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Notes at Origin: Uji 2024 · Specialty Matcha Podcast

0:00
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Match podcast.
0:02
My name is Ryan, this is my Coho Sunjin.
0:04
Hello, hello. And we're the Co founders of
0:06
Sanco Matcha. Products.
0:08
Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey,
0:10
matcha, share startup stories and interview experts.
0:14
And today we are in WUJI again. Yeah, and this is actually a
0:19
special episode. We found a quiet place along the
0:22
Uji River and are recording live.
0:25
So if the audio is not perfect, that's why right after.
0:29
Another day of burning Hassan. We continue our learning journey
0:35
in this wonderful place. Yeah.
0:37
So we've now met with quite a few tea farmers that we've
0:40
developed some impressions and and done a lot of learning, some
0:45
more traditional tea farmers, some more innovative tea farmers
0:48
from not just from Uji, but in Mazuka.
0:51
So we're learning all sorts of interesting perspectives and
0:55
wanted to like share things that are like kind of directly from
0:58
our notes and some stories that we've heard trying to source T
1:01
here by meeting these different people and asking them
1:04
questions. And they've been so generous
1:06
with their time and with everything they've been willing
1:09
to teach us. So Zhongjun, based off of
1:11
everyone you've met so far, how has this trip been different
1:14
than your expectations? My.
1:16
Expectations and good question. I honestly have very little
1:21
expectation before coming to Uchi.
1:24
You know, I have always envisioned or have heard people
1:28
talking about how not open Japanese people can be in terms
1:33
of, you know, sharing and telling stories.
1:36
But it has really just surprised me how much we have learned by
1:41
just talking to people not only about, you know, how to grow
1:46
tea, how to make tea, but also all these interesting industry
1:50
dynamics, we think. It's an insider baseball.
1:54
It's quite quiet, a learning journey and story telling time,
1:59
yeah. No, absolutely.
2:01
I was not expecting this either. I mean my expectations having
2:04
done business in Japan before mostly large companies, I'm
2:08
expecting the business card exchange quote UN quote ceremony
2:13
is expecting a lot of formality. I was expecting to have very few
2:17
emotions communicated in a meeting.
2:20
Like you know, I'm used to business meetings in Japan where
2:23
I walk out and you know, I'll ask our partners how do you
2:25
think that went? And they say I have no idea and
2:28
that was the norm, but just. Poker face, you know.
2:31
Yes, from the beginning to the end.
2:33
But that's not the case at all. Everyone's actually very open
2:37
and there's a lot of emotion being exchanged, not just words.
2:40
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, a lot of emotions,
2:43
but you kind of see a little bit of that in some of the older
2:47
farmers we have interact with in terms of formality and the
2:51
subtlety of communication. But for younger farmers, it's
2:55
really not the case. They're very open, enthusiastic
2:59
and willing to share and discuss.
3:03
Yeah, and actually two of them will be on the podcast.
3:05
They've we've invited them and they said yes.
3:07
So they'll be on in future episodes so we can hear from
3:10
their perspectives directly. Yeah.
3:14
So what is the most interesting thing that you have learned in
3:19
our second journey into Uchi? Right.
3:22
I guess it's how small Uji city is.
3:25
Like Uji proper, so insanely small.
3:28
I mean the the city is pretty large.
3:30
Yeah, but the production? Production region is so.
3:33
Tiny for having uji cha be like the world famous, like Bordeaux
3:38
or like, you know, like Bordeaux basically like of tea.
3:44
It's like the one brand name. If you do know anything about
3:46
matcha, you know, oh, I like tea from Guji.
3:48
I like uji cha, uji matcha, and we're learning that they're
3:54
really, you know, you can import sort of a crude tea called
3:58
aracha from like Chizuoka or Kagushima that are doing much
4:02
larger volumes, finish it here, even have 100% of it be called
4:08
ujimacha. Some serious tea laundering
4:11
going on. There's a pretty massive
4:14
distinction between uji matcha and matcha from Uji.
4:20
But we are learning, and Mark from Olika has talked a lot
4:22
about this, But you know, it's a big problem because apparently
4:26
even in Japan, there's very little awareness.
4:28
People don't even know where to look for actual matcha from Uji
4:34
most of the time. Yeah, I mean like the outlet of
4:37
all these teas are mostly getting controlled or
4:40
monopolized by all these big teas makers gardens.
4:45
The farmers in Uji actually had has very very little voice or
4:50
representation outside of Fuji City basically.
4:54
And so we just finished a meeting with someone from a
4:57
multi generational family farm in Fuji City, over 300 years of
5:01
history and you know, get to hear a lot of inside baseball
5:05
about some of the dynamics that's going on.
5:07
And like one of the first things that we talked about were that
5:09
these large brands that we all know as consumers, if you're in
5:12
Tamasha, I won't name any by name, but we all kind of know
5:16
who we're talking about. Like literally have all the
5:18
power and they set the prices and you basically say yes or no.
5:22
And if you say no, you can be punished and that buyer may
5:25
never buy from your family again.
5:28
The amount of control is kind of insane, almost some like cartel
5:33
pricing. The problem is, is that the
5:35
wholesale buyers are these brands.
5:37
Now these matcha labels have all of the power because they have
5:42
all basically reliable buying power.
5:45
We were learning from a different farmer that, you know,
5:47
you could buy like a 1000 kilos of tea from a farmer, but if
5:52
you're only going to buy it once, it actually is not really
5:54
going to help them at all, right?
5:56
These farmers need predictable revenue to maintain their
5:59
businesses. And in fact, that 1000 kilos
6:02
that you buy from them one time might actually hurt them because
6:06
now someone else, they didn't have that volume to sell to
6:10
someone who's going to become a repeat buyer.
6:13
Unless you become a repeat buyer, yes, and ensure there are
6:17
revenue stream in the future, but otherwise really selling you
6:22
more tea will be a risk for the time being.
6:26
Yeah. And not only do these big
6:29
buyers, big brands control the, you know, the the, the
6:33
procurement, they also control the market.
6:35
They control the distribution. You know, all of these famous
6:39
schools like, oh, Moda Sinka, ODA Sinka, the instructors work
6:43
with all these big brands, big names and use their tea through
6:48
their instructions and essentially educating the future
6:51
consumer of matcha, you know, about what to buy or what to
6:56
appreciate essentially. And their taste can be very
7:00
distorted based on the tea they end up getting teached or
7:04
getting taught. Yeah.
7:06
Like we learned quite a crazy story from one of the farmers in
7:10
Wuji that some older ladies who. Were the ceremony practitioners
7:15
the. Ceremony practitioners
7:16
experiencing Mata came by drink his tea, and the tea was a
7:21
hunter. Hunter shaded Asahi.
7:24
That's very little bitterness, very smooth, very creamy.
7:27
But the old ladies told him that if given the opportunity, she
7:33
will not pay for this tea. Yeah, because she almost asked
7:36
not to pay for it because it was not matcha.
7:39
It's not bitter, thus doesn't consider as matcha to her.
7:43
Yeah. It's a wild story and it's so
7:46
interesting, right? Where do you go as an average
7:49
consumer to learn anything about matcha?
7:51
Well, you go to the matcha practitioners, you go to the tea
7:53
ceremony schools. You ask your or a Sanker or
7:56
Multisenke or some other tea ceremony school.
7:59
You know what's good? What do you like to like?
8:01
Tell me about good matcha. And they of course tell you to
8:03
the brands and the brands have traditionally all the buying
8:07
power. And not only do they have all
8:09
the buying power, but anything that makes that matcha special
8:13
is immediately obscured under whatever poetic name, say Katsu
8:17
Mukashi for example. So like if you're working really
8:20
hard creating some of the best tensha from the best matcha
8:23
farmers, umm, and you know, most of it gets sold wholesale and
8:27
gets blended. They don't even know where it's
8:29
going as it gets shovelled into these various blends.
8:32
And of course, some of these blends have a lot of history,
8:35
but they also have the relationships with these tea
8:37
ceremony schools, which is why you'll see the Iyamoto Omoto
8:41
Senke Iyamoto preferred X blend or the Arisenke Iyamoto Iyamoto
8:46
means grandmaster preferred X blend coming from all of these
8:50
houses. So you have a weirdly vicious
8:52
cycle of abstraction where new value and consumer relationships
8:58
get separated again and again and again from the farmer
9:02
through these brands, through the tea schools and then to the
9:05
end consumers, creating a very weird world of matcha that we
9:09
live in today. You know, even hot we we're
9:11
talking about this on a different episode, but Hatsu
9:14
Mukashi is basically meaningless.
9:15
It is not only a poetic name, but even between different
9:18
vendors, it can mean something completely different, right?
9:22
So if you're someone I don't know and a country that doesn't
9:25
have a lot of macho infrastructure, you buy a hatsu
9:28
mukashi and you think you're developing a preference for
9:30
hatsu mukashi and then you switch vendors, you might get a
9:33
literally a completely different product.
9:35
It's almost as bad as the term ceremonial grade.
9:38
It is completely meaningless and all that you have to stand by it
9:42
is the reputation of the vendor that's selling it to you, where
9:46
it could be like the bottom of the barrel meant for a matcha
9:50
latte. This is not very high quality
9:52
stuff to the best of the best. Yeah.
9:56
I mean, the name is really a disguised of a flavor
9:59
consistency that can be, you know, managed by these blenders
10:04
so that they are not constrained or tied to certain garden.
10:09
Like for like future like these gardens are basically components
10:14
of a larger machine that can be swapped by these big blind
10:18
houses. So they really, they have the
10:21
monopoly to not only control the production, but also control the
10:27
the consumer that will end up tasting this product and
10:30
educating them what's good or what's not good.
10:32
And when you talk about appreciation of matcha right now
10:36
and in the past, the status quo is the appreciation of the
10:39
preparation, someone making you a bowl of tea in a ceremonial
10:44
way, in a ceremonial context. But it's not even appreciation
10:47
of the product. My biggest problem with Chano
10:51
You is that, you know, tea is not really the center of the
10:55
whole ceremony. It's everything else, like
10:59
sometimes but the tea. And which is most of the time
11:01
you don't even know what the tea is that you're drinking.
11:03
Yeah, and you know how to make tea, Where Marsha comes from,
11:08
like how it's made was never, you know, the topic of a tea
11:13
ceremony, School lessons. Yeah.
11:16
And I think that the this new wave of consumer desire to learn
11:22
about where your food comes from, like it really started in
11:25
the 1990s, which has led to an explosion of all these craft
11:29
industries ranging from coffee to chocolate, tea to wine to
11:33
beer, to all sorts of things, is that people want to know where
11:37
their food comes from. But even now, you see these
11:40
specialty olive oil brands talking about where their olive
11:43
oil comes from and which cultivars were used.
11:45
And it's all headed in that direction.
11:47
So these systems of the past made a lot of sense for this
11:51
market. Who were the consistent,
11:53
reliable consumers buying matcha 50 years ago?
11:58
They were the tea ceremony schools.
12:00
It makes sense that they got their own custom blends.
12:02
It makes sense that it was all abstracted, the way they didn't
12:05
really care whether or not the tea was honzu shaded.
12:07
In fact, probably a lot of it was until, I guess 50 years ago,
12:10
we saw the introduction of some other shading methods.
12:13
You know, it was all abstracted away and it kind of wasn't the
12:15
point. But that's not the direction
12:17
that modernity is going, largely because consumers have lost
12:22
trust in the food industry. And now I'm not saying you
12:24
shouldn't trust these traditional houses, but you
12:27
know, when you look across industries, you see all sorts of
12:30
bad practices, whether or not it's wheat or barley or
12:33
chocolate or any of these commodity crops where you have
12:36
in other cases almost you, you do have colonial economic
12:42
systems in place. And I don't think I'll go as far
12:45
as to say this is a colonial economic system, but this is
12:47
definitely an economic system of the past where the farmers are
12:51
on the very bottom. Yeah.
12:54
And for consumers nowadays, much consumed very little by younger
13:00
generations in Japan and with the rising consumer demand from
13:04
the West, this new mentality I think will help shape how much
13:09
it will become in the future. This idea of knowing your food
13:13
and knowing where it's coming from, this whole farm to table
13:16
idea that really gives the farmers a stage or spotlight for
13:21
them to shine. Which is a very exciting thing.
13:25
And one of the things that we've been asking people is like
13:28
comparatively how much of your business is with these new
13:31
single origin, single cultivar western matcha brands versus to
13:36
the wholesalers. And they say that most of the
13:39
volume goes to the wholesalers. So there's still tons of supply
13:43
of this well cultivated with tons of intentions, single
13:47
origin, single cultivar matcha to grow into other markets
13:51
because there's just no desire. It's a shrinking market and very
13:54
little desire domestically in Japan for these types of
13:59
products. There hasn't been historically
14:02
and there isn't even now. And even when a traditionalist
14:05
walks into a matcha shop but has matcha, it is owned and operated
14:09
by a farmer and has single origin single cults for matcha,
14:13
walks in and says this isn't matcha.
14:15
And this just goes to say that truth is there is no such thing
14:18
as truth in this world of matcha.
14:20
It is all perspective, and the layers of separation between the
14:26
blenders and Millers and the farmers and the tea ceremony
14:29
practitioners and the consumers are so radically different.
14:34
It's hard to wrap your mind around.
14:35
Some of these people, like will ask them questions about certain
14:39
milling topics or certain blending topics or poetic names,
14:43
and they're the producers of this product, and they'll say we
14:46
have no idea. They just don't know.
14:50
Yeah, the discrepancy of knowledge and information is.
14:54
Very segmented. Very.
14:55
Segmented. And it kind of confuses me, like
15:00
why is this the case? Like do people do not like not
15:04
have desire to work things out of their specialty?
15:07
Like why is this so like tightly segmented?
15:11
It's very, very confusing. I don't know.
15:14
Yeah, I don't know. It's like you mentioned about
15:18
when Mark was doing a major tea event in Penn State, and all of
15:24
these tea instructors coming from other tea houses were
15:27
taking notes as well. Yeah, learning about like how
15:30
tea was made in the 1st place, being a tea ceremony instructor,
15:35
it's very, very interesting. Yeah, I mean, if you talk to the
15:39
average tea ceremony practitioner or a sink, a multi
15:42
sink, a whatever, who does Tana you, they know remarkably little
15:45
about tea. Remarkably little in fact.
15:48
They most likely will not be able to answer your questions.
15:50
I was recently at Penn State for a Nimoto sink, a demonstration,
15:54
and was meeting some tea ceremony teachers there and
15:59
talking to them about matcha and became very obvious that, you
16:03
know, that's just not their specialty and they don't claim
16:05
to know anything about it either.
16:06
It's just really a completely different world.
16:08
So you have these weird pockets of knowledge where they don't
16:11
actually know very much about one another.
16:14
So like for someone to say that something isn't matcha or isn't
16:17
traditional or is not authentic, We have a tea ceremony
16:20
practitioner calling some of the most heritage, thoughtfully
16:24
crafted matcha left in Japan that makes up some of the
16:28
teeniest, tiniest volumes, Some of the best tea grown in this
16:31
country say that they don't want to pay for it because it's not
16:35
matcha, because it doesn't taste the way that they know.
16:39
This illusion of quality happens within Japan as well.
16:44
It's pretty crazy. Yeah.
16:46
No, it's it's it's very. Very bizarre.
16:49
It's worse than my assumptions were from learning about this
16:54
outside of Japan and not talking to people who are actually on
16:57
the ground. So one of the other things that
16:59
we learned that's very interesting and I'll give you
17:01
some statistics here it when it comes to Ujimacha itself, there
17:04
are 50 hectares likely less of matcha in Uji city.
17:09
That is wild to comprehend less it's it's about .138% of the the
17:17
tea production area in Japan. And what's happening is there's
17:22
tons of tea being imported in from other key areas in Kyoto
17:28
prefecture like Fuji Tawara or in Mazuka.
17:32
And also tons of tea from Kaglushima, which is highly
17:34
industrialized and she's woke up, which is also high volume,
17:39
high highly industrialized for the most part.
17:41
Of course there's exceptions, but those are places that are
17:44
able through I'd say agricultural innovation really
17:48
have remarkable yields and efficiency to about.
17:52
I mean, the total, the total tea production in Japan is 75,000
17:56
tons. That's not just much up also
17:58
other teeth. And for tea coming from Fuji
18:01
alone, only 30 tons, it's .04% of the total tea yield.
18:08
The you know, that's definitely not enough for people out there
18:15
buying Wuji tea, so imagine how many Wuji teas get sold out
18:21
there. That's not really coming from
18:23
Fuji. Yeah, well, so Wuji macha is not
18:26
a very regulated term. And we learned something very
18:29
interesting. One, you're allowed to label tea
18:32
from other places as Fuji Macha, so long as it's finished.
18:36
So aracha is kind of the crude product, which then I think goes
18:40
through basically another roast and gets de stemmed and
18:43
deveined. And then it's tencha, which then
18:45
can be milled. So that whole step, so long as,
18:48
so far as we understand, so long as it happens within Uji, it can
18:52
be sold as Fujimacha, at least within Japan.
18:55
But Ujimacha is actually a trademark, and what we learned
18:59
is that about 10 years ago, this trademark was owned by a Chinese
19:04
company. Yeah.
19:05
And in in China. In China.
19:07
In China, so they're like like about 10 years ago, like it's,
19:12
it's not really just Japanese tea, it could really be Chinese
19:15
tea too. And and the Japanese government
19:18
sent a diplomatic claim to Chinese government and then now
19:22
the trademark has returned to Japan.
19:24
It still gets licensed back to some Japanese owned Chinese
19:28
company in China and continually making Chinese matcha under the
19:32
name of Uji till this day. So it's still basically meaning
19:37
this. Yeah.
19:37
And most Uji matcha that people are drinking is not Fuji matcha.
19:41
And we're also learning that a lot of the retail presence in
19:45
Japan, where tourists by matcha, are also Chinese owned.
19:50
Yeah. And they're, you know, making
19:53
Japanese. Tea, that's true.
19:55
And they're doing excellent marketing, but you know, you
19:58
don't really know like how the tea is getting made, no where
20:01
the tea is coming from. No one knows.
20:04
It's a very, very bizarre. Yeah, it's very bizarre.
20:07
So it's not a protected region at all.
20:09
And we were told that even local Japanese people that want to
20:12
find Uji from Uji tea, matcha from Uji, is that they don't
20:17
even know where to look. And apparently this was an
20:20
interesting perspective. There are some wealthier
20:23
individuals and we're not just talking about money, but also
20:26
cultural capital and the ability to appreciate things within the
20:30
domestic Japanese market that have direct relationships with
20:33
farmers. Kind of in a similar way that
20:36
like a really like some of the best wine in the world was just
20:39
purchased directly. A consumer purchasing it
20:41
directly from a domain that they have a long standing, we're
20:44
buying relationship with. And that those individuals one
20:47
have usually have a lot of money, but they also have quite
20:50
a bit of taste to have prove themselves that they can
20:52
appreciate these products and add it to their collection and
20:55
age it whatever, at least in the case of wine.
20:58
But a similar thing happens, but it's very small.
21:01
And then all of the rest until very recently with the rise of
21:04
these new Western companies coming in and buying it and
21:08
marketing it as a specialty product and putting a big
21:10
spotlight on what makes it special and how it's cultivated,
21:14
how it's produced, etcetera. You know, just all went to the
21:16
wholesale buyers and just disappeared, you know, into who
21:19
knows where. That's crazy.
21:21
Like, I mean, by the end, by the end of the day, you know, who
21:25
really wants to have the brand Wuji protected?
21:29
It's really just the farmer. The big houses don't want it to
21:32
be protected because they want to blend into other tea from
21:35
other regions and so get sold as Wuji.
21:38
The consumers doesn't really care.
21:41
And it's really just the Wuji tea farmers that want the name
21:45
Wuji being protected. Yeah.
21:48
And they are numbered. We learned that there are only
21:52
30 on that 37 to 3080 farmers in Wuji nowadays.
21:56
Wuji City proper in. Wuji City proper nowadays, and
21:59
the number is decreasing. Unlikely, only 5 to 6 farmers
22:02
that do hanzu shading with the straw canopies to shade the
22:08
matcha. So these numbers are wild.
22:12
It's very small and apparently almost all of it is a Sahi
22:16
that's hansu shaded, and apparently maybe there's a few
22:19
that do Sami dotty as well. It's, it's very interesting the
22:23
performance of tea leaves and their not only their shape, but
22:28
you know, their characteristic has a very significant impact on
22:33
how they gets processed or gets harvest.
22:36
One of the reasons that Asahi is usually Hansu shaded is that the
22:41
tea leaf doesn't get hardened quite as fast as other cultivars
22:45
because, you know, doing, if you're using honzu for your
22:49
shading process, it's quite laborious compared to Kali Asha
22:53
or the cheesecloth, the black cheesecloth.
22:56
So it takes quite a longer time for people to pick the tea by
23:01
hand. So if you are doing so for other
23:04
tea cultivars, you know the quality might not be as high.
23:07
Yeah, absolutely. What are some other good lessons
23:11
that we've learned by actually visiting these places and
23:14
touching the plants and from from what we've learned from
23:16
these farmers that we didn't already know that's not commonly
23:18
talked about in English language knowledge or publications or,
23:25
you know, social media feeds about about matcha and its
23:28
production. One thing that I learned that's
23:31
very interesting that really doesn't get talked about by a
23:36
lot of these Western publication, English
23:39
publication, is how titsumi actually work for tensha.
23:44
So if you're familiar with how Chinese tea gets picked in
23:48
China, you know you're really only harvesting the top of the
23:52
tea plant. Like the most tendered, but
23:54
maybe one or two. The 1st and 2nd leaf.
23:57
Yeah, first or second leaf following by the but but for
24:01
Japanese shade grown tensha, you are picking making individual
24:06
beaks and you're actually keeping the little butt on the
24:10
twig for future growth. So like in the second or third
24:13
harvest, those little butt will turn into larger leaves again
24:17
and then they will get harvest in the future.
24:19
But you're only just picking individual leaps.
24:22
And the most umami high quality tea leaves are actually the
24:27
bottom ones because they receive even less sunlight from the
24:31
other teeth that are on the top. And so they they actually have
24:34
the most concentrated amino acid content in the tea leaf.
24:38
So that was very, very interesting.
24:40
Very counterintuitive. Very counterintuitive.
24:42
Chinese tea perspective. Yeah, yeah.
24:44
But you know, this is just for tancha, just for matcha, for,
24:48
you know, sencha and other Japanese tea.
24:50
The harvesting method is identical to Chinese.
24:53
Just the top part, yeah, just Kudo and Sencha, they were
24:56
telling us is that's more of the pick for that.
24:59
That was very interesting. Yeah.
25:01
And also there's some very interesting labor shortage, not
25:05
on the farmer, but on the tea pickers.
25:08
There are these old, kind, nice little Japanese grandmas that
25:14
you probably will casually run into in Wuji City, and they will
25:17
just turn into tea harvest Tsumi Superman during harvest season.
25:21
And they are also numbered. So we learned something very
25:25
interesting from one of the tea farmers is that a lot of these
25:28
tea gardens are just now they sitting there empty.
25:32
Not because or not just because of no farmers wants to grow tea
25:35
out there. But also they, the farmers are
25:37
running out of bandwidth during harvest season to harvest those
25:41
tea because there is not enough these nice.
25:45
Resources. There's the nice little grandma
25:47
out there picking tea for them. That's the very, very
25:50
interesting, you know, in China. But that's also a problem too.
25:53
Younger people just like not interested in this very
25:57
laborious, you know, like very, very hard work during, you know,
26:02
peak summer, like under the sunshine and you were in the
26:06
teeth you all day. And there's insects, assuming
26:09
there's not too many pesticides or yeah, it's hard.
26:13
It's. Hard work.
26:15
And in China, there's this little grandma community that we
26:19
just traveled from provinces to provinces following the tea
26:22
harvest line to pick tea from all the way from Fujian to
26:26
Chaozhou to Yunnan. You know, like here in Japan,
26:30
all of the tea pick pickers are sourced locally.
26:34
There's no such thing as migrant tea pickers.
26:37
That's interesting. That's interesting too, because
26:39
you don't see it in other areas. I know that there's a large tea
26:43
plantation in New Zealand under the brand name Zealong, and I
26:48
know that they fly in people from Taiwan.
26:50
I think it's either Taiwan or the Philippines, I don't
26:53
remember which, who are skilled tea pickers.
26:55
That's great to hand pick tea because it's they can't.
26:57
They can't source on that type of skilled labor locally.
27:00
That's wild story. You've had their tea before.
27:03
Yes, I have. Oh really?
27:04
Is it good? It's very different.
27:06
It's done in Taiwanese Wolong style.
27:08
When you compare it price to quality.
27:10
It's let people make their own judgments, but it's not bad.
27:13
It's not bad. It's definitely worth trying.
27:15
Interesting. Taiwanese owned or.
27:17
I don't know, I don't know. OK, interesting, but.
27:21
Some pretty wild stories about the the tea picker shortage.
27:25
Yeah, what about you, Ryan? I am just still blown away at
27:29
how different the cultivars look.
27:32
Uji Hikari with their WAVY leaves and slightly lighter
27:35
color. The Asahi cultivar with these
27:38
gigantic leaves relative to the others, the long skinny, kind of
27:43
almost sword shape Sami Dory, the really dark green color of
27:48
Oku Midori. It's just these, it's not
27:51
subtle. It's in my head.
27:53
I had never really pictured it, but it is so like anyone could
27:57
tell the difference. It's it's not.
27:59
And we learned that it's not just the appearance, but the the
28:03
skills or experienced tea farmer can smell.
28:05
The difference the. Difference of the tea leaves
28:08
when they're getting matured because they mature in different
28:11
times of the year so they can actually smell the tea leaf and
28:15
smell the difference, which is wild.
28:17
The other thing that I found really inspiring and I believe
28:20
in Tyus Sosen talked about it. Sosen talked about it a little
28:23
bit his books, but but getting to hear this first hand was
28:28
really interesting is that a lot of the fertilizer that the
28:31
natural fertilizer that's used like in different fish
28:36
byproducts and rice and sesame waste and.
28:40
Oyster. Shells, everyone has their own
28:42
recipe, but they're all things like this that they get put on
28:46
to the soil and that is actually not the fertilizer.
28:51
It's like the the the starting material and actually the local
28:56
microbial flora of bacteria and yeast break that down and it
29:02
turns white. And it's actually fertilizer
29:05
through natural fermentation. And it's another expression of
29:09
the land itself and the microbial flora that are
29:13
breaking down these things into their more basic nitrogen
29:16
components or phosphorus or potassium components.
29:20
And then it gets kind of tilled into the soil.
29:22
It's really full circle. It was very inspiring to see
29:26
some of these natural practices in action and tasting tea from
29:30
these farmers who do this, it tastes night and day difference
29:34
than what I would call these umami bombs, which is what's
29:38
probably very well produced tea using synthetic fertilizer,
29:41
though, that just tastes like umami, like just pure savory.
29:46
But these are much more expressive in their flavor and
29:49
much more complex. And I would say they have a
29:51
lower overall intensity of flavor, but a much greater
29:55
complexity, much more nuanced, much more.
29:59
Interesting, like you can actually you are actually
30:02
tasting the local environment, the local tawa versus you know
30:07
all of these other umami bombs. Technically you know you can
30:11
really replicate that taste anywhere else in the world or
30:15
getting very closed because the entire production process is
30:19
highly engineered. But for all of these traditional
30:23
natural plantation methods garden in Uchi, but you are
30:27
really tasting the local environment and especially the
30:30
Hansu shaded. What we learned is that it it
30:33
not only it shades the sun from protecting the straw, the the
30:37
straw like Hangzhou is you know how you call straw.
30:40
It's the name of straw in Japanese, but it not only
30:43
protects the tea from the sunlight, but it also acts as a
30:48
natural filter of rainwater. And according to, you know, the
30:52
farmers, these straws kind of can filter out some of the
30:56
unwanted flavor from the rainwater and gives the the tea
31:00
a more of a pure kind of a local taste.
31:03
And these straws are all sourced locally too.
31:06
Local rice straws. Surrounding all of these tea
31:09
gardens you have all these rice fields and they're all sourced
31:13
locally and they're produced locally and they're decayed
31:16
locally. And get free.
31:17
Full of life. Re back, put back into the soil.
31:20
Yeah. And all the works in the
31:22
microbes too. I mean, that's one of the things
31:24
that people like about natural wine.
31:26
Natural wine's so interesting because most wine is made by
31:29
industrial yeast, and you pitch in industrial yeast, which then
31:34
breaks it down into alcohol. But in natural wine, it's the
31:37
local yeast that's sitting on the skin of these grapes that
31:41
ends up doing the fermentation and is really another dimension
31:45
and extension of what we can understand about a taste of a
31:49
place and terroir. And you know, in a lot of ways,
31:52
these umami bombs using synthetic fertilizer really seem
31:56
to be just like accommodating the average Japanese consumers
32:01
preference for umami. And it's something that they can
32:07
then easily appreciate in a tea. And easily controlled and easily
32:11
maintain the flavor consistency. Yeah, it's, I think that's
32:16
really the reason of why these things exist and how they're
32:21
getting, how consumers are getting educated that these are
32:25
the flavors that they should be appreciate.
32:28
Yeah. And there's nothing much deeper
32:30
there. It was interesting.
32:31
I think someone was saying there's a study, there was a
32:33
study done in Japan looking at the correlation of umami
32:37
compounds in tea with price and there seems to be a very linear
32:41
correlation. So there's probably a huge
32:44
profit incentive of doing a lot of these practices as well.
32:47
But you know, like after being in Uji and after learning from
32:52
all of these farmers practicing natural tea plantation, I don't
32:55
think that the actual cost of making tea is linear with umami
33:00
taste. The cost and labored that went
33:03
into Hunzu shading that went into creating all of these
33:07
nuanced, beautiful flavor in the tea.
33:10
It's far more expensive and labor intensive than just
33:14
dropping, you know, synthetic nitrogen bomb into your soil.
33:18
Yeah, absolutely. It's it's pretty interesting and
33:22
merely sad. I wish we had more time to talk
33:24
up with some of these people about what they think about
33:27
these tea competitions. But all of this competition
33:30
grade stuff that I've ever had, you know, they're generally lean
33:34
towards more umami bombs. And I half wonder if that's good
33:37
or a bad thing for the industry. Like, you get a lot of
33:40
recognition, but who decided that that was going to be the
33:43
top quality Those all of these decisions filtered down to get a
33:49
spotlight of a national award-winning team.
33:52
What I have been seeing, you know how these national awards
33:56
gets labored on packaging. It's the big houses.
33:59
Yeah, well, it's a small house. I mean, you see people like Suji
34:02
San winning. That is.
34:04
All the people that people like, oh, we car some of the people's
34:07
cattle that work, that they work with.
34:09
That is true. That's one way that they gain.
34:12
That's how one way we know who the people to contact out to.
34:15
Those people write about them in English.
34:17
Yeah. But from one of the tea farmers
34:19
that we visited today telling us that, you know, if you want to
34:23
be competitive or want to participate in these
34:27
competitions, you would want to drop a lot of fertilizers in
34:32
your soil and kind of exploit the potential of the soil in the
34:35
near term. And he doesn't necessarily do
34:38
that. But you know, it's, you know,
34:42
one of the, I guess shortcomings of being too focused on creating
34:46
competition T is that you are not necessarily working with the
34:51
soil, working with the environment.
34:54
You're basically stimulating the environment to create something
34:58
unnatural. Weird system of perverse
35:00
incentives going on and we are just skimming the top of it.
35:04
It'll be interesting to see how our opinion evolves over the
35:06
years as we get deeper and deeper into this industry.
35:10
But one thing is very obvious and certain is that the current
35:14
system really is not the most sustainable for farmers and
35:19
almost, I would say not even fair.
35:21
And it is against the values that most consumers have outside
35:27
of Japan about knowing the source of the food that they are
35:31
consuming. It's really against like
35:35
everybody except the, the big, the big blenders and the big
35:40
houses. Like, you know, like if you
35:44
know, this system continues to exist and fewer and fewer people
35:47
in Wuji wanted to make tea and all of these tea gardens went
35:51
into oblivion. And you are basically left with
35:55
all of these blenders importing tea from Kagoshima or other
35:59
regions into Wuji and gets processed as Wuji tea, the true
36:03
Wuji tea will cease to exist. And.
36:06
We have very sad potential future.
36:09
A little crazy, actually. Yeah, it would just be a shock.
36:14
Just a yeah, a shell. A weird legacy legend that is so
36:18
disconnected from. What the reality?
36:22
Reality of what GT is and should be and what made it famous in
36:27
the 1st place. Some very strange optimizations
36:30
going on around exploiting this same UGI tea.
36:35
And weirdly enough, we heard that there was a sort of a
36:37
coalition of UGI City tea farmers that tried to trademark
36:41
on the term UGI tensha because that wasn't taken to kind of
36:44
protect the region in similar ways like ADOC or an AOC type
36:50
classification. They were threatened.
36:53
Yeah, they were threatened, They were threatening to take them to
36:56
court, these big blend houses if they tried to trademark this.
37:01
So there is some real powered imbalance and distortions going
37:06
on. So, you know, everyone who's a
37:09
consumer that's listening to this or another business that's
37:11
listening to this, you know, it's, we need to really know the
37:14
source of the things that we're buying to make sure that we're
37:17
not slowly, accidentally, unintentionally destroying what
37:23
could be a very vibrant future of Uji Macha from Uji and or.
37:30
Uji Macha like this really should not be.
37:32
Either way, a stigmatized name and.
37:35
We're not curious either. I mean a fine call it Wazuka
37:38
Cha. I'd love to learn about the
37:40
unique terroir of Wazuka and what they're doing there.
37:43
Or Uji Tawara, or Kagushima. Or Shizuoka.
37:46
Or Yami. I love Yamicha.
37:48
Do these people have to hide by dumping it into this one thing
37:52
that ever everyone happens to know and that tourists want to
37:55
buy? Right.
37:56
It's really not a sustainable future.
37:59
And there's probably all sorts of interesting stories to tell
38:02
in these other places. Yeah, it's.
38:04
It's really a a value of a money problem.
38:08
Like a tea obviously gets sold for higher price if your name
38:11
packet bujicha but it really should not be the case.
38:15
There are good teas growing all over Japan and they should be
38:19
like back to our application of transparent labeling.
38:23
Like if consumer are educated with transparent information,
38:26
they can naturally develop their own preference of all these
38:29
regions. And, you know, like they can
38:31
choose to, you know, make purchase or, you know, that the
38:35
money will naturally flow into places that their kids could
38:38
take or T that fits to a certain consumer.
38:43
So I think, you know, the future really should should be shaped
38:47
by a transparent information float.
38:49
And the consumers need to have the freedom to choose what kind
38:52
of tea or, or have the right to know what tea they are actually
38:56
buying. I think that's that's very
38:59
important. Yeah.
39:00
No, absolutely. That's essentially how you
39:03
develop preference to begin. With it's anti specialty, I've
39:05
been going back and forth as we talk about specialty matcha and
39:09
how we define a specialty product and sort of the words
39:12
and labels and the terminology that we are using on this
39:16
podcast. And they keep going back and
39:18
forth whether or not I personally consider these large
39:20
traditional blending houses and whether or not they're specialty
39:23
matcha. And because they did, some of
39:26
these blends do have some heritage and these are very old
39:29
companies that have been around for hundreds of years.
39:31
But I the more I learn, I think less and less they're not a
39:36
specialty. It's not specialty much on from
39:39
these large blend houses. Legacy dinosaur Maxwell.
39:43
Maxwell House equivalent, maybe a couple steps higher.
39:47
Definitely. I mean, it does not encompass
39:50
any of the things that we value in specialty around
39:53
transparency, around the ability to cultivate your own
39:56
preferences about understanding the taste of a place or the
39:59
taste of a process. It's not specialty.
40:01
No, and they don't even treat their vendors or suppliers
40:06
nicely. That's very sad.
40:08
Makes me angry a little bit. It really feels like these old
40:12
school archaic post colonial agricultural systems that buy
40:17
and sell commodities and put nice packaging on it and sell it
40:21
as name your mass market product.
40:23
Definitely not specialty well. It's only our second journey in
40:27
Wuji and we have learned, I would say quite a lot before,
40:32
you know, before we got here. It's quite an amazing place with
40:36
all these interesting dynamics and good tea.
40:40
My the initial impression of Wuji T has always been very
40:45
mommy driven, but after tasting some of the actual good quality
40:49
tea produced locally. Which by the way, you're really
40:52
not going to find retail or maybe it's some cafes that that
40:56
is true. You really have to go to the
40:57
source. You know, like I like Wuji T
41:00
Wuji T is great and it's a great city.
41:02
It's a kind of great environment and very nice people and
41:06
definitely coming back. Yeah, yeah, we've had a great
41:08
trip so far and we're headed to Izumo City and we'll talk about
41:13
some impressions there and to Yame as well and then to Tokyo.
41:17
And yeah, be on the lookout for for new content from us.
41:21
So thanks so much for listening. We really appreciate the
41:24
listenership. If you have any strong opinions
41:27
or we're going to talk about this topic, please just DM us on
41:30
on Instagram or shoot us an e-mail.
41:32
I'd love to talk to you or if you have a unique perspective
41:35
that you'd like to share on the podcast, we'd love to hear from
41:38
you as well. Thanks so much for listening
41:40
and. See you in the next episode.
41:42
See you in the future.