
• 34:19
  anticipation of these, you know, Tashi's being having their own
• 34:23
  language, their own society, their own culture, But it's it's
• 34:27
  really not that. Like he's very transparent about
• 34:30
  all the knowledge that he has. And he's also very open about
• 34:33
  the idea of, you know, other people doing the blending
• 34:36
  themselves. So I think with our machine, we
• 34:39
  can really unlock the freedom or the possibility of, you know,
• 34:42
  everyone to at least be able to try doing blending.
• 34:46
  Like, you know, not everyone will be a good tea blender or a
• 34:50
  good chashi, but you know, everyone needs at least needs to
• 34:53
  have the opportunity to learn and try to become one.
• 34:57
  And I think that's very important and very healthy for,
• 34:59
  you know, this whole specialty matcha movement.
• 35:03
  So one of our recent podcast recordings, we talked about the
• 35:06
  concept of currency of trust. And something that we got to
• 35:10
  towards the end of the episode is that, you know, Japan has a
• 35:13
  very unique culture in many, many respects.
• 35:16
  But one of the more important ones is the respect for
• 35:20
  authority and the respect for like people who are at some
• 35:25
  level higher status than you because of age or because of
• 35:28
  some other factor. And that, you know, we were
• 35:31
  mostly talking think about currency of trust in can I trust
• 35:34
  you that this is labeled correctly or comes from this
• 35:37
  particular region, etc. But also the currency of trust
• 35:40
  sometimes means not asking questions.
• 35:43
  If one of the best clients in Kyoto walks into Leola and comes
• 35:48
  in and goes to the main manager and asks to know what are the
• 35:53
  cultivars in this hatsu mukashi this season, the there could be
• 35:58
  an implication that he does not trust the judgement or that he
• 36:03
  is somehow questioning the quality of that land or what
• 36:07
  went into it or the work that these people are doing.
• 36:10
  So the people who work retail tend to be extremely defensive.
• 36:14
  If you walk into Poto or Maruchi Kalyanayan or any of these
• 36:19
  traditional blunt houses, or even go to the live streams that
• 36:22
  some of these producers have, you'll see in the comments
• 36:25
  people will ask like, oh, where is this tea from?
• 36:27
  And they'll say, oh, it's proprietary, we can't tell you,
• 36:30
  blah, blah, blah. But it seems that that is like
• 36:32
  one level below the chashi. But I think part of this is the
• 36:36
  culture of asking questions is a culture of being skeptical.
• 36:40
  And in the West we see this is healthy and educational
• 36:43
  understanding it. But in the East, in particular
• 36:46
  in Japan, it might be perceived as questioning someone's
• 36:50
  judgement. Like, who are you to ask me
• 36:52
  that? But I'm Achashi or I, I, you
• 36:55
  know, we're a 300 year old company.
• 36:57
  Like, why do you need to know what these cultivars are?
• 37:00
  I'm not saying that's what they're thinking, but I bet a
• 37:03
  large part of the reason why this culture has lasted for so
• 37:06
  long, it's because it would be incredibly culturally
• 37:10
  inappropriate to start asking so many questions and poking and
• 37:13
  prodding to learning about matcha as a prod product.
• 37:16
  What do you think about that, Sam?
• 37:18
  Yeah. It's possible.
• 37:20
  And I think that the intention of asking those questions really
• 37:25
  matter in communication of intentions is a very important,
• 37:31
  I would say art of Japanese culture demonstrating tensions
• 37:36
  and you know, like clarifying your curiosity before asking
• 37:39
  those questions. I mean, we, we end up getting a
• 37:42
  lot of honest and informative answers after we show that to a
• 37:46
  lot of people in Japan that we interact with.
• 37:52
  Yeah, I agree. Yeah, attention matters.
• 37:54
  And I think historically, why, you know, this part of their job
• 37:59
  or the knowledge of tea blending or the knowledge about tea
• 38:03
  cultivars so marginalized, I think it has really something to
• 38:07
  do with how farming as a practice or as a social class
• 38:11
  being perceived in the Japanese society historically.
• 38:15
  It's never something that is part of the, you know, literati
• 38:19
  or the higher class people's topic.
• 38:22
  Like they don't care about what the farmers are doing in the
• 38:25
  field. You know, they care about, you
• 38:27
  know, the artistic theme of the tea gathering.
• 38:30
  They care about, you know, the very interesting Song dynasty or
• 38:33
  Tang dynasty ceramic they end up procuring.
• 38:36
  They care about, you know, the, the guests within the same tea
• 38:40
  gathering and, you know, the information or the decision that
• 38:44
  that end up getting made on that day.
• 38:47
  So they they probably don't necessarily care about, you
• 38:50
  know, if this tea is, you know, being made of a very specific
• 38:55
  cultivation farming method that, that, that, that, you know, the
• 38:58
  farmers are doing. Yeah, I certainly agree.
• 39:02
  And I think maybe that just most Japanese consumers just don't
• 39:05
  care and in general, and it wasn't until recently that more
• 39:09
  foreigners got interested in matcha.
• 39:11
  And when you come in as a foreigner and you start
• 39:14
  bombarding these salespeople or retail people, more people that
• 39:17
  you're trying to source from with all of the questions,
• 39:20
  sometimes intention is incredibly difficult to
• 39:23
  communicate and it can feel like you're questioning someone's
• 39:26
  judgement or trying to replicate a blend or who knows what.
• 39:29
  Yeah, Because, you know, like I feel like there is some, I would
• 39:33
  say a misalignment of a lot of criteria that people care about
• 39:37
  in terms of if there are like a quality indicator, like the idea
• 39:42
  of something being single origin, the idea of something
• 39:45
  being truly, truly like a local. Like this is T from Wuji, not
• 39:51
  just Wuji tea. I think it's like a very new
• 39:54
  thing, a new concept, a new thing that people care about and
• 39:57
  the new thing that people perceive as a quality indicator.
• 40:00
  Like historically, people who makes matcha in Japan do not
• 40:05
  care about all these things. And the consumers do know that
• 40:09
  the consumers do not care about it.
• 40:11
  Like it's really like all of these concept I would say.
• 40:15
  Probably is largely driven by people that that that lays
• 40:19
  outside of Japan. Like all of these single origin,
• 40:21
  single Kosovar, this tawat concept came from wine, came
• 40:24
  from coffee. Like, yeah.
• 40:26
  So like when, when you kind of ask if the tea is whether or not
• 40:31
  just single origin, whether or not a single cultivar, sometimes
• 40:35
  you can sense a level of frustration from these tea
• 40:38
  farmers or these, you know, tea, tea tea houses that you know,
• 40:43
  wow, this guy Jean is trying to use this to kind of access the
• 40:47
  quality of my tea. But like, you know, like that's
• 40:51
  that has never been a quality indicator for Japanese matcha
• 40:54
  historical. That's that's actually an
• 40:57
  invention from a non Japanese person.
• 41:00
  Indeed, indeed. So actually, I have a very good
• 41:03
  segue off of this is that, you know, something that we're going
• 41:07
  to talk about more and more in season 4 is that Uji Cha Uji
• 41:10
  Macha does not come from Uji. At least most of it does not
• 41:14
  even though Uji is the historic growing region.
• 41:16
  And like during the Edo period, for example, and there were the
• 41:19
  only people who are really given the license to do shaded
• 41:22
  cultivation at all. But anything that comes from
• 41:25
  Narashige or Mia prefectures in Kyoto Prefecture can be called
• 41:29
  Ujimacha. And so long as the shiage
• 41:31
  processing is done in anywhere in Kyoto Prefecture, it is
• 41:36
  allowed to fall under the Ujimacha trademark.
• 41:40
  I apologize for all those words, but this is actually indeed very
• 41:43
  complicated when you try to work backwards, like what in the
• 41:48
  world is Ujimacha? So one of our sourcing
• 41:51
  strategies is this is interesting.
• 41:54
  Let's just go to Nara, Shige and Nye, buy the tea before it
• 41:57
  enters Kyoto Prefecture. Maybe we can get a better price
• 42:01
  for it because it's not being blended.
• 42:03
  It's no longer than magically turned into ujimacha.
• 42:07
  So we were asking him like, is this a good strategy, something
• 42:11
  that we should be doing? And he told us something very
• 42:13
  interesting. And RSI gay guy and me, I don't
• 42:16
  have a regional auction system, but they can participate in the
• 42:21
  national auction. But it's a very High Commission
• 42:23
  auction, unlike these other prefectural auctions that take
• 42:27
  place, which it's much more economically beneficial.
• 42:29
  So it's actually much more profitable for tea farmers in
• 42:33
  these regions to have direct contracts with Kyoto based
• 42:37
  companies, which means that there's almost no leftover
• 42:41
  material that can be labeled as specifically coming from Nara,
• 42:45
  MIE or Shiga prefectures. There are some producers that do
• 42:49
  it and you'll we'll find a few handfuls, but it's not any
• 42:52
  larger meaningful volume. It literally all just gets
• 42:56
  turned into ujimacha because it gets sold to the Kyoto pre the
• 43:01
  Kyoto companies wholesalers. So there's a lot of actual
• 43:04
  structural barriers here, but there's a very interesting piece
• 43:07
  of industry gossip that it is basically nearly impossible to
• 43:11
  source tension at any meaningful volume from those prefectures.
• 43:14
  Yeah, Ryan, you said something very memorable as we were
• 43:17
  walking in the city of Wuji. Is that use?
• 43:21
  He said that this is the place produce the words masha and none
• 43:25
  of it. Produce all of the world's Uji
• 43:27
  matcha and almost none of it on Uji Main Street.
• 43:30
  There's only two produce on the direct Main Street, only two of
• 43:35
  the stalls are from actual tea farmers that actually grow
• 43:37
  things that are actually grown within Uji or the rest of it,
• 43:41
  you know who knows big roll of the dice.
• 43:43
  And then of course, slightly off the street, you have Harishi
• 43:45
  Shimei and of course they're local as well.
• 43:48
  So within Uji City, you know, there's there are others, but on
• 43:52
  the Main Street there's just those two, which is actually a
• 43:55
  really sad story, very sad. And we also learned from a wuji
• 43:59
  tea farmer segwayed from the topic of the conversation with
• 44:04
  our chashi friend. But there's no auction system
• 44:07
  within Wuji. So all of these Wuji tea,
• 44:11
  whether or not is truly from Wuji or from all of the other,
• 44:14
  you know, cities and areas surrounding Wuji, is that they
• 44:17
  also get contracted away to all of these large tea shops or tea
• 44:23
  brands. Well, not even contracted, just
• 44:25
  like historically have worked with.
• 44:27
  Yeah, commissioned, contracted, but there's no actual contract
• 44:31
  being signed. It's all like very, very shady.
• 44:34
  Like, like, of course you know, the farmers can say no to these
• 44:37
  tea shops, but you know the moment they say no, they are
• 44:40
  getting boycott and blacklist by the entire local agricultural
• 44:45
  system. Yeah, apparently then if they
• 44:47
  say no to the wholesalers, then if they try to take it to
• 44:50
  auction, it's a little unclear what the ramifications were, but
• 44:55
  it didn't sound like that was a realistic option.
• 44:57
  They wanted to take it to the Kyoto Prefecture auction because
• 45:02
  this year there were some very strange dynamics where because
• 45:05
  the wholesalers, which largely consist of these tashi, set the
• 45:09
  price for that material, a lot of it's hand picked tazumi tea
• 45:14
  from Uji city proper was selling for less than machine cut
• 45:21
  Wazooka tea, you know? Can go through the local
• 45:26
  auction. System that goes through the
• 45:27
  auction system because it's a little bit more of a free market
• 45:30
  and you know, people can can buy it for what it's worth.
• 45:34
  Yeah, but the defense of, you know, the reason why this system
• 45:38
  exists is that historically, especially when matcha was
• 45:42
  largely being ignored by the society and is was a indeed
• 45:48
  dying art. In the past it was all these tea
• 45:52
  companies who, you know, consistently paying all these
• 45:54
  farmers. Is a lifeline.
• 45:56
  Yeah, to to get them to survive to these days.
• 45:59
  And still to this day into the future, like if the whole market
• 46:02
  slumps and it gets so small, they will have a buyer.
• 46:06
  Even though we're in a bull market, it's fine and it looks
• 46:09
  like a horrible injustice. But in a market that's
• 46:12
  declining, it's actually a pretty interesting saving grace,
• 46:16
  particularly because these traditional blend houses have
• 46:19
  such strong tide to the tea ceremony schools and to other
• 46:23
  very important cultural institutions where they're
• 46:26
  probably always going to have buyers.
• 46:29
  Even as Japan ages and it's a shrinking population and fewer
• 46:33
  and fewer tea ceremony practitioners are doing anything
• 46:36
  active, it's still probably enough to support the
• 46:40
  traditional, the matcha industry, especially the stuff,
• 46:42
  the best stuff that's coming out of Uji proper.
• 46:45
  So that was super interesting. So it's nearly impossible to
• 46:49
  source anything from Nara or she got not impossible, just like
• 46:53
  not a whole lot of volume in the same way that you can get out of
• 46:57
  other places. So we also learned about a
• 46:59
  relatively untalked about thing we we don't talk much about on
• 47:05
  this podcast, but Amacha has to come from Tensha, which is
• 47:08
  shaded, unrolled, deemed green tea.
• 47:12
  It was like the shortest definition and D stemmed and
• 47:15
  deveined. That's about the shortest
• 47:16
  definition that I can come up with.
• 47:18
  But there's also something called moga cha and it's
• 47:21
  primarily used for green tea powder.
• 47:23
  But apparently more and more and more moga cha is getting slicked
• 47:27
  and blended into different bunch of products.
• 47:29
  And it's basically you process tensha the same way you would
• 47:33
  process sencha with the same equipment.
• 47:35
  You just turn off the rolling equipment so it heats it, it
• 47:39
  steams it, it dries it, but it doesn't go through the rolling
• 47:42
  step where you're breaking open the cell walls, extracting those
• 47:46
  flavors, getting it ready for loosely fruit tea.
• 47:48
  Instead, all the flavors, quote UN quote, locked inside the cell
• 47:51
  walls doesn't go through the rolling.
• 47:53
  And we've heard that Mogacha has increased its production by 5
• 48:00
  year on year, both to support the quote UN quote green tea
• 48:04
  powder, but also some of this moga Moga cha does come from
• 48:08
  shaded cultivation and gets blended in.
• 48:10
  We've heard a few percent here, a few percent there into Matcha,
• 48:15
  different matcha products. Yeah, these are well, I would
• 48:18
  say indeed inferior products or inferior fillers for for matcha.
• 48:23
  And you're not not too confused with another tea called Toshi
• 48:28
  Cha, which are, you know, flavorless or like very
• 48:32
  uncharacteristic, but actual tension that, you know,
• 48:35
  historically Tashi uses to increase the volume of a tan cha
• 48:40
  batch. So we also asked our Tashi
• 48:42
  friend, so like if you want to indeed blend mogacha with a
• 48:46
  batch of tan cha but still maintain the quality standard,
• 48:49
  what is like kind of the portion that you would?
• 48:52
  Like how much can you get away with or with like medium quality
• 48:55
  tan cha? Like say you have some like very
• 48:58
  normal tan cha, it's a really good ones.
• 49:00
  Like what's the threshold? Yeah.
• 49:03
  So apparently 30% mortgage, 17% like good Tancha is something
• 49:09
  that they will consider a safe. Yeah, 3070 or like mediocre
• 49:13
  Tancha, Yeah and 70% good, which is actually way less than I
• 49:18
  thought does like you know, it produces can produce a lot more
• 49:22
  volume, but I actually would have assumed something closer to
• 49:24
  5050, but it doesn't seem to be the case.
• 49:28
  So we actually end up being given back of Mogasha from a
• 49:33
  unnamed donor of such interesting sample and we are
• 49:37
  going to meld it and see how exactly.
• 49:40
  It looks and smells good. It does.
• 49:42
  Doesn't look like tensha but it's very dark and the leaves
• 49:47
  are slightly folded over on each other and very choppy.
• 49:51
  But it smells good and it looks good.
• 49:53
  Yeah, yeah. And it's actually not as veiny
• 49:55
  as I expect. It looks totally millable on an
• 49:59
  issue so it's not so woody or full of stems or veins, so it's
• 50:02
  actually very promising. Very promising.
• 50:05
  Because it's much easier because you know, if you don't have
• 50:07
  access to a tensha processing facility, you can make this
• 50:11
  stuff on a Sencha processing facility, which really decreases
• 50:17
  the amount of infrastructure and speed and timing that you need
• 50:21
  to help fulfill this boom. Because if it tastes good,
• 50:24
  honestly, who cares? Especially in like most
• 50:28
  consumption scenarios. No, Ryan, it's not true matcha.
• 50:32
  It's a Gray area, kind of, but a lot of quote UN quote matcha
• 50:35
  even we've heard from the traditional players uses a lot.
• 50:39
  They use a lot of Mogachar's filler.
• 50:41
  Yeah, well, honestly, like from a color and you know, smell
• 50:45
  standpoint, it's better than most of the ten shot that we saw
• 50:49
  in China. Like those tea were actually,
• 50:51
  you know, like even Japanese cultivars and being processed by
• 50:54
  Japanese machine. But you know, honestly, this
• 50:57
  Mogachar looks very promising. But you know, we need to taste
• 51:00
  it before we make any real judgments.
• 51:02
  Something that I asked about too is steaming time because you
• 51:05
  hear that like part of the art and the science of making
• 51:08
  tension production, steaming is so important.
• 51:10
  And like the idea of like a deep steamed or Fukumushi tensha, no
• 51:14
  one really talks about it. I mean, apparently like it's
• 51:16
  really you have seconds like like a single second can like
• 51:20
  change the optimization that and the flavor transformation in
• 51:25
  that leaf. And I asked, like, does anyone
• 51:27
  do deep? Does anyone like do deep
• 51:31
  steaming or like slightly more than deep steaming?
• 51:34
  And what happens to the taste? And he said that the taste
• 51:38
  actually improves to some extent, but it destroys the
• 51:43
  color. It turns yellow and brown and
• 51:45
  you don't get that bright green. And he also says that it
• 51:48
  destroys a lot of like inherent characteristics.
• 51:51
  Yeah, the complexity of the leaf.
• 51:53
  Like the the flavors of a, you know, Uji, Hikari or an asaki
• 51:58
  will kind of all be mellowed out.
• 51:59
  It's like over roasting coffee, right?
• 52:01
  It just all starts to taste like roasted coffee after a while.
• 52:05
  Apparently same thing with deep steamed tea to some extent.
• 52:08
  But he also told us that yame in general does steam slightly
• 52:12
  longer and give it a lighter toast.
• 52:14
  And actually it's pretty interesting.
• 52:15
  Abby are the matcha scientists did some color imagery on a
• 52:19
  bunch of Fuji samples and a bunch of Yame samples and
• 52:22
  quantum quantifiably and was able to conclude that the Yarmi
• 52:25
  samples are much less green. And this is part of the reason
• 52:29
  why. But it actually doesn't mean
• 52:31
  that they're lower quality. This quality thing with color is
• 52:34
  very complicated because it can be driven by the cultivar
• 52:38
  because some colors are naturally lighter and darker
• 52:40
  than others, like brilliant green versus deep green.
• 52:44
  How long it was steamed for, any type of roasty, toasty step that
• 52:48
  it went through, how old the tea was after it was.
• 52:53
  I mean, even the water temperature that you can prepare
• 52:56
  it with can change the color. It's there's a lot of factors.
• 52:59
  Yeah, and also how fine the powder gets milk.
• 53:01
  Oh. That too, yeah.
• 53:04
  Yeah, it's very interesting. And honestly, you know, like if
• 53:07
  it doesn't impact the taste of the matcha, like I would much
• 53:11
  rather have a better tasting matcha versus a greener matcha.
• 53:15
  Absolutely. So we have two more points
• 53:17
  before we conclude this. Actually, this ended up being
• 53:19
  quite a long episode, much longer than we were
• 53:23
  anticipating. But we asked him about what he
• 53:26
  thinks of this matcha boom and the word that he used was
• 53:30
  nervous, which was a bit of an unexpected answer and an
• 53:34
  expected answer at the same time.
• 53:36
  It's better than the other answer that we got scared, like
• 53:39
  scary. So yeah, I don't know, like from
• 53:42
  a business standpoint, you can definitely sense there's some
• 53:46
  level of excitement coming from him because like.
• 53:50
  If you have money and capital to put to work right now and
• 53:55
  infrastructure, you really win. Yeah, yeah, Especially for
• 53:59
  Itashi, like him that's so vertically integrated from
• 54:04
  production to processing to manufacturing to selling.
• 54:08
  It's like it really like fuels a lot of his ideas and
• 54:13
  innovations. And this Tashi is also
• 54:15
  relatively young, so, you know, it's actually such a refreshing
• 54:20
  experience talking to him and, you know, like, and meeting him
• 54:23
  and just knowing his existence. Yes, actually makes us not
• 54:28
  nervous. It makes us extremely
• 54:30
  optimistic. But yes.
• 54:32
  Wow, finally. So not only can we learn, but we
• 54:36
  can start understanding why to a lot of the questions we've had
• 54:39
  for a long time. But the reason he says he's
• 54:41
  nervous is that many small tea companies within Japan, a lot of
• 54:44
  the mom and pop tea companies cannot buy tensha at all.
• 54:47
  So most of the tensha are all silent auctions.
• 54:51
  And we learned recently that one of the best chashis in Japan, a
• 54:54
  different one, but one of the best.
• 54:56
  And I believe there are 10 Don Chashi bid on something like 2
• 55:00
  tons of tension at the auctions. And it's a silent auction.
• 55:04
  So you don't know if you're the highest bid and you can't
• 55:07
  respond to give a higher bid. And only walked out of that
• 55:10
  auction with like 200 kilograms. That's the price to quality
• 55:14
  ratio for the the people who are deep in the industry like it,
• 55:18
  it's selling for way more than like it's worth, at least in
• 55:22
  their minds. That's how I interpret that.
• 55:25
  I think it's a fair interpretation.
• 55:27
  If you're not well capitalized, good luck.
• 55:30
  Like from the cash flow consideration, it's a it's, it's
• 55:33
  not good and it's not cool. And there's a lot of companies
• 55:36
  going out of business. And actually some of the reason
• 55:38
  we're able to source tension at the moment and we're pushing
• 55:41
  further and further outside of the areas that we're familiar
• 55:44
  with to people who have much smaller tea companies.
• 55:47
  It's because there's huge lines for shiage processing.
• 55:51
  And also for milling. And for milling, so a lot of
• 55:54
  there's actually, we didn't realize this, there's a lot of
• 55:57
  tea companies in Japan that service their local communities
• 56:00
  and they buy tensha at auction or a slightly less refined
• 56:06
  version of tensha at auction. They send it off for shiage
• 56:09
  processing to 1 vendor and then they get it back and then they
• 56:13
  send it off for milling to a different vendor and they sell
• 56:16
  it to their local community. And that's their part of the
• 56:18
  value chain. It's the retails, the tea store
• 56:21
  part of the value chain. I mean, they're able to
• 56:23
  participate in that auction system to get access to the
• 56:25
  commodity products, but the transformation is fundamentally
• 56:29
  being done by other people. The problem is, is that everyone
• 56:33
  needs those, the capacity of that infrastructure right now.
• 56:36
  And there's huge lines. So like we've met some people
• 56:39
  that are just sitting on massive amounts of 10 job that they
• 56:43
  can't sell or do anything with because they have no capacity to
• 56:47
  mail it. And we've heard about these
• 56:48
  people, but now that we finally met them, we're hoping that our
• 56:51
  mill can be a great way for these people to get some cash
• 56:55
  flow and to purchase their ten job and then mill it locally
• 56:58
  wherever they are and to serve it fresh.
• 57:01
  It's better for them, it's better for the consumer, and
• 57:04
  it's good for anyone who wants to add value on top, such as
• 57:08
  fresh milling. So we really encourage any
• 57:10
  listener who has a tea brand to go go deep and try to find these
• 57:14
  people because it gives them a lifeline to get the cash flow
• 57:18
  that they need. Because, I mean, you know, when
• 57:20
  you're buying things at auction, you buy it and then you're
• 57:22
  sitting in on that inventory. And if you aren't able to do the
• 57:25
  transformations that you need, such as shiage and milling to
• 57:29
  sell it, you're stuck. And a lot of places are just
• 57:32
  declaring bankruptcy more they're retiring early, which is
• 57:35
  very, very sad. And even, like you know, giving
• 57:38
  them some name recognition too could be very powerful.
• 57:41
  Yeah, totally. So as long term hold the phone,
• 57:44
  let's talk about the single most exciting, interesting optimistic
• 57:48
  thing that we learned about from this Joshi that we did save for
• 57:52
  the very, very end, which might be a little controversial.
• 57:55
  Yes, the elephant in the room, Ryan, it's China.
• 57:58
  China, Chinese macho, Chinese tension.
• 58:01
  Well, it's no secret that all of these Japanese company has, you
• 58:06
  know, they have been importing materials from China or even
• 58:09
  doing processing and packaging locally inside China to create,
• 58:14
  you know, matcha or quote UN quote Chinese matcha.
• 58:17
  But we have learned that, you know, there are some products or
• 58:21
  some quality of these tension in China are actually getting good.
• 58:26
  So we personally haven't really experienced that like we have
• 58:29
  been, you know, on and off going for sourcings also in China to
• 58:33
  try to find find out if there are indeed good tension or
• 58:36
  matcha being made here. But we haven't had luck of, you
• 58:41
  know, getting access to those materials.
• 58:43
  But you know, according to our Tashi friends, those materials
• 58:47
  actually exist. And they taste good, and they
• 58:50
  think that the quality is good. And they work with the producers
• 58:53
  in China continuously and giving their, like, seal of approval
• 58:58
  before they use it, which is super interesting and way more
• 59:02
  pragmatic than we ever would have thought.
• 59:04
  And, you know, they framed it as like, yeah, it's like really
• 59:07
  good raw material. Like this is like great
• 59:10
  Yabukita. And the quality is getting
• 59:12
  pretty good. It's getting better every year.
• 59:14
  And, you know, it's processed on Japanese processing equipment.
• 59:19
  And we're working closely with the farmers to make sure that
• 59:21
  this Yaga is good enough for certain types of milling and
• 59:24
  that there's good color homogeneity and that they're
• 59:27
  doing all of the practices that they should be doing.
• 59:30
  And in fact, what he also told us is that some of the gardens
• 59:34
  that actually pesticides and fertilizer free.
• 59:36
  So the material coming from those places probably not taste
• 59:41
  as good as Japanese material, but they are like EO compliant.
• 59:45
  A lot of it's being done for compliance reasons, yes, very
• 59:49
  hard to get like true compliant matcha coming out of Japan.
• 59:53
  So like all of this growth explosion in particularly in the
• 59:58
  US and the EU needs compliant matcha so.
• 1:00:01
  So like a lot of these Japanese company over companies over the
• 1:00:04
  past 15 years have set up subsidiaries in China.
• 1:00:08
  But the majority of the matcha production happening here in
• 1:00:11
  China where we're recording this right now is specifically for
• 1:00:15
  those export markets. And it is actively taking
• 1:00:18
  pressure off of the system in Japan.
• 1:00:20
  Like just the structural problems that we were just
• 1:00:22
  talking about 10 minutes ago where you have people who have
• 1:00:26
  had family businesses for decades, who's the local tea
• 1:00:30
  house, local matcha guy can't like get access to, you know,
• 1:00:35
  shiage equipment and refining equipment, right?
• 1:00:38
  Like sourcing this in China is actively taking pressure off the
• 1:00:41
  system because it can be done in places like in other places.
• 1:00:46
  Not just China, like from this Korea trip that we recently have
• 1:00:51
  conducted, we also learned that there are great matchas being
• 1:00:53
  produced over there too. So like this whole system stress
• 1:00:58
  is actually pretty dire because we also learned from our Tashi
• 1:01:02
  friend is that a lot of these other tea production in Japan
• 1:01:07
  are suffering because a lot of people are switching to making
• 1:01:11
  tansha and there is not enough of tea like sencha being made
• 1:01:15
  till the point that a lot of these Sentra companies and
• 1:01:18
  Sentra beverage companies are having trouble sourcing Sentra
• 1:01:22
  materials coming from Japan. So like even like if anyone has
• 1:01:25
  been to Japan, you'll see all this green tea and PET plastic
• 1:01:30
  bottles everywhere and like every vending machine.
• 1:01:33
  Like it's very likely that this much a shortage is going to
• 1:01:37
  cause price increases for these PET teas like Itoan and the ones
• 1:01:42
  from Santori and Asahi and all the companies that do this a
• 1:01:46
  Coca-Cola Japan. It's very possible that all of
• 1:01:49
  these green teas get more and more expensive because of the
• 1:01:52
  macho shortage. Just a wild secondary
• 1:01:55
  implication that you probably wouldn't have thought about.
• 1:01:57
  IA ¥150, Ito and Sancho will be gone from Lawson's.
• 1:02:03
  No, it'll just be ¥200 or something.
• 1:02:06
  Yeah, the price tag will be different.
• 1:02:08
  So it's a lot of secondary and tertiary implications.
• 1:02:11
  But, you know, he was saying that, yeah, I think in five
• 1:02:14
  years almost all players in Japan will be importing Chinese
• 1:02:18
  Tanja or Chinese material just because there's not enough to
• 1:02:22
  meet demand. Yeah.
• 1:02:23
  And a lot of active investment. Yeah, this is a very hopeful
• 1:02:26
  future. I would say like because from my
• 1:02:29
  personal experience, you know, like it's really difficult to
• 1:02:32
  source anything that that's quality in China at the moment.
• 1:02:36
  And part of the reason I think is, you know, there's really
• 1:02:40
  very little specialty consumers within China that you know, push
• 1:02:45
  the manufacturer of Tensha to higher quality.
• 1:02:48
  But this outside force might eventually being cascade down
• 1:02:52
  back to here and it's very hopeful.
• 1:02:54
  Yeah. So in the future, we might look
• 1:02:56
  to partner with local people or Commission people to start doing
• 1:03:00
  some more interesting things and see like what what can be
• 1:03:03
  created both as Japanese cultivars or local cultivars, so
• 1:03:06
  long as they're processed, you know, on the proper potential
• 1:03:09
  processing equipment. There's nothing wrong with doing
• 1:03:12
  this in other places. So it really actually all comes
• 1:03:14
  down to intention because what I think people are fearful of is
• 1:03:18
  that people take like this random green tea grown in Korea
• 1:03:22
  or China or even places like India or Sri Lanka and they're
• 1:03:26
  or Thailand and trying to pass it off as matcha.
• 1:03:29
  Or like trying to blend into Japanese material and called a
• 1:03:33
  Japanese matcha. But like, if that's not your
• 1:03:36
  intention, who cares? Like whether or not we call it
• 1:03:39
  matcha, I don't. I personally, I don't really
• 1:03:42
  have a stake in this battle, but wouldn't it be cool to see
• 1:03:44
  shaded cultivation into something that you could turn
• 1:03:47
  into a powder that can be whisked?
• 1:03:49
  It's delicious. That is basically matcha that
• 1:03:52
  you know comes from these other places.
• 1:03:54
  Yeah, I think transparency is very important on this topic.
• 1:03:59
  You know, like people. I think the stigma really comes
• 1:04:02
  from people trying to hide the origin of all these materials.
• 1:04:05
  Or it's adulteration. Yeah.
• 1:04:07
  So you know like in the future we are definitely going to label
• 1:04:11
  the origin of everything that we are going to feature.
• 1:04:14
  And I think that's like essentially very beneficial like
• 1:04:18
  who I would personally want to learn the flavor difference
• 1:04:22
  coming from all the. Wouldn't you like to learn a
• 1:04:25
  Yabukita from Shizuoka versus Wazuka in Kyoto Prefecture
• 1:04:31
  versus Jeju Island versus Jujiang in China?
• 1:04:36
  Versus Darjeeling. Like talk about like super cool
• 1:04:41
  to understand the expressions that that cultivar can give you,
• 1:04:44
  right? You'll probably start to learn
• 1:04:46
  more than the chashi's you know who are who aren't importing all
• 1:04:51
  of this material and they really lead to some very unique and
• 1:04:54
  interesting expressions. Some of the Yabukita that we had
• 1:04:57
  from Jeju really tastes nothing like we've had in Japan,
• 1:05:00
  specifically not in umami bomb type way.
• 1:05:03
  And, and, and honestly tastes pretty good.
• 1:05:06
  It's like not bitter, very low bitterness.
• 1:05:09
  I'm a stringency. Very, very interesting floral
• 1:05:11
  notes that I have never experienced in, you know,
• 1:05:14
  Yapakita being grown in Japan. Yeah, so the the future is
• 1:05:17
  bright when it comes to this sort of thing.
• 1:05:19
  And I cannot tell you and express how happy I was to hear
• 1:05:24
  how pragmatic both he was and other people were talking to
• 1:05:28
  about the ability of other places, other country to
• 1:05:31
  contributing to the supply so that this matcha boom doesn't
• 1:05:35
  turn into a matcha bust because it gets way, way, way too
• 1:05:39
  expensive for the same thing. Quality is not increasing,
• 1:05:42
  prices increasing. You're going to have churn of
• 1:05:44
  consumers and then you have a dead and dying industry that's
• 1:05:47
  literally turning stale because nothing is changing about the
• 1:05:51
  products other than the price and which is not a future that
• 1:05:54
  anyone wants to see. So I think it's incredibly
• 1:05:57
  valuable creative for everybody. That makes us very, very
• 1:06:00
  optimistic. Yeah, like special.
• 1:06:02
  This whole specialty movement is really a discovery journey of
• 1:06:06
  people doing interesting things. And I think it's very healthy to
• 1:06:11
  give everyone the liberty of making things that you know has
• 1:06:15
  good intention. Absolutely.
• 1:06:17
  And make things that are delicious, which really is the
• 1:06:19
  most important thing at the end of the day, right?
• 1:06:21
  It's the hedonic pleasure you get from this thing.
• 1:06:24
  Yeah, delicious will be a very, pretty good outcome.
• 1:06:26
  But, you know, all these innovations and experiments
• 1:06:29
  might lead to different, you know, degrees of expression
• 1:06:33
  based on, you know, the But you know, let's, let's accept and
• 1:06:36
  embrace the possibility of all of these, you know, experiments
• 1:06:41
  or new developments or innovations.
• 1:06:43
  And there's going to be a lot of crap.
• 1:06:45
  There's going to be a lot of failure.
• 1:06:46
  Perhaps the first Chinese matcha that you drink is horrible,
• 1:06:50
  right? That's OK.
• 1:06:51
  That is not representative of what's going on in the entire
• 1:06:55
  country. I mean you could easily buy a
• 1:06:57
  random matcha powder from Japan and have the same experience.
• 1:07:00
  But, but I, I think what would be a step forward is that the
• 1:07:06
  first Chinese matcha that you drink, whether or not it tastes
• 1:07:09
  good or bad, has the label of China or Zhejiang or a specific
• 1:07:14
  region with the cultivar on it. It's not something that's Fuji
• 1:07:19
  matcha quote UN quote China. Which to add to the Uji drama
• 1:07:23
  for some foresight, the Uji Macha trademark also exists
• 1:07:29
  within China that is owned by Japanese which can be licensed
• 1:07:33
  out locally. So you can technically have Fuji
• 1:07:37
  Macha in mainland Chinese market sold as Uji Macha and or
• 1:07:42
  exported as Uji Macha because the trademark allows for it at
• 1:07:47
  least domestically within mainland China.
• 1:07:50
  Yeah, it's it's a lot of shenanigans.
• 1:07:53
  It really pinning down and understanding the complications
• 1:07:56
  of what in the world is Uji Macha.
• 1:07:58
  You think it's a simple question.
• 1:08:00
  It's not. It's much more complicated than
• 1:08:03
  like what is ceremonial grade, which is, you know, there's one
• 1:08:07
  sentence meaningless, but actually a little more
• 1:08:10
  complicated. So some form of intention.
• 1:08:12
  But uji matcha, it really just shows a lot of money to be made.
• 1:08:18
  It's like the deeper you dig into that story, not as pure as
• 1:08:23
  you might think, despite what the good marketing and framing
• 1:08:27
  that a lot of people try to put around it.
• 1:08:30
  But well, tea actually coming from Uji is, you know, like
• 1:08:34
  incredible. But very hard to find too.
• 1:08:36
  Yes, if you can find actual uchi grown mancha and it's not even
• 1:08:41
  to like like to hate on the other regions that participate
• 1:08:45
  in tea that gets labeled as uchi mancha, right?
• 1:08:48
  Like it's, you know, the best case interpretation is that it's
• 1:08:52
  a style of processing. But that this is really a
• 1:08:55
  concept that we want to break in the future.
• 1:08:57
  It's just so dumb. You don't learn anything from
• 1:09:00
  calling it that. It's really dumb.
• 1:09:01
  And also like, honestly, there could be and there will be
• 1:09:07
  there. And I really hope there will be
• 1:09:10
  like other Wuji's in the future popping up in other regions,
• 1:09:14
  right? And this is really a concept or
• 1:09:16
  a mentality that we want to break in the future.
• 1:09:20
  There could be literally like 5 or 10 or 15 UGI worthy regions,
• 1:09:27
  fantastic producers doing interesting things, absolutely
• 1:09:31
  Kyoto, Nara, et cetera. Or even outside of Japan, like
• 1:09:35
  we right now kind of seeing Yame gaining the new a kind of like a
• 1:09:40
  high quality production status. But you know, it's totally
• 1:09:44
  possible that all these other tools in different corners of
• 1:09:47
  the world can produce very high quality, very tasty matcha.
• 1:09:52
  Absolutely. But this whole current system is
• 1:09:55
  not setting up in that way to allow this to happen.
• 1:09:58
  Like, it's more like setting up a very, very bloodthirsty Leech
• 1:10:05
  in the center of this whole system, sucking the blood from
• 1:10:08
  all corners to create something that can be sold for a higher
• 1:10:12
  price. Yeah, but for the status quo,
• 1:10:14
  you know, and also especially after talking to all these
• 1:10:17
  farmers. Yeah, both in and out of Uji.
• 1:10:20
  It's really less pure than you think.
• 1:10:22
  Yeah. Despite its staunchest
• 1:10:23
  defenders. And Uji should definitely still
• 1:10:26
  exist in the future and it should be cherished and should
• 1:10:29
  be protected, but just not in this way.
• 1:10:32
  Yes, where you can literally like go 10 kilometers over the
• 1:10:37
  border, set up a random shiage factory and you instantly have
• 1:10:41
  uji matcha so long as it's like your raw materials so much from
• 1:10:45
  the four prefectures that gets ridiculous.
• 1:10:49
  Not to mention all the stuff that really shouldn't be going
• 1:10:51
  into it outside of those 4 prefectures, which is also a
• 1:10:54
  topic of a later podcast. Which you might ask, why does
• 1:10:58
  this all matter? I think part of the specialty
• 1:11:00
  movement is understanding where the decisions for a certain
• 1:11:03
  flavors get made, where there's culture formation and where
• 1:11:07
  everyone skilled person's hands have touched this product in
• 1:11:12
  some meaningful way to get it all the way to the consumers.
• 1:11:16
  And just this reductive idea of Ujicha destroys it, which I
• 1:11:19
  think is a real shame for those farmers and other places or
• 1:11:24
  these producers and other places, these people adding
• 1:11:27
  value from all over. Yeah, we actually recorded the
• 1:11:29
  episode right after we got out of Fuji, and it was.
• 1:11:33
  So bad and so pessimistic, we're not going to release.
• 1:11:38
  But after talking to our Chashi friend, wow, it's like a fresh
• 1:11:42
  of new breeze. It's like it really changed our
• 1:11:46
  kind of mentality or anticipation of what's coming
• 1:11:50
  next. And right now, we are very
• 1:11:52
  hopeful, yeah. Indeed.
• 1:11:54
  Well, I think it's a perfect place to stop.
• 1:11:56
  Thank you so much for listening. You enjoyed this.
• 1:11:58
  Please consider sharing it with a friend.
• 1:12:00
  If you have any interesting perspectives that are other than
• 1:12:03
  our own, please do reach out. We'd love to make this like a
• 1:12:05
  community discussion and to have you on the show potentially.
• 1:12:10
  We're always searching for people with new and unique
• 1:12:12
  opinions for Season 4 and. We'll see you in the future.