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Interview with Jeff Fuchs, Tea Explorer · Specialty Matcha Podcast

• 0:07
  Hello, and welcome to Specialty Much Podcast.
• 0:09
  My name is Ryan. This is Michael Hozenjun, who
• 0:11
  also goes by Sam. We've had some Internet issues,
• 0:14
  unfortunately, so he's on WeChat, on my phone and we're
• 0:18
  the cofounders of Senco Much Products.
• 0:20
  Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey,
• 0:22
  Matcha, share startup stories and interview experts.
• 0:26
  And today we have Jeff Fuchs, who should need no introduction
• 0:28
  in the tea world. But I'll give a brief
• 0:30
  introduction. Who is Jeff has documented both
• 0:33
  in film and his book and in many different ways actually the Tea
• 0:37
  Horse Road, which is an ancient trade route and has walked, I
• 0:42
  think all of it or most of it. And helped document a lot of the
• 0:46
  living stories that were there as it kind of fell out of use as
• 0:50
  we moved into the the 20th 21st century and has been a tea
• 0:55
  explorer more generally across many different countries and
• 0:58
  cultural contexts. And I met Jeff for the first
• 1:01
  time at the Berlin Tea Festival last year.
• 1:03
  We had some very brief e-mail exchanges 10 years ago.
• 1:06
  It's a little crazy full circle. But you mentioned some very
• 1:10
  interesting things about Japanese tea and some
• 1:13
  perspective of as someone who has spent so much time in Yunnan
• 1:17
  and seeing what is going on in those ancient forests, I was
• 1:20
  like, I have to go up and talk to you about this.
• 1:22
  But I guess I'll turn it back over to you and to briefly
• 1:26
  introduce yourself and we can jump in from there.
• 1:29
  Sure, you did a you did a nice job, nice little bit of work
• 1:34
  describing the journey. I guess the, I had a friend say
• 1:38
  this the other day and I guess where I'm at now with the tea
• 1:41
  world is, I mean, after selling tea, writing about tea, talking
• 1:47
  tea, I guess I'm a bit of a tea advocate in whatever story
• 1:53
  shape, whatever human shape it comes, comes in as I feel a lot
• 1:59
  of the informal tales and stories and narratives are
• 2:03
  somehow the most vital. We're, we're, we're in a time
• 2:07
  where there's an awful lot of knowledge.
• 2:09
  There's a lot of great information, There's a lot of
• 2:13
  rehashed misinformation, deliberate mystification, and,
• 2:18
  and, and there's a lot of beautifully simple knowledge
• 2:21
  that still exists about tea at Ground Zero, where it's, it's
• 2:25
  grown, where the farmers worry about it every year.
• 2:29
  So where I'm at right now and where this discussion is, I
• 2:33
  guess some sort of a tea advocacy and maybe trying to
• 2:37
  bring to light some of the, I guess, lesser aspects of tea
• 2:42
  that I feel still have a huge role to play.
• 2:45
  And every time I see you, every time we've chatted, even over a
• 2:50
  decade ago, I think I said this before we started this chat,
• 2:53
  we've been close to going down rabbit holes, you and I.
• 2:56
  It's been like the sprinkling of bait.
• 2:59
  Then there's these big chasms of where we want to go with a
• 3:02
  conversation and then one of us gets whisked away.
• 3:05
  But so this is a pleasure. Yeah, it's a pleasure, a real
• 3:09
  pleasure for us. It's I'm and also just
• 3:11
  personally just so curious to hear your perspective because
• 3:15
  you know, we, Sam and I started our journey in Chinese tea and
• 3:18
  came in with very particular ideas.
• 3:22
  But we're actually probably shaped a lot by you over our
• 3:25
  learning journey because I feel like you're a center of gravity,
• 3:28
  especially in the West, for understanding and transmitting
• 3:32
  what's actually going on in the ground and the ancient tea
• 3:36
  forests of Yunnan and the living culture that exists there.
• 3:40
  And, you know, I think there's a long chain that largely goes
• 3:44
  flows back to you and then your primary experience about the way
• 3:49
  people talk about it and appreciate it in the West.
• 3:52
  And, you know, we're, you know, beneficiaries of that
• 3:55
  perspective having gone back, you know, knowing of your work
• 3:58
  for so long. And then walking into Japan, it
• 4:01
  just feels so different in the way that they talk about the
• 4:04
  agriculture, the way they talk about the trees, the way they
• 4:07
  talk about the fertilization practices.
• 4:09
  And this is I was listening to your talk in Berlin last year
• 4:13
  and you were talking about, oh, wow.
• 4:15
  You know, you know, most of you, you were addressing the
• 4:17
  audience, but essentially saying, you know, most people
• 4:20
  don't realize the intense fertilization practices that the
• 4:23
  Japanese do. And you were talking about
• 4:25
  bringing some of these marine umami expressions of flavor
• 4:30
  inland and but also, you know, some of the downsides of over
• 4:35
  fertilization. So I know that you spent a lot
• 4:38
  of time recently in Kyoto Prefecture, in particular Kyoto
• 4:42
  Nabe, but also in places like Uji.
• 4:44
  Would love to learn some of your sort of fresh perspective after
• 4:49
  coming off of a lot of Japanese travel, comparing it to your tea
• 4:54
  experiences other places. Yes, and it's important to
• 4:58
  mention and you you did, but it's important to mention that
• 5:01
  I'm a relative novice in the the Japanese tea vernacular.
• 5:07
  My wife grew up in Japan, She was born in Japan.
• 5:10
  She's Japanese. So there's there's been
• 5:12
  infusions from her over the course of our relationship and
• 5:17
  she refers to things very offhand, but her mother's family
• 5:23
  background is actually in agriculture.
• 5:26
  They were, they were Peach growers.
• 5:28
  Momo, my wife, has a sort of a casually eloquent way of
• 5:32
  speaking about agriculture. When I have been in Japan in the
• 5:36
  last couple of years, it's been working on this film project and
• 5:39
  working with one specific tea producer.
• 5:43
  And it's one of those beautiful little gateways into one
• 5:47
  person's life that as soon as you walk through that gate into
• 5:50
  their world, all of a sudden there's this huge horizon of
• 5:56
  information, a bit of foggy information at times into the
• 6:00
  world, the, the, the revered world of the shaded teas, which
• 6:05
  are Gentrus, the Kabu Secha, the Yokura or the Mata.
• 6:09
  And of course, there's this massive wave of matcha lunacy,
• 6:13
  interest, knowledge spread. I mean, in part of this is good
• 6:18
  too, because we were talking about trends earlier.
• 6:21
  With trends, a lot of important information and learnings take
• 6:24
  place. And sometimes somebody starts
• 6:27
  with a trend and that's the segue into going into a deeper
• 6:31
  sphere of know about something. So the world of trends, but the
• 6:35
  world of trends sometimes fixates upon one or two
• 6:38
  highlight reels without going into the depth of what creates a
• 6:43
  mummy. As an example, you referred to
• 6:45
  fertilizer. And I think one of the the big
• 6:49
  learnings has been and it continues to be for me how exact
• 6:54
  and how precise this tradition is of using specific fertilizers
• 6:59
  for specific soils. And I'll, I'll give an example,
• 7:03
  just something that I can speak to with a bit of clarity.
• 7:07
  In Kiltanabe, their Gilkuro is known as a soft, a softer
• 7:12
  Gilkuro. It's known as very rounded
• 7:14
  flavors, very subtle, nuanced umami.
• 7:18
  The region was covered in bamboo forests, which contributes to a
• 7:22
  high magnesium count in the soils around Kiltanabe.
• 7:27
  The soils also have a higher an oxide content, not higher,
• 7:32
  higher than a lot of the regions, but surrounded.
• 7:36
  So the fertilizing ratio of specifics and I'll get into what
• 7:41
  they use that I that I've seen them use is very different to
• 7:46
  another prefecture. What I found particularly
• 7:49
  interesting, and I guess this goes into the umami discussion,
• 7:52
  which is another could probably do several days worth of, of, of
• 7:57
  discussions, is that a lot of the fertilizer is herring mulch
• 8:05
  or meal. And what was amazing,
• 8:08
  fascinating, but not really surprising, I guess, given
• 8:11
  Japan's obsession with details and precision, is that certain
• 8:16
  farmers have certain suppliers of certain mackerel herring meal
• 8:23
  that they import from the north of Japan around Hokkaido.
• 8:28
  They then use that meal to mix in with other components like
• 8:32
  sugar cane husk, cornmeal to create these very specific
• 8:37
  ratios of a fertilizer with all three components or maybe 2
• 8:41
  components to play with the levels that they'd like to
• 8:45
  extract of umami. So there's the shading aspect,
• 8:49
  which is vital. We, I guess, generally know
• 8:52
  about shade, but it's not just the shading.
• 8:55
  The shading has a very specific relationship to the fertilizer
• 8:59
  that's used. And fertilizers often been given
• 9:04
  a bad rap because it's not natural.
• 9:06
  I won't get into that, that discussion yet, although you
• 9:09
  may, you may provoke me. But the idea that there's a
• 9:13
  curating of the elements that they desire to extract in the
• 9:18
  cup of a gyokuro or a high level matcha or a caboosecha, I find
• 9:25
  fascinating. I mean, it's a rabbit hole.
• 9:27
  It's a magnificent rabbit hole to go down.
• 9:29
  But there is a very specific culture, a very imbued culture
• 9:34
  of mastery of fertilization. And part of that I think has to
• 9:39
  do with almost the type of alchemy that the, the a lot of
• 9:43
  Japanese tea growers have been very good at is observing,
• 9:46
  taking the elements, measuring the elements and being able to
• 9:50
  adapt and pivot very quickly to still extract the flavor
• 9:55
  profiles that they're looking to extract.
• 9:58
  Which is, I would say on the opposite end of a lot of the
• 10:03
  teas that I grew up drinking living in Yunnan, they every
• 10:08
  year, every harvest, every spring would be different.
• 10:12
  Caffeine levels would be totally unpredictable, healthy anion
• 10:15
  levels completely unpredictable. And that's because the elements
• 10:19
  played such a role that we're and and there was no
• 10:22
  manipulation going on in the ancient forests of it was more
• 10:26
  of the art of restraint. Whereas in Japan there is a very
• 10:31
  specific art of curation, I would say manipulation to
• 10:37
  extract. Predictable outcomes and I guess
• 10:40
  the need for control feels very actually Japanese spirited
• 10:45
  almost in a way. Very.
• 10:48
  It's it's, it's admirable to be able to commit to this.
• 10:52
  Not, as you say, not surprising. Yeah, and it feels like in in
• 10:58
  Yunnan and a lot of these other places, the flavors and the tea
• 11:01
  starts in the forest and it's controlled by nature and like
• 11:04
  the processing happens after it's harvested or you could
• 11:07
  argue during harvesting. And a lot of these Japanese
• 11:10
  teas, especially the shaded ones, I mean, it happened
• 11:13
  basically the the whole plant's life cycle from the selection of
• 11:17
  the cultivar to all the garden management, That's where a lot
• 11:20
  of, if you trace back where these flavors are coming from,
• 11:23
  it's it's pretty different type of agriculture.
• 11:28
  It is and it it it brings to mind for me a lot of the time
• 11:32
  this idea of tech wall driven teas.
• 11:35
  So where you can definitely feel, not that I'm an expert
• 11:40
  because of these flavor wheels and tea, sometimes they befuddle
• 11:44
  me, but in a, in a raw, explosive young shung puer from
• 11:50
  old trees, you will get a definitive tech wah statement.
• 11:55
  The chi you, you get a it's a beautifully annihilating kind of
• 12:01
  hit. Whereas again with the Japanese,
• 12:03
  I find it a great counterpoint. In our household, we have these
• 12:06
  conversations all the time. Julie and I are we play with
• 12:11
  teas a lot and the the beautiful predictability of a high level
• 12:15
  center or couple seta as opposed to a a small village in Yunnan
• 12:20
  where we've got four or five years worth of spring examples
• 12:25
  that are completely different, not at all similar.
• 12:29
  In fact, you could argue unless you've purchased in the village,
• 12:32
  you might suspect they're not from.
• 12:34
  It's a different it. Could be from a different
• 12:36
  province, but the idea being that one is terroir driven and
• 12:41
  sort of complicit and one is as you said, it's it's post post
• 12:46
  pic curated to formulate, to come up with this, this
• 12:51
  beautifully tangible visceral ratio in the mouth.
• 12:55
  Yeah. So it's, it's interesting
• 12:58
  because it's, I feel like the marketing language of these
• 13:01
  covered Tees is very tower centric.
• 13:04
  The matchas, the Goku Rose, you see it in the specialty
• 13:07
  marketing, you see it in the traditional marketing with these
• 13:10
  traditional blend houses and the reverence of places like Uji and
• 13:14
  the surrounding regions of Uji. And like, the more we dig into
• 13:18
  it, the more we're convinced that it's not tower driven at
• 13:21
  all. It's like the most processed
• 13:25
  tea. You're, you're more like
• 13:27
  literally tasting someone else's crap.
• 13:30
  It's you're tasting people actually, instead of people's
• 13:33
  decision, people's preference, people's understanding instead
• 13:37
  of, you know, tala or nature. But that's like you, you could
• 13:41
  also argue that it could be theoretically grown anywhere.
• 13:45
  And like, I think this is the best defense for the Chinese
• 13:48
  matcha producers is that if it's not a very tower driven tea and
• 13:53
  China is a country that's perfectly capable of producing
• 13:57
  high quality tea, why couldn't high quality matcha be made in
• 14:02
  China? And the reality is it's getting
• 14:05
  better and better and better, but the best Chinese matcha
• 14:08
  doesn't hold a candle to the best Japanese matcha that I've
• 14:11
  ever had. And like, I think this skill gap
• 14:14
  represents, I don't have a good word for it, like secondary
• 14:17
  terroir, like the people, the culture, the processing
• 14:20
  decisions and sort of everything that you've been steeped in the
• 14:23
  last couple of months in your time in Japan.
• 14:26
  How would you is that a fair characterization?
• 14:29
  And like how, how do you feel that from interacting with
• 14:32
  these, all of these farmers in Japan for so long?
• 14:36
  One of the things that stays with me during a recent visit
• 14:40
  was a very well regarded matcha maker who I think you're
• 14:45
  familiar with. Tsuji San.
• 14:47
  Oh yes, and Shirakawa. Yes, he said this.
• 14:51
  I don't even think it was provoked by a question.
• 14:54
  He was, he was talking and the, of course this was being
• 14:57
  translated, but he made mention that there's a proper way to
• 15:02
  make matcha and there's an improper way to make matcha.
• 15:05
  And I remember him going further and I assumed, well, he was, you
• 15:10
  know, trying to keep this tradition, the regional
• 15:14
  tradition, the national tradition alive.
• 15:17
  And he, he actually said, no, I'm not talking about a national
• 15:21
  tradition. I'm talking about doing matcha
• 15:24
  correctly and doing it incorrectly.
• 15:28
  And it was, it was interesting because he was very open to the
• 15:30
  idea that matcha, he, he understood that matcha's origins
• 15:34
  were in China during the Song dynasty.
• 15:37
  So he was aware of the history and he wasn't covetous that only
• 15:42
  he knew how to make matcha or there's only one way to make
• 15:46
  matcha. He said there's a proper way to
• 15:48
  do it. And then there's a whole
• 15:51
  different, you know, there's a whole different segment opening
• 15:55
  up. There's food grade, organic food
• 15:58
  grade. It's being put into muffins.
• 16:00
  He's aware of that. And he said that's its own
• 16:02
  thing. What he was specific about was
• 16:05
  that when you're making a high grade, even now, the idea of a
• 16:10
  ceremonial matcha seems to have been usurped because
• 16:13
  everything's ceremonial. But in the days of old when
• 16:17
  there was a very, very, very small amount of actual
• 16:21
  ceremonial matcha, and it wasn't that long ago available for
• 16:25
  domestic consumption, that there was only one way to make it.
• 16:29
  So for him, it's not necessarily where it's grown and produced.
• 16:33
  It is how it's produced. OK, what is it called?
• 16:38
  So he was, he was very traditional, very proud, of
• 16:44
  course, but he was also very open to the world of matcha.
• 16:47
  And he understood that matcha has become something almost I
• 16:51
  mean, we had a discussion that was, it was quite entertaining
• 16:54
  because at one point someone had said, well, matcha is almost
• 16:58
  separate from tea now because matcha and you have tea, but
• 17:04
  matcha is everywhere that tea is not plus.
• 17:09
  Oh wow, yeah, that's so true. You.
• 17:12
  Know he was. He was making the example of
• 17:14
  coffee shops. Yeah.
• 17:16
  They won't carry any tea in Japan usually, but they'll
• 17:22
  probably have a hojita matcha latte or they may have a matcha
• 17:27
  latte. So he found it quite interesting
• 17:31
  and I think he he realized that much is doing its own thing now.
• 17:35
  It's, it's become something bigger than a very regional
• 17:39
  coveted protected thing. That's reverent, you know,
• 17:43
  that's, that's, that's got reverence.
• 17:45
  It's now got another life of its own.
• 17:48
  It's almost like it's got a secret life beyond beyond the
• 17:51
  borders that has transformed a lot of the the language used.
• 17:55
  And I mean just the word ceremonial now.
• 17:58
  He went on a bit of a wonderful rant, quite emotional.
• 18:02
  He said the amount of times he sees ceremonial used to market
• 18:06
  matcha, it was driving him insane because of the actual he
• 18:11
  he says it's just a word now as opposed to in past.
• 18:16
  It had a very, again, a very particular meaning.
• 18:20
  Yeah, the words been totally hijacked.
• 18:23
  So it's a shame. So and the ceremonial
• 18:27
  connotations, I sometimes take offense for the Japanese when
• 18:31
  all you have all these Western companies calling it ceremonial
• 18:34
  grade, it's like it hasn't been endorsed by a Mota San Gay or
• 18:37
  the San Gay. There's no one with their chime
• 18:40
  saying anything about this, like it's just totally been hijacked
• 18:46
  trying to sell, sell to sell more tea, which I guess people
• 18:50
  are in the business of selling tea, want to try to sell it.
• 18:53
  And it's it's understandable why people use that term and there's
• 18:56
  demand for that term. So we're stuck in this doom
• 19:00
  loop. Yeah, especially so when they're
• 19:02
  trying to sell the mediocre tea, because for higher quality tea,
• 19:06
  they no one wants to use the term ceremonial grade anymore.
• 19:11
  It's all these mediocre, even bad matcha.
• 19:15
  That has picked up. Which further stigmatize it.
• 19:18
  Yes. And to your point, so the point
• 19:20
  is just made. I think there is an
• 19:23
  understanding at least in the journeys, the the recent
• 19:25
  journeys this year and last year's journeys to Japan in the
• 19:29
  tea growing regions. I think there's an understanding
• 19:32
  that there are market pressures on medium, large and small
• 19:37
  farms. All these pressures are are
• 19:40
  they're hitting all of the farms, small farmers, family
• 19:43
  farms, big farms. So there is an understanding
• 19:47
  that there's pressure. I think where a lot of the
• 19:50
  farmers seem to take a little bit of umbrage and offense is
• 19:55
  with the idea that words are being used without information
• 20:00
  being provided. In other words, you know, we
• 20:03
  were speaking earlier about terroir.
• 20:05
  Well, I'm sure there is a terroir component in the
• 20:08
  Japanese, you know, and Shizuoka and Kyushu and.
• 20:12
  Kagoshima, I'm sure there is information to relate to the
• 20:17
  public, relate to drinkers, but that information isn't required
• 20:22
  by the marketeers. You know, back to the ideas of
• 20:25
  ceremonial, I think that has been coveted more so than
• 20:30
  explaining well what makes Kagoshima soil a little bit
• 20:34
  different, because I think those explanations are things that
• 20:37
  credit the farmers for their understanding.
• 20:41
  Yeah, actually I totally placed the blame at the traditional
• 20:46
  practitioners and the original consumption group for matcha who
• 20:51
  really don't express any interest in the agriculture at
• 20:54
  all. Like these old school emoto
• 20:57
  sanke orisenge people. They don't know anything about
• 21:00
  the product agriculturally speaking.
• 21:02
  And, you know, Sam and I have tried to source a lot of tensha
• 21:05
  and matcha in Japan. And like, getting these
• 21:09
  objective facts that actually will determine quality and
• 21:12
  flavor are really, it feels like pulling teeth.
• 21:16
  Like people don't open up about their fertilization practices.
• 21:19
  They like, it's very hard to actually get to the root of why
• 21:24
  a tea is good and what makes it special.
• 21:26
  So I feel like a lot of these people entering into Japan just
• 21:29
  do whatever they can because it's so hard to access this
• 21:34
  level of information. Like especially when you
• 21:36
  contrast it to like someone in like China for example, that can
• 21:40
  be very articulate about what makes a tea good and in
• 21:44
  objective terms. Yes, and maybe that is one of
• 21:48
  the problems with the the whole ceremonial aspect has almost
• 21:53
  become a movement in itself. And I Revere ceremony without
• 22:00
  question, but I Revere it from those who've got a root system
• 22:05
  devoted to generations of teachings of a particular school
• 22:09
  and who haven't turned it into a marketing bonanza.
• 22:12
  To your point earlier about, you know, a lot of these
• 22:15
  practitioners, these new practitioners, I'd call them,
• 22:18
  who don't actually know much about the cultivars used, who
• 22:22
  don't have much interest in explaining why.
• 22:26
  For instance, at Zaidai, an old cultivar of Japan, they may be
• 22:29
  one of the old originals, has a more bitter a stringent power to
• 22:34
  it. Then some of these more Yabukita
• 22:39
  Gokul. These new cultivars have a, an
• 22:41
  almost a cure. They've been curated to provide
• 22:46
  this umami sweetness. And I always think that
• 22:51
  information is only dangerous if you're not willing to share.
• 22:57
  When you're trying to covet something, then the lack of
• 23:01
  information is really troublesome because it's spin.
• 23:06
  Perhaps. It's maybe just ignorance, not
• 23:09
  knowing or not caring where you know.
• 23:12
  The origin points are where the farmers are from.
• 23:15
  I mean, matcha for me in my limited world, we have it at
• 23:19
  home. It's not my go to, but it's
• 23:21
  probably the least described terms of flavor profile of any
• 23:26
  tea that we have in our home. And we probably have 30 or 40
• 23:30
  different teas. So I've been told what a good
• 23:32
  matcha should taste like, but I haven't been given a real.
• 23:36
  And even my wife Julie, she can read a description in kanji.
• 23:42
  But what defines A matcha flavor profile to a large degree?
• 23:46
  I, I feel is, is ambiguous at times compared to, you know, a
• 23:52
  Baochong Wolong or a Shungpur from NACA which is explosive or
• 23:57
  so yeah, maybe the the commercialization of the
• 24:01
  ceremonial aesthetic, maybe that has actually detracted a little
• 24:06
  bit from the knowledge base or the transfer of legitimate
• 24:11
  knowledge to us on the on the receipt and.
• 24:14
  Yeah, that that really resonates and it's really up and down in
• 24:19
  both these newcomers and the old comers, the traditional blend
• 24:22
  houses, even if like a retail experience you walk into, I
• 24:26
  won't name anyone particularly, but you walk into their shop,
• 24:29
  you ask, what is this Tatsu Mukashi?
• 24:32
  So it's, would you know Shiro or whatever poetic name, what's in
• 24:36
  it? I don't know.
• 24:38
  It's a blend. Where is it from?
• 24:39
  It's from Uji, which we've recently come to learn really
• 24:42
  actually doesn't mean that it's from the town of Uji can come
• 24:45
  from any one of four prefectors. So there's there's nothing to
• 24:49
  learn about that T there's nothing interesting about any of
• 24:54
  the TS and any of the lineups that has any bearing of reality.
• 24:58
  It's poetic names. It's a price point.
• 25:01
  Maybe if you're lucky, you get like a two by two grid to say
• 25:05
  it's more bitter or less bitter are more rich or less rich or
• 25:09
  refreshing, not refreshing whatever their axis is.
• 25:12
  And there's nothing to cling on to.
• 25:14
  Someone who wants to let the product speak for itself and
• 25:19
  like build patterns to OK, why do I like it?
• 25:23
  What's good about it? How can I replicate this
• 25:25
  experience? How can I look for a new variety
• 25:28
  in this product? Positioning.
• 25:30
  It's it's actually no surprise to me that these newcomers
• 25:33
  cannot position the product. As you go to the old players,
• 25:37
  you can't learn what's good. And unless you talk to the
• 25:39
  farmers directly, it's hard to pull out this information from
• 25:44
  people. And some farmers too have very
• 25:46
  strong perspectives and they don't always agree with each
• 25:49
  other. We've we've noticed.
• 25:51
  No. And, and I, I, we had this
• 25:54
  conversation earlier this year with an old farmer who is a, he
• 25:58
  is one of the top producers of Gilkudo in the Kyoto Nabe
• 26:02
  region, old gentleman. And he was very point blank.
• 26:07
  He said, and I love this statement.
• 26:10
  He said, I know what I like, but the new marketing has told me
• 26:15
  that what I like in a Gilkudo which I've drank, which I've
• 26:18
  consumed since I was young, is not what should be promoted.
• 26:24
  So he said, he said, I'm confused for a number of
• 26:29
  reasons, because my version is what I was told by my master was
• 26:35
  reflecting great quality. And he said, now I listen to all
• 26:39
  of this fancy language and he says I don't recognize the tea I
• 26:44
  love and all that fancy language.
• 26:45
  So, and he's a tea tea producer, tea farmer, simple vernacular.
• 26:49
  His teas are tremendous. His teas are ranked by a lot of
• 26:54
  producers of Gilkudo on this specific region near a village
• 26:59
  called Fuganji as being tremendous, and they all say the
• 27:03
  same thing about his tea. But sometimes these older
• 27:07
  farmers may actually have had a description that has been erased
• 27:13
  or weakened by this marketing bonanza of some of the players,
• 27:18
  the marketeers, the middle people.
• 27:21
  So rather than take the knowledge as it was and simply
• 27:24
  describe something, it's been taken, thrown about like kites
• 27:28
  in the wind, and it's settled. So we're using language that
• 27:32
  sometimes confuses even the growers and the producers.
• 27:38
  I'm sure that's not always the case, but I mean, I've met tea
• 27:42
  farmers around the world who sadly know how to do one or two
• 27:45
  things well. They're not marketing
• 27:49
  specialists, but they can tell you.
• 27:51
  They can walk into their gardens.
• 27:52
  They can tell you tomorrow it's going to rain.
• 27:55
  That means I need to do this in in three days we will start the
• 27:59
  harvest because the Japanese Nightingale, I'm saying so that
• 28:03
  there I feel sometimes the informal ways of the old
• 28:08
  traditions, they weren't necessarily wrong.
• 28:12
  They may not be correct either, but maybe they were not
• 28:15
  transcribed. I'm using that word lightly.
• 28:18
  They weren't transcribed properly.
• 28:21
  And so I often feel that a lot of tea farmers feel cut out of
• 28:25
  the tea journey to the consumers cup.
• 28:27
  Now all they're expected or wanted to do, grow the tea,
• 28:31
  provide X amount, this is your quota.
• 28:35
  And in the middle, a lot of mystifying language sometimes is
• 28:39
  used. And then by the time it gets the
• 28:41
  cup we're on, we're not actually acknowledging the information
• 28:44
  that the farmers know very well. We're not tributing some of what
• 28:49
  they know. Yeah, I feel like this is not
• 28:52
  just limited to Japanese tea because while you're looking to
• 28:56
  China, like people also talk about like the idea of Shingomi,
• 29:00
  right, the new method. And that's being constantly shut
• 29:04
  down into farmers motivation practice by sometimes larger
• 29:09
  companies like IE for example, it's constantly pushing all
• 29:13
  these like very green kind of processing to farmers that have
• 29:17
  been doing tea very traditionally in the past.
• 29:19
  So that's the what do you think about that, Jack?
• 29:23
  Like do you see similarities between these two words?
• 29:27
  I do. I've seen it in Sri Lanka, I've
• 29:29
  seen it in India. And it's a, it's a good point
• 29:32
  because in some ways it may be, it points to a wider framework
• 29:37
  of the marketing efforts of some of the bigger players in T to
• 29:41
  sell more quantity. And, and you know, your, your
• 29:45
  comment is, I think a very good one that this isn't restricted
• 29:48
  to a region or a nation. It it it might be something much
• 29:53
  more global and certainly there are tea trading interests at
• 29:58
  work that would like to keep the stock of tea at certain prices.
• 30:02
  And with those efforts comes I think certain language to gussy
• 30:08
  up average teas and give very, very, very simple basic bits of
• 30:13
  information. This is a classic black this is,
• 30:17
  but we're not actually passing on the vital information that I
• 30:21
  think a lot of young people especially, we're information
• 30:25
  driven now. And when we don't pass on, I
• 30:28
  think some of the grass roots information, when it's all being
• 30:32
  sieved through massive companies who are coming up with, you
• 30:36
  know, blueprints for how to market a new long, a lightly
• 30:39
  oxidized doolong or or a heavily roasted yenta like a stone
• 30:46
  oolong. I think what happens then is we
• 30:50
  disconnect from the origin point to the consumer.
• 30:54
  And I think the consumer knows a lot more now, certainly in the
• 30:58
  tea world than they used to. Yeah.
• 31:01
  When I last saw you, Ryan, we were in Paris few weeks ago at
• 31:05
  the Paris Tea Festival. I can never get over how many
• 31:09
  young and I'm talking youthful 20 somethings, tea participants,
• 31:15
  tea lovers, tea heads are willing to commit so much time,
• 31:19
  financial resources, traveling resources to learn more about
• 31:24
  tea. And I'm it's it's so impressive
• 31:29
  to me. It's so humbling to see a
• 31:32
  reverence to go to the source. I have friends who are now in
• 31:35
  Yunnan who spent three weeks finding a translator because
• 31:41
  they don't want to get more information about poor from a
• 31:45
  distance. They want to go to the source,
• 31:48
  they want to go to the farmers, They want a translation.
• 31:51
  They're doing Google Translate. They're struggling.
• 31:53
  But their effort is so admirable because I feel like they're,
• 31:56
  they represent a growing interest amongst youth.
• 32:00
  Youth that tells you something about my age.
• 32:01
  But this idea that no, we want to get information that's closer
• 32:06
  to the source. We want verifiable information.
• 32:09
  We don't want all this jargon. Yeah.
• 32:12
  Having having said that, back to your point, Sam, I do feel that
• 32:18
  there is an an abundance, as always, of misinformation
• 32:22
  deliberately rehashed, sometimes clandestine, more clandestinely
• 32:27
  trying to hide, processing ridiculously tight quotas for
• 32:31
  struggling tea farmers. Wow, such a.
• 32:35
  Unique perspective, I guess, on tea because you you have exposed
• 32:40
  and talked to so many people like farmers, tea consumers, tea
• 32:44
  makers, and we have been talking about, you know, all these
• 32:47
  differences between tea making countries and regions.
• 32:50
  And I guess that's what we most shocked at because, you know,
• 32:54
  after learning so many years about Chinese tea, our first
• 32:57
  exposure to Japanese tea would like, wow, this is just so
• 33:02
  different, so counterintuitive. It is.
• 33:06
  I guess on the other hand, like where where do you do you see
• 33:09
  any similarities between I guess Japanese tea and Chinese tea and
• 33:14
  maybe other regions? I'm curious to hear your
• 33:17
  perspective. There's definitely, I mean, I'm
• 33:20
  going to make a social commentary.
• 33:23
  I definitely see a similarity in the tea farmers struggles.
• 33:26
  I see tea farmers now in Japan really struggling to provide
• 33:32
  tensor. I see a lot of matcha in
• 33:36
  Kagoshima that's not even been shaded.
• 33:39
  There's there's such a demand now from matcha.
• 33:43
  So the struggling tea farmers, I've seen them in China.
• 33:46
  Having lived in Yunnan, I was very close with a number of
• 33:49
  families who would constantly point out that the, the, they'd
• 33:54
  asked me how much is this tea in the West, in Europe and North
• 33:59
  America. And I, and I would tell them how
• 34:01
  much sort of the mean average price was.
• 34:03
  And they would explain that in, let's say a decade, what they
• 34:07
  could sell the middle men, the T4 per kilo hadn't changed more
• 34:13
  than a, and I'm talking less than a, less than a euro, less
• 34:17
  than AUS dollar. But the middle men were charging
• 34:21
  much more over the course of this decade.
• 34:23
  So I, I see a yes, there's a lot of great tea projects out there
• 34:30
  that are very small, very curated, high price margins,
• 34:33
  which I sometimes support. Because I think it's important
• 34:37
  that if we're going to talk about coffee being sold at some
• 34:41
  of the exorbitant amounts per pound wines will spend an
• 34:45
  inordinate amount of money on a bottle of wine that we down in a
• 34:49
  day a meal. I've done it, but we're not yet
• 34:54
  willing to pay slightly higher premiums for great tea with a
• 35:01
  great narrative from the source. So I see a parallel with a lot
• 35:06
  of the tea farmers throughout, Sri Lankan tea farmers.
• 35:09
  This was happening 15 years ago when I was there.
• 35:12
  Darjeeling is suffering a lot as well.
• 35:14
  So I see that as that's more of a socio economic similarity.
• 35:19
  Japan has got this. I mean, we've gone on about it,
• 35:22
  but what? Let's maybe go down to Taiwan
• 35:25
  briefly. That's in the late 90s and early
• 35:27
  2000s. That's where my first mentorship
• 35:30
  began with a with Mr. Lee, who was from China, who had settled
• 35:35
  in Taiwan, who made dampi oolong.
• 35:37
  So he'd do these very specific roasts using different woods to
• 35:42
  smoke and enhance oolongs. Very complex.
• 35:47
  He was neurotic, beautifully unsmiling, didn't didn't give
• 35:51
  credit very often, but like most masters, doesn't, you know,
• 35:56
  didn't feel the need to to be a marketing genius.
• 35:59
  He was just really good at what he was doing.
• 36:02
  But he always used to say Taiwanese teas for him were
• 36:06
  marvelous because they took a bit of the Japanese structure
• 36:10
  and rigidity when Japan occupied Taiwan.
• 36:13
  But they had a real tradition that was rooted in Fujian type
• 36:19
  ulos because of the first waves of Fujian immigrants that came
• 36:24
  to Taiwan. And he he always said that there
• 36:28
  are similarities, but they're the differences.
• 36:32
  When the differences of the Chinese and the Japanese styles
• 36:35
  fuse, that's where the genius moment happens.
• 36:40
  A bit of the rigidity, but also knowing your tea, you know, the
• 36:44
  gong fu style is all about a bit of cowboy because there's
• 36:47
  interpretations to gong fu style, which I love.
• 36:49
  You can, you can go on a beautiful journey with somebody
• 36:52
  whose precision is almost demonic.
• 36:56
  And then the very next gong fu session, somebody's interpreting
• 36:59
  it. It's a cowboy session.
• 37:01
  Liquids flying cigarettes are going all over the place.
• 37:04
  But he always emphasized, Mr. Lee always emphasized this Yao
• 37:09
  Jun, the sort of standard, if you can make the standard mix
• 37:14
  between the rigid of the Japanese with a little bit of
• 37:17
  that messy brilliance of the Chinese Fujian style.
• 37:21
  That was happy ground. And I've for for me at least,
• 37:25
  that's where I still see the similarities in their divergent
• 37:29
  approaches. They're both brilliant.
• 37:32
  And maybe that's the reason I don't drink so many Taiwanese
• 37:36
  Zulongs. But there's something about a
• 37:39
  Taiwanese along when you drink classic one with the right water
• 37:42
  and the right ambiance, with the right people, and that plays a
• 37:45
  role in what we taste. I think there's something for me
• 37:49
  at least, that that hits a high point because you it's almost
• 37:53
  recognizing the genius of chaos and the genius of rigidity in
• 37:58
  one session. It's interesting.
• 38:00
  It's actually really, I, I've, I've made that comparison
• 38:03
  before, especially within tea setups.
• 38:06
  Like you can really tell a Taiwanese tea setup like pretty
• 38:10
  distinctly from a mainland Chinese one.
• 38:14
  But then I sometimes compare it to the opposite and look at
• 38:17
  sencha though, which to me is just incredibly weird mix.
• 38:21
  Except it's more if if we compare it like 8020 and like
• 38:25
  the Taiwanese style is like 80% Chinese and 20% Japanese.
• 38:30
  And then it feels like that flips in the century though,
• 38:33
  where you have all this like Chow Joe looking stuff being
• 38:36
  performed in a very Japanese way.
• 38:39
  It's a really weird comparison of these mixing of Chinese and
• 38:44
  Japanese culture. And the way the Japanese do that
• 38:47
  mixing is so different than what manifests in Taiwan.
• 38:52
  Yes, and I'm, I was recently reading something where the, you
• 38:56
  know, during the tea of the the time of tea evolving in Japan, a
• 39:02
  lot of the merchant classes played a huge role in tea
• 39:06
  spreading into the culture of Japan because of a lot of the
• 39:11
  imported ceramics styles of serving from Korea, from China,
• 39:17
  which played a role in the whole movement of wabi sabi.
• 39:20
  And and again, that's a huge topic.
• 39:23
  But you know, some of the most coveted matcha bowls right now
• 39:28
  in the old schools in Japan are actually based on old Korean
• 39:33
  super simple stoic rice bowls. And some of the more glamorous
• 39:38
  glitzy, you know, side handle ornamental styles of Japan, the
• 39:44
  kusu style. Some of that was influenced by
• 39:47
  the the Chinese that there was a huge fad of, of Chinese styles
• 39:52
  in Japan at a, at a time. So, you know, so much of what is
• 39:56
  seemingly fixed, for me at least, is incredibly nuanced
• 40:01
  rather than fixed. There's so many influences that
• 40:04
  we don't acknowledge. You know, maybe that runs
• 40:07
  parallel to the conversation we had earlier about not
• 40:09
  acknowledging or not understanding enough about the
• 40:13
  baseline of where our tea comes from, who's growing it, What are
• 40:17
  the cultivars? What are the soil?
• 40:20
  PH, acidity, relationships. So maybe all of this very rigid
• 40:24
  information. I tend to subscribe to chaos
• 40:27
  theory again and again because it the chaos theory is about
• 40:31
  accepting nuance. That was unexpected.
• 40:33
  And yeah, I might have, I might have digressed there, but.
• 40:39
  One of the things that you know, we were talking about before
• 40:42
  this recording was this old tree idea, and I currently was.
• 40:48
  I'm currently writing an article and I sent you a copy where I
• 40:51
  discovered some primary sources from old tea quality manuals
• 40:56
  from like the early 1900s and I found a couple sources saying
• 41:01
  that old trees are better. Some people said you cannot make
• 41:04
  good matcha or good gokiro unless your trees were at least
• 41:08
  100 years old and you I found I found various numbers but the
• 41:12
  quality distinction much like we see in poor has a lot to do with
• 41:17
  TH. And now you never hear anyone
• 41:20
  talk about TH. Like occasionally maybe there's
• 41:23
  some strange farmer in like Uji Tawara or Asuka that happens to
• 41:27
  have revived an abandoned tea plot that happens to have some
• 41:32
  seed propagated tea that has now reached 100 years old.
• 41:35
  And maybe they're making sunshine out of it, or maybe
• 41:38
  they're making tension out of it, but you don't hear about it.
• 41:42
  And I've had the opportunity to taste some of this tea and it's
• 41:46
  just not classically good. And it really resonated your
• 41:50
  story in Kyoto Nabe, where these old masters have this idea of
• 41:54
  quality and it just doesn't match with what is considered
• 41:58
  high quality now. In the same way that I know in
• 42:01
  my heart that that 100 year old Zai Rai Tensha that was milled
• 42:05
  in tamasha would never win a competition.
• 42:08
  It is just too flawed and how our ideas of quality have
• 42:13
  drifted. And it's like has a real impact
• 42:17
  on on like these farming practices.
• 42:20
  Like, is this evolution or have we lost something?
• 42:23
  And I kind of go back and forth on that.
• 42:25
  Certainly it resonates with me specifically to do with the poor
• 42:30
  world just because of and again, there is a lot of hyperbole and
• 42:35
  deliberate. Well, it's, it's, it's lying.
• 42:38
  It's fake teas about the age of of tea trees and tea bushes in,
• 42:42
  in in Yunnan. It's funny, your story in your
• 42:46
  article, which which I really enjoyed it made me remember
• 42:52
  traveling to Darjeeling to a garden near a very good garden
• 42:58
  called Jungpana. They make first flush.
• 43:01
  Darjeeling's tremendous, and I was speaking with one of the
• 43:04
  people who is the manager of the factory there, and he said he
• 43:08
  went on this long discourse about a cultivar called what
• 43:12
  they called China. I kept hearing China, that the
• 43:16
  best Darjeelings were made from a China cultivar.
• 43:20
  Well, what they were saying, I found out these were China
• 43:24
  cultivars. Oh, OK.
• 43:27
  These were original mother seeds that were stolen, kidnapped.
• 43:32
  Robert Fortune Seeds. And that a lot of the the best
• 43:37
  Darjeelings and there are some tremendous Darjeelings are made
• 43:42
  from what they call China, which is an original cultivar.
• 43:46
  And of course they're seed based rather than cuttings.
• 43:50
  So, you know, app roots have been going down and we saw a
• 43:54
  couple of plants that were close to 200 years old.
• 43:58
  Wow. So we were there for a month
• 44:01
  going to different places. Only once did I hear about a
• 44:05
  reverence or an A reverential reference to an old tree.
• 44:11
  And it was at this one garden, which I think the tree was 100
• 44:16
  and it wasn't that old, but it was over a century old.
• 44:21
  But, you know, to your point, I also am surprised that there
• 44:25
  isn't more information, more references in the description of
• 44:29
  AT to the age of the original Bush or tree.
• 44:32
  Or, you know, in China, there's very specific taidi sentai kusu
• 44:37
  laosu. And of course we can lie about
• 44:40
  these things, but at least there's an acknowledgement of
• 44:43
  this because each age group gives you a different profile in
• 44:47
  the mouth, a little more astringency.
• 44:49
  But yes, it's, it's like a, a sea of calm when you ask in
• 44:53
  certain countries about the age of a Bush.
• 44:56
  And in Sri Lanka, I think there's a practice, it's quite
• 44:59
  common where they have to uproot every three decades, every 30
• 45:03
  years. They uproot everything
• 45:04
  completely because they've, in some cases they've overharvested
• 45:08
  and in some cases they've just, the soils are not as rich
• 45:13
  mineral wise as they once were. So they have to plants and
• 45:17
  replants. They harvest like four or five
• 45:20
  times a year there, don't they? Or sometimes even more.
• 45:22
  Right you. Do and, and in some cases there
• 45:25
  isn't even really a time of the year where they're not
• 45:30
  harvesting. So there's so right.
• 45:34
  And and you know, there's sensational teas in Sri Lanka,
• 45:38
  but it's, it's again, it's a very different model of, let's
• 45:41
  say, revering the older trees, the older bushes, creating a
• 45:46
  storyline around some of that sumptuous information.
• 45:49
  And in fact, you're the article you sent me that you're working
• 45:53
  on. I'd never heard of any of this
• 45:55
  except from our mutual friend Tsuji San, who OK mentioned at
• 46:02
  one point, there's a time in the not so distant past when there
• 46:05
  was the idea of gulshu. He didn't use those words
• 46:09
  because I served him poor. Every time I go to, I bring my
• 46:14
  stock of teas and oolongs. And I mean, I've got a, my cakes
• 46:18
  of puer and I serve them because I, I think it's nice to, for me,
• 46:21
  it's nice to share and to serve them.
• 46:24
  So much of what they do is providing me joy.
• 46:26
  So I try to serve. And I explained this one
• 46:30
  particular tea that was really enjoyed in the village, and it
• 46:35
  was a ghoshu from an area called Naka, which is known for very
• 46:40
  strong flavor profile, a lot of chi.
• 46:44
  And I explained the idea while these are and I showed him
• 46:47
  pictures of these old trees and he was fascinated.
• 46:50
  And he said, well, you know, we had this to a degree, but it's
• 46:56
  part of the past. Interesting, how did he find the
• 46:59
  tea? I've always been super curious
• 47:02
  if you took the best teas of a region and serve them to a
• 47:05
  different sort of tea master in a different region, like what
• 47:09
  would they think? And I've actually I had this
• 47:11
  idea for like a fun video project is to record people's
• 47:14
  reactions like a Gushu pour to a famous matcha producer, which is
• 47:18
  exactly what she did. And then like the top umami bomb
• 47:23
  matcha to someone doing gushu in in China.
• 47:27
  I'm really curious what his his impression was.
• 47:30
  He enjoyed it and we we serve. I served it to the film, the
• 47:35
  subject of the film, and he found it fascinating.
• 47:38
  And he talked about, I don't remember exact words, but he
• 47:42
  talked about it in ways I've I wouldn't describe.
• 47:46
  I thought they'd find it very astringent because the power of
• 47:49
  a, of a young fresh, even if it's an old tree, a young
• 47:53
  explosive, 2, three-year old, you know, Sean Poor, they
• 47:58
  didn't, they said they could taste flowers.
• 48:00
  They could taste, I don't know exactly the, the descriptions,
• 48:04
  but they talked about flowers, they talked about soil, that
• 48:08
  they could taste soil. So they were able to determine
• 48:12
  that in my way of thinking, at least my memory is that they
• 48:16
  understood that what they were tasting wasn't manufactured,
• 48:20
  that it was the source material from the, the environment that
• 48:25
  they were tapping into. Because some of the Shong pores,
• 48:29
  people will say that there's, you know, if you, if you taste
• 48:32
  it at a cooler temperature or by your 5th infusion, you're
• 48:35
  starting to get something different.
• 48:38
  That's very subjective. I don't get into that.
• 48:41
  But they didn't dislike it. And in fact, one of the
• 48:44
  gentlemen kept quietly coming and I'd say which are the TS and
• 48:49
  he'd point at my pot. So he enjoyed it and he said the
• 48:53
  energy that the translation was. OK.
• 48:57
  So he was feeling not hyper. He said it wasn't hyper, but it
• 49:01
  had a lot of what I described as chi or the Japanese called Ki.
• 49:06
  But it had the energy, the power of.
• 49:09
  So he, he quite enjoyed it. And of course the teas that he
• 49:13
  makes with the shading, he's almost diminishing those very
• 49:17
  qualities that make a tea astringent, the catechins,
• 49:22
  everything else. So I I found it interesting that
• 49:25
  he wanted the energy component and I didn't hear anyone say it
• 49:30
  was astringent, which I was expecting.
• 49:33
  For a young. Yes, they love oolongs.
• 49:38
  I have to say I've I've shown up with a couple of Taiwanese
• 49:41
  oolongs from friends of mine. They they love oolongs.
• 49:45
  And they point out that there's a huge industry in Japan to
• 49:49
  bottle cold hojita, cold oolongs and sip.
• 49:53
  But something about the oolong flavor for a lot of Japanese I
• 49:57
  know they love the oolongs, but they're familiar.
• 50:01
  The Shang Puer is not so much. Interesting.
• 50:04
  It's very cool. I did something almost
• 50:06
  sacrilegious a couple months ago.
• 50:09
  We are constantly sampling matcha and I had a what was
• 50:12
  classically good Uji Hikari matcha but I thought it was a
• 50:15
  little boring. So I had some Danju that we got
• 50:19
  from a producer in Jing Mai from old trees and just took 1g of it
• 50:24
  and I crushed it up, put it in the easing teapot, brewed it
• 50:27
  super, super light, really just a touch of fragrance and to
• 50:31
  extract some minerality from it. When I prepared in Usucha with
• 50:35
  that water, with that tea, and I have never seen a more beautiful
• 50:40
  expression of matcha. I think it was like because it
• 50:44
  was the texture and the fragrance of the shung and the
• 50:47
  minerality of it without the flavor characteristics as much
• 50:51
  and the way that those two things blended together.
• 50:54
  I was like oh wow maybe this is kind of close to what these old
• 50:58
  tree like 100 year olds uji bushes might have tasted like
• 51:03
  that had could have this deep taproot and were shaded and
• 51:06
  could have a much more interesting expression of
• 51:09
  minerality. I mean, what you're doing, I
• 51:11
  mean, it may be sacrilegious and 10 years ago I would have
• 51:14
  probably shut the screen off at this point, but I think what I
• 51:19
  think what you're doing is actually part of how T moves
• 51:23
  forward. I, I just had, we just hosted 21
• 51:28
  students from all over North America, Mexico.
• 51:31
  And I have something I do called tea time.
• 51:34
  We have a nonprofit here and I serve them tea and every time I
• 51:38
  serve them tea, let's say one or two out of each group of let's
• 51:43
  say 2025 people will have had decent tea.
• 51:46
  The rest, no. But every time I serve a decent
• 51:50
  tea and I, I don't serve plank, I learned something from them
• 51:55
  about their interpretation of what they're tasting or feeling.
• 51:59
  And I think one of the great learnings I've maybe that that
• 52:02
  I've taken in in the last years is to never refute how somebody
• 52:08
  wants to progress with something or experiment with something.
• 52:11
  Because it is often in those little tweaks and sacrilegious
• 52:16
  moments that we take this beautiful leaf that we all
• 52:21
  adore. We take it forward somehow.
• 52:23
  And you know what you did there is a bit of alchemy.
• 52:26
  You decided to there's, there's, there's a, it wasn't a barista,
• 52:30
  it was a bartender. He was a mixologist.
• 52:33
  He wasn't working in Hong Kong, a Polish gentleman.
• 52:36
  He was mixing high end teas with, you know, gin with
• 52:40
  martinis. And I said there's no way I'm
• 52:43
  drinking because at that point in my life I was going to drink
• 52:46
  tea. I would do a martini, but I was
• 52:49
  not doing them in the same setting.
• 52:51
  And in the end I did. And some of what he was doing
• 52:54
  was breathtaking. And you know, to your point
• 52:59
  about throwing a bit of Qing Mayan with a little Ugi Kari
• 53:04
  matcha, maybe that's also where we should be encouraging people
• 53:09
  is to, you know, throw away the book of rules.
• 53:13
  And because ultimately I think this is what disappoints me
• 53:18
  sometimes about people who are trying to put this rigid
• 53:21
  structure on tea, I think it's important to understand how to
• 53:25
  take a pure tea and, you know, proper temperature, proper
• 53:32
  reverence for the cultivar, understanding it's like chefs
• 53:35
  talk about an omelette before you go creative, make sure you
• 53:39
  base omelette done right. So understanding what a great
• 53:43
  baseline, you know, semi lightly roasted who long should be.
• 53:50
  But after that, I think this idea of a sense of play, a sense
• 53:55
  of taking another journey with something, I, I think there's
• 54:00
  something quite positive and and exciting about the results and
• 54:05
  they won't always work. No, I've since replicated this
• 54:10
  experience with some other experiment with some other T and
• 54:14
  somehow I on the first try I stumbled upon 1 + 1 = 4.
• 54:18
  Honestly, it wasn't even three. It was so magical what that did,
• 54:22
  because I felt like the deficit of that, what I felt is a little
• 54:25
  bit of a deficit, was just so perfectly balanced.
• 54:29
  But then I tried replicating it with some other TS and it's like
• 54:32
  yeah, doesn't work so. Well, and it's like that old
• 54:36
  idea of sometimes the best tee times aren't actually a tee time
• 54:40
  with the best tee. I think a lot of these moments
• 54:43
  of exploration are subjective and that we have a different
• 54:48
  palette to someone sitting across the table from us.
• 54:50
  We have a different enzymes, different blood type, different
• 54:53
  acidity levels. So sometimes a sense of play is
• 54:57
  just that. It's it's not.
• 55:00
  It takes away this rigid notion of overly formulated rules that
• 55:06
  have been come up with by people who are maybe merchants and
• 55:10
  trying to sell us something. So good for you.
• 55:14
  Thanks. Is there anything that we didn't
• 55:16
  touch on that? You would like to know about No,
• 55:20
  just maybe a little something. And it's maybe it's simply
• 55:23
  because I know a little less about this part of the world.
• 55:26
  We're talking about the whole fertilizer question in Japan.
• 55:30
  And through some research, through a friend of mine, doing
• 55:33
  some research in Japanese literature, there is this idea
• 55:37
  that I think what's interesting about the whole umami flavor
• 55:40
  profile, this sea sort of this tribute to salt and sweetness.
• 55:46
  Throughout the, the research I've been doing and, and a
• 55:49
  friend has been doing for me, there is this idea that the
• 55:53
  Japanese identity has, has always been tied to the sea,
• 55:59
  even in inland regions. So this idea of importing a sea
• 56:05
  flavor, a sea essence with their kombu, with their seaweed, this
• 56:10
  has always been present in the Japanese literature and culture.
• 56:14
  And this there's a song in fact, that sort of pays tribute to the
• 56:18
  sea. It's Wadewa umi Noko.
• 56:22
  Basically, it's a, it's a patriotic song, but it pays
• 56:26
  tribute to the pride the people feel in the ocean and for the
• 56:31
  bounties of the ocean. And when Kyoto was a hub in
• 56:35
  Japan, you know, back this is all tying into fertilizer and
• 56:39
  bringing in herring from Hokkaido in the north of Japan
• 56:42
  into fertilizer. When Kyoto was one of the great
• 56:45
  hubs, they had something called the Mackerel Road or the Saba
• 56:50
  Kaido. It was an actual trade route
• 56:55
  that brought mackerel in from the Wakasa Bay, I think, to
• 57:00
  Kyoto. It also brought Sultan because
• 57:05
  of these flavor profiles that were so revered and and desired
• 57:10
  and sorry, it kind of ties into the mystery of fertilizer and
• 57:15
  this umami. There is a bigger story there
• 57:18
  and and your article touched on it and and maybe some of this
• 57:21
  history in literature making reference to the sea.
• 57:25
  Maybe that is in and answers some of the questions that these
• 57:29
  are nuanced questions, but maybe it ties into these flavor
• 57:33
  profiles that are coveted and and are sought out in the
• 57:38
  creation of these teas. Yeah.
• 57:41
  Well, with, with our own research, you know, like back in
• 57:44
  the days, Mata was fertilized with the human manure that was
• 57:49
  collected in Fuji City and and the manure especially coming
• 57:53
  from richer families that consumes more fish in their
• 57:58
  diet. From Digested mackerel.
• 58:00
  Yeah, to fertilize tea, that's. It's the original regenerative
• 58:06
  permaculture model maybe. Yeah, yeah.
• 58:09
  That's a sustainability model right there.
• 58:11
  Yeah, very circular food economy in the best way.
• 58:16
  The Japanese had it figured out all along.
• 58:19
  So now we just pump the soil full of ammonium nitrate.
• 58:23
  At least in the agriculture, the the, you know, the less
• 58:25
  artisanal side to the little SAD.
• 58:28
  Did they? Start using like actual fish and
• 58:31
  seafood as fertilizers in Japan. Yeah, it's interesting.
• 58:35
  I think it's probably in literature.
• 58:37
  I have asked the question about Wendy's because it's such a
• 58:40
  specific science to me that you get a simple tea farmer, but
• 58:44
  he's got an amazingly detailed log book of the ratio of, in
• 58:49
  this part of it in the garden that's in that prefecture,
• 58:53
  there's a ratio of herring, cornmeal, sugar husk, sugar cane
• 59:00
  husk in that, in that prefecture, it's totally, well,
• 59:03
  it's not totally different, but it is very demonstrably
• 59:05
  different. And when I asked him about this
• 59:08
  I I got a very vague answer and I'm not sure he was sure.
• 59:13
  But just think. It it would be fascinating to to
• 59:17
  detail the evolution of this very complex and sustainable or
• 59:23
  or not method of fertilizing. I guess it's, I guess it's one
• 59:27
  last question. I'm curious, what are your
• 59:30
  biggest discovered curiosity gaps or knowledge gaps that
• 59:35
  you've discovered that you have after spending all this time in
• 59:38
  Japan and talking to people, learning about shaded
• 59:42
  cultivation in Katanabe and also Uji in the surrounding regions?
• 59:48
  Like what? What makes you the most curious
• 59:51
  now with all the contacts that you've learned in preparing for
• 59:55
  and shooting this film? Two, I think two things come
• 59:59
  back to me again and again. One is we've, we've talked about
• 1:00:03
  it during this this quite wonderful chat.
• 1:00:06
  One of them What is the the detailed approach to creating
• 1:00:11
  eliciting? The flavor profile within a
• 1:00:15
  plant using and being able to adapt the soil, the shade, the
• 1:00:22
  curation, manipulation, the steam to create something so
• 1:00:27
  very specific. Again, it doesn't surprise me
• 1:00:29
  that the Japanese do this because they have, you know,
• 1:00:33
  methods of cooking puffer fish. They have used seaweed in so
• 1:00:37
  many different ways, spectacular, subtle, I.
• 1:00:40
  So I'd say it's the dedication to eliciting a very specific and
• 1:00:45
  desired sensation. And I guess another one is that
• 1:00:51
  this goes back to the farmers and maybe this idea of chaos
• 1:00:54
  that I cling to is that within all this detail and within all
• 1:01:00
  of this curation within the Japanese tea farmers and the
• 1:01:04
  Japanese psyche, I think there is such a sense of the pending
• 1:01:09
  power of nature. There's all these references
• 1:01:13
  with the earthquakes to the tsunamis, to typhoons.
• 1:01:17
  They've been inundated by natural disasters, but they've
• 1:01:22
  managed to always. So I found this and I find it a
• 1:01:26
  wonderful counterpoint to being inflicted with all of these
• 1:01:29
  things from the outside and yet being relentless in refining a
• 1:01:35
  structure and a technique to elicit something very specific.
• 1:01:40
  It's kind of like you've got the chaos of Typhoon Alley,
• 1:01:44
  earthquakes, tsunamis, and on the other hand you have this
• 1:01:48
  ability to cling to some sort of sense of detail and reverence.
• 1:01:53
  Like exercising the agency within the domain they control.
• 1:01:57
  It's like almost kind of. It's almost stoic.
• 1:01:59
  It's. Very much.
• 1:02:01
  In fact, I almost used the word stoic.
• 1:02:03
  It's it's an understanding that there's so much that's
• 1:02:05
  uncontrollable. So it almost has pushed people
• 1:02:12
  to the opposite of what you'd expect.
• 1:02:14
  They're not giving up the traditions.
• 1:02:17
  I mean, they are, we all are. We're giving, we're giving a lot
• 1:02:22
  of ourselves away to fast and easy.
• 1:02:25
  And, and I'm that's another discussion.
• 1:02:28
  But I think those two things, this idea of eliciting something
• 1:02:33
  so specific and this commitment to adapting and pivoting very
• 1:02:38
  quickly in a world that's shown them very little mercy at times
• 1:02:42
  in terms of natural disasters. Yeah, that's interesting.
• 1:02:45
  I've never thought about that. My my mentor, Mr. Lee, though,
• 1:02:48
  gave me the best mantra. It'll it'll be with me until my
• 1:02:53
  son will have it. He after two years of studying
• 1:02:56
  with him, he said very unceremoniously.
• 1:03:00
  I found it very cold. But he just said, now that you
• 1:03:02
  know all this, forget it and go drink some tea.
• 1:03:07
  It's been fun. Yeah, thank you so much.
• 1:03:10
  And to our audience, thank you so much for listening.
• 1:03:12
  And if you enjoyed this, please consider sharing with the friend
• 1:03:15
  and we'll see you in the next one.
• 1:03:16
  Take care. Bye.