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Notes at Origin: Yame vs Uji Matcha · Specialty Matcha Podcast

0:00
Hello and welcome to the Specialty Monster Podcast.
0:02
My name is Ryan, This is Michael Hozungyan.
0:04
Hello. Hello.
0:05
And we're the cofounders of Sanko Mach products.
0:07
Yeah, we launched this podcast to discuss our learning journey,
0:10
macho show, startup stories and interview experts.
0:14
And today we are sitting in our tiny apartment in Tokyo.
0:19
Can't even open your suitcase. I'm getting squeezed in the
0:21
little corner of this room we just came back from.
0:26
Yummy. Yeah, So we would title the
0:29
series like Matcha sourcing, Tensha sourcing, like Travel
0:33
diary, but that sounds way too cringe journal.
0:36
And so this is going to be a little bit less structured and a
0:39
little more conversational than our usual content.
0:41
But we bought a bunch of samples, we met a bunch of
0:43
people, we did a bunch of factory tours.
0:46
And it's just kind of interesting to contrast Yame
0:49
with Uji and having talked to all these different people,
0:52
getting our impressions. And we just did some sensory
0:55
analysis on four different teams from Yame that we wanted to
0:57
share. Again, these won't be like a
0:59
review, so to speak. We'll, we'll give you the name
1:02
and the producer and, and what we know about them.
1:05
In some cases, we were able to get even the blend components
1:08
and which is kind of cool. Usually these large companies
1:10
don't do that. And then, yeah, just share our
1:12
thoughts travelling and what it's like to source tea now that
1:15
this trip is basically come to an end now that we're in Tokyo.
1:20
No. Oh.
1:20
No, but we'll be back and we have some friends to visit in
1:23
Tokyo before we head on. So what were your overall
1:29
impressions of Yamei now that that portion of the trip's over?
1:33
Yeah, Yamei is actually pretty interesting.
1:35
You see a lot of traditional practice like natural plantation
1:40
and even honzu shading in some of these areas.
1:44
But but they don't necessarily have a lot of these historical
1:47
baggage as you know, people in Wujitas.
1:50
And they're more, I would say, flexible and open minded, not
1:56
necessarily open minded, but maybe more pragmatic when it
2:00
comes to making tea or making productions.
2:04
So it's almost, I would say, an interesting fusion of Fuji and
2:09
Izumo. Yeah, Now it's an interesting
2:12
point. In Izumo is an even newer tea
2:14
producing region. And something I realized on that
2:17
trip when we were talking to a tea farmer is that when you hear
2:20
about these companies being multi generational, like being
2:24
on their 12th, 14th or 16th generation, they actually
2:28
weren't always tea farms. And sometimes they were doing
2:31
other crops or other activities. And you know, I think I forget
2:35
the exact case, but in one of the cases someone we met I think
2:38
was 8th generation, but they'd only been called it only quote
2:41
UN quote. Been cultivating tea for like 80
2:43
years. Still a very long time, but from
2:47
beginning to end it wasn't actually all tea, which is also
2:50
interesting. Well, usually when they switch
2:53
to tea, they stick with tea, but when they start, sometimes other
2:57
crops, yeah. The other thing that was very
3:00
interesting is that for just the sheer dumb luck, we got to meet
3:04
the 14th generation of a very small producer in Yame, which
3:08
we'll talk about a little bit later, And we were walking into
3:11
the retail store like really just to get an experience,
3:15
retail experience in Yame. You know, we had no meeting set
3:18
up that day, just kind of wandering around and we're
3:20
asking tons of questions to the retail salesperson who I feel
3:24
very bad for because we were like, what cultivar was this?
3:27
How do you do processing and using Google Translate in your
3:31
language skills? And she was like, I have no
3:33
idea, I'm sorry, I need to ask the president.
3:36
And there we go. We're standing there.
3:38
The president, he's a pretty young guy, walks in the door.
3:41
He was super hot. He was like very sweaty just.
3:44
Like the power like over his head and.
3:47
I'm sure he was like, who are these people in his own head?
3:50
Clearly he was just came back from his tea garden.
3:53
Yes, and as he walked in and I was like sweat swimming in sweat
3:59
and guy into his warehouse did a little bit of change and then
4:03
came right back. And with his notebook and he's
4:05
like, yes. Let me tell you everything about
4:09
this team, yeah. He was one of the most
4:10
transparent retail experiences we've ever had in Japan, where
4:15
we walk into a place, a store that sells tea and this store
4:18
has been around for a very long time.
4:20
They've won awards, architectural awards for their
4:23
tea evaluation table and how they built this kind of sun.
4:26
Well, that I guess has existed for about 100 years and it
4:31
floods light onto the T evaluation table.
4:34
Really stunning. Yeah, yeah, it's a there's a
4:37
very interesting book called Impressive Shadow that talks
4:41
about Japanese design aesthetic and that was just a perfect
4:45
example that. Impressive shadow.
4:48
Yeah, that realization, it's really a plate of light and
4:52
shadow. Yes, it is.
4:53
Most of the areas are finished with this matte dark wood, and
4:58
you have this light bulb shining a beam of light into each
5:02
section of the little table, which people use it to evaluate.
5:06
Sadly not anymore, but that was very cool to see.
5:09
And that place has been around for like 100.
5:12
Ish years, yeah, that building, I think the company has been
5:14
around even longer. Yeah, that was very cool to see.
5:17
And they had some packaging that they used to export tea 100
5:22
years ago to San Francisco. Yeah, that was cool.
5:25
American written packaging of Japanese tea that they had
5:29
produced was wild. Very cool to see.
5:32
So anyway, you can go and visit this place, which is what we
5:34
did. We actually went into a random
5:36
tea shop in Yamai that we very quickly learned didn't sell
5:40
matcha. After a 30 minute walk, it was
5:43
like whoops. And the very nice people there
5:45
showed us this map at some. Maybe we'll link this or if
5:48
you're interested in this map, we'll send you some photos.
5:51
There's a tea tourism map, I think, of Fukuoka and of all the
5:55
major cities and the select retailers that they have.
5:59
And so we went to one of these places on this map, and it
6:01
happened to be this place. And so sometimes sourcing tea is
6:04
easier than you think. Some very interesting
6:06
serendipity happened a long way, almost cinematic.
6:09
Almost cinematic and the gentlemen there.
6:12
The 14th or 16th generation tea master was so nice to us.
6:16
Between his English and Sam's Japanese, we learned quite a
6:20
bit. We had a whole factory tour.
6:21
They had some old setups where they used to do pan fried tea
6:25
kind of in a walk like they do for shashing in Chinese tea.
6:28
Like Chinese green tea and other types of tea.
6:30
Yeah, what we learned very interestingly is that I may used
6:35
to only do Kamari finish, so pan fried finish for the tea in the
6:40
region for a couple 100 years and then it was quite recently
6:45
like 100 years ago that they switched to a steam finish.
6:48
Well. I think they're a new ish matcha
6:52
a producer as well at least. Definitely not nearly as old as
6:56
Uji. The history of matcha production
6:58
and Yame as far as I'm aware. And these people start doing
7:03
Hongzhu. Yes, that was the most
7:05
interesting thing we learned. They're a new Hongzhu shading
7:10
producer. They just started three years
7:13
ago. Three years ago doing Hongzhou.
7:14
Here we are. And it's so funny.
7:16
We had conversations with some farmers in Uchi and we're like,
7:19
are other people going to do Hanzhou?
7:20
Like, do you think it's like demand grows for this Hongzhou
7:24
rice straw shaded like they're completely natural canopies to
7:28
to shade the matcha. Like, is anyone going to do
7:30
this? And they were like, I doubt it.
7:33
And here we go, Yeah. So there's these different
7:35
knowledge pockets across the tea industry where someone might not
7:38
know what someone else is doing. It's really I'm quite optimistic
7:42
now that someone would choose to do a production method that is
7:46
so labor intensive, completely from scratch, with no history of
7:51
having done this. It's wild.
7:54
It's pretty interesting to see how people adopt new technology
7:58
or revive old technology, you know, as just purely, I would
8:04
say experimental. They are willing to, you know,
8:07
take the risk and be innovative. I I'm quite optimistic about the
8:11
future of Japanese Marja. Apparently it's quite difficult
8:14
to do. You'd think that you know Japan
8:16
is a major rice producing country.
8:18
Should be pretty easy to find enough rice straw to Hangzhou
8:21
shade. But apparently not all rice
8:23
straws created equal. And what happens is, is what
8:26
we've learned when it rains, the honzu thing, the rainwater can
8:32
extract stuff from the rice straw and the rice straw can
8:36
also filter some things that come down from the rainwater and
8:40
then that rains down on the plants, which is one of the
8:43
things that makes it a little bit better.
8:45
And what we have learned is that a lot of the rice draught either
8:49
has too many chemicals or a sprayed with too much stuff that
8:52
it's actually not suitable for hanzi shaving.
8:55
And I've heard, I believe from Mark, from Olica has works with
8:58
the producer that has his own rice field specifically so he
9:03
can grow his own straw so that he can shade his matcha, which
9:07
is really wild. And we were learning that that
9:10
not all rice straws create equal.
9:11
Yeah, yeah. And we also learned from one of
9:15
the farmers in Izumo that does like in the recent few years,
9:20
rice straw has, the quality of rice straw across Japan has been
9:23
declined. So, you know, like people are
9:27
getting more cautious about, you know, using this practice
9:30
because the quality is not as good as before.
9:33
Yeah. So something when it comes to
9:35
taste and one of the more, I'd say difficult questions that
9:40
we've asked producers when we've met with tea farmers or around
9:44
flavor and expressing flavor and we asked what is the flavor
9:48
difference between let's say Asahi that is Hanzo rice straw
9:53
shaded natural shaded natural canopy versus the synthetic
9:58
canopy. I always forget the technical
10:00
name for this. Kanesha.
10:02
This is why Kalesha. Kanesha like a temperature or
10:08
cold coldness cloth or. Coldness cloth.
10:10
OK, so this which is basically some form of black plastic.
10:15
And usually they put two layers of this at the very end.
10:19
So I, I believe it's 98% of the sun that's blocked versus the
10:23
Hanzo rice straw, which they can just put on more straw to block
10:26
more and more sunlight. And I remember asking one of the
10:29
farmers we met like, what is the taste difference between the
10:33
synthetic cloth and the Hanzi rice shade, shade?
10:37
And he said that the difference in color and taste at the stage
10:42
of tensha is actually very big, very noticeable, especially if
10:46
you know what you're tasting for.
10:48
He didn't describe what the flavor difference was other than
10:52
that there was one. But apparently then once it's
10:54
milled into matcha, the difference is not so huge when
10:57
it just comes to flavor. So the demand for this rice
11:01
honzu straw shading I think will not necessarily be flavor
11:06
driven, but it's more about garden management and how people
11:09
like people using natural techniques, older techniques for
11:13
garden management and you like, it's probably making the tea
11:16
plants healthier. It's a little bit more of, I
11:20
don't know if regenerative agriculture is quite the right
11:23
phrase to use, but it's using waste ingredients from a
11:27
different industry and using them to make a canopy.
11:30
And that the straw's life doesn't stop when it's shading
11:33
the tea and put on these canopies.
11:35
It then gets dropped to the soil.
11:37
And actually all of these natural gardens that we're
11:39
meeting or more natural gardens that were bendant, even the ones
11:44
that have that synthetic shade raised canopy cover, they still
11:49
take straw and put it between the different tea plants, which
11:52
helps retain moisture in the soil.
11:54
And then that breaks down and helps contribute to the soil as
11:57
well. Yeah, really nice full life
12:00
circle of these materials. The sheer idea of doing that
12:05
practice, I think is really complies with the idea of
12:08
sustainability and regenerative agriculture.
12:13
And also like it's kind of the difference too between let's say
12:16
like a handmade T-shirt and an industrial T-shirt.
12:19
Let's say you have a very high end industrial T-shirt where
12:22
it's automatic weaving machines and automatic sewing machines.
12:26
It could be objectively better or similar perfect stitching or
12:31
let's say carpet making a lot of carpets.
12:33
If you go to like Turkey or like Egypt and go get have a carpet
12:37
salesman try to sell you or upsell you on a carpet, right,
12:40
One of the biggest thing they tell you for is to look for the
12:42
imperfections. And because something handmade
12:45
is always a little bit imperfect, where in the case of
12:48
like A at least at the lower end of carpets, the machine made
12:52
ones are probably objectively higher quality if they're using
12:55
the same base materials as something that's handmade.
12:57
But something that's handmade has a life and has soul and took
13:01
a lot more labor, a lot more work is giving more people jobs
13:04
is maybe more full circle. So like a similar thing with
13:08
these different types of luxury products, whether or not it's
13:11
carpets or clothing or let's say like leather bags even, right?
13:15
There's a reason why people pay so much beyond just vanity or
13:20
rarity for an Elman's bag. It's because Elman's bags are
13:24
100% handmade by people who have been doing it for 20 years, 30
13:28
years, 40 years. At least that's my take.
13:31
I don't know if you agree with me as I'm giving.
13:32
You yeah, I mean, like, you know, like it's really like
13:36
after learning how hard and how labor intensive Hanzu's shaving
13:40
can be, you know, like other than the flavor that, you know,
13:45
the tea that you are drinking by the end of the day, really a big
13:49
respect to a people who continue and, you know, revive this
13:53
practice. But also on the other hand, you
13:56
know, like Khalil Shah is so much of A easier technology or
14:01
innovation in the modern days, it really decreased the labor
14:06
that's required into going into farming matcha.
14:11
And resources. And resources and whereas you
14:14
know, it retains quite a bit of, you know, the, the effect, the
14:19
final effect like the final delivery of the matcha is it's
14:24
pretty good. According to one of the farmers
14:26
we talked to in Uchi, really only very experienced tea
14:31
drinkers would be able to tell the difference between a kind of
14:34
shaded matcha versus a Holmes or shaded.
14:37
Matcha and we didn't even learn what the difference was.
14:39
There are no flavor descriptors were given.
14:41
We tried to ask for a flavor description and they were, I
14:45
think they were themselves having no trouble articulating
14:48
the difference too, or in English or maybe there was a
14:51
language barrier. And with all of these in
14:54
consideration, you know, like the tea industry in Japan is
14:59
aging, like young people are leading the industry because
15:02
it's so labor intensive. Anything that can ease the
15:05
labor, make farmers life easier. Well, as, you know, like
15:10
retaining the quality of matcha, I think is great technology.
15:15
And I, I, I don't think that, you know, like one, one thing is
15:18
superior, then another needs to be make such a strong comparison
15:24
because they really have their own benefits.
15:26
Yeah. If anything, I think purchasing
15:28
it is a reflection of your own values and that you value this
15:32
type of cultivation, this type of tradition, and that's why
15:36
you're doing it. It's a reflection of yourself.
15:38
Because to be honest, I was really disappointed in this
15:42
answer that there's not a very large taste difference,
15:45
especially as matcha. I'm like word really.
15:48
Like it's not. All these efforts.
15:50
This is not what the answer that I wanted to hear and then I was
15:53
thinking why do I still want it? And I'm trying to deconstruct a
15:57
reverse engineer my own desire for this thing.
16:00
Even if someone who grows it says that, there's not a huge
16:03
difference on. The other hand they're they were
16:05
being very honest to. Us very honest.
16:08
Which is pretty surprising. Usually after all these efforts,
16:12
you probably probably would want to make up some stories.
16:15
So like, yeah, like, yeah, difference is not that large.
16:21
Like only very experienced tasters can sometimes taste the
16:24
difference. Now it's that was wild.
16:26
That was a special learning experience, so apologies for
16:29
that tangent back to Uji, but to circle back to Yame, we got to
16:33
tour, I think it was 2T factories in Yame of completely
16:37
different size and scale. One majority of other than like
16:40
the metal equipment, but the majority of the material seemed
16:43
to be wood, even the tubes that helped to move tee from 1
16:47
section to another and the other was very, very modern industrial
16:51
had computer optical scanners to sort color like really
16:56
completely wonderful contrast to see.
16:59
Yeah, very, very interesting. And the wood structured factory
17:05
that we visited was clearly from the past days, yes, very, very
17:11
well kept, but very, very old. And one thing that I noticed
17:15
very interesting, I, I mean, I have no contacts about, you
17:19
know, all of these tea equipment industry.
17:21
But it seems like all of these equipments, even the very old
17:25
ones, are all made in Shizuoka and they are all custom made to
17:29
fit the exact dimension of the factory or the workflow, which
17:34
are very, very interesting. It is interesting, all these
17:37
factory tours we get. There's this wonderful little
17:40
plaque that's on a lot of these pieces of metal.
17:43
It's just easy. Woka something, something.
17:45
Yeah, it's interesting. It must be an interesting
17:47
business to be in as well with these different layers, but it
17:51
seems to be even within anyone set of equipment, the ability to
17:55
make different parameter process changes seems to be pretty easy.
17:59
And the industrial ones were like, yeah, we can do anything
18:01
you want, You want it like this, that's fine.
18:03
We process it that way and even on the small scale.
18:06
So that that was interesting. They have a lot of control over
18:08
the process of their manufacturing.
18:10
They are old man like people. I feel like frequently forgot
18:14
that how early Japan industrialized.
18:16
Yes, one of the first industrialized country in Asia.
18:21
And, you know, you can clearly see the legacy or the historical
18:26
footprint of how these machineries evolved from
18:30
different factories. Even from what we've seen where
18:34
like you know, in that place, I think the newest piece of
18:36
equipment was 50 years old. You know, in the other hand, we
18:39
have some AI optical recognition thing that sorts things by
18:44
color. And what it does is the tea has
18:47
is kind of like a waterfall and falls down in a mere monolayer.
18:53
And there's a camera that watches this tea that falls off
18:57
into a monolayer. They have this for coffee and
18:59
wheat, pretty common in those industries too.
19:02
And for beer, I think they do this for some malt to do some
19:04
malt sorting. And actually in coffee, it's
19:07
extremely important because in some of the defects that can
19:11
happen at the farm in processing or in storage, 1 bean out of
19:15
1000 will ruin the entire batch. That's how strong in taste that
19:21
defect is. It's not the same case in tea.
19:24
But anyway, this is a pretty well developed technology that's
19:27
now you see in a lot of different manufacturing.
19:29
I had no idea it was being done in tea the same.
19:31
That was cool. And what happens is you have a
19:34
grid of of jets, air jets. So it falls over.
19:38
It's immediately recognized that, you know, this is not the
19:40
right level of green or this is too brown.
19:43
And this little jet shoots out this little amount of air that
19:47
knocks it out of the stream, and it gets sorted out into a
19:50
different bucket. And then we're saying that they
19:52
can run it through multiple times to refine the T by color
19:55
and to do some sorting. That was really interesting and
19:57
sophisticated. Yeah.
19:58
I mean this place was talking about quality, quality, quality,
20:01
but from a very industrial. That is scientific basis.
20:05
This would have had to been a process where someone went
20:07
through and hand sorted this back in the day.
20:10
So seeing this new technology, I I've nothing against it.
20:13
That was very cool that people are embracing this because why
20:16
not like. They, I mean, like by the end of
20:18
the day, you know, these factories versus all of these
20:21
autism of farmers, they have very different objectives for
20:25
these larger factories. It's all about quality and
20:28
consistency. It's about selling as much tea
20:32
as possible in, you know, as much of A consistent way as
20:36
possible. Whereas these tea farmers,
20:39
individual tea farmers are constantly battling with nature,
20:43
trying to produce as high quality of the tea as possible
20:47
with the resources they have. And they essentially have very
20:50
different objectives to feed the entire market, to feed different
20:55
segments in the entire market. So something we also got to see
20:58
a lot of was ball milling or I think they also call it bead
21:02
milling in different factories and talking to producers that do
21:06
a lot of white label for other brands where people buy their
21:09
matcha and repackage it or do custom blends for them from a
21:12
lot of brands that we had heard of.
21:13
Obviously we won't share anyone's private sourcing
21:17
information, but what was very interesting take away for me was
21:22
the degree to which these ball and bead mills were being used.
21:25
And I would not assume if you're buying from a western brand that
21:29
anything is Ishiusu stone ground unless it says it in the
21:33
description. A shocking number of very high
21:37
quality single origin single cultivar Macha gets bead milk
21:42
and we got to taste some on site at yame and the flavor was
21:45
great. The texture was great.
21:47
But you know, we were chit chatting and I let my usucha sit
21:51
for two minutes and it a lot of it sank to the bottom.
21:54
So, you know, as we say, you know, these bead mills and ball
21:57
mills produce very spherical particle shapes.
22:00
And because much as the suspension and because you if
22:03
you have a spherical particle shape, it's going to be more
22:06
likely to fall out of suspension faster because it has less
22:09
surface area and therefore less surface energy.
22:12
And whereas Ishiusu stone melt is going to float around and be
22:15
suspended and hold that suspension much, much, much
22:18
longer. But that was shocking to me
22:20
learning the prevalence of this NFL.
22:23
It doesn't say it. It's probably not Ishiusu stone
22:27
melt. Yeah, it's, I think that that
22:31
really should be part of the notification in the future for
22:34
transparent label. What exactly is the milling
22:38
mechanism? Really makes a big impact on the
22:40
final result. But I mean it tasted good, so no
22:43
judgement. Flavor wise, it's it's it's
22:46
fine, it's fine. And actually for most contexts,
22:49
maybe it's actually completely fine.
22:51
If you're dumping it in a latte, any liquid that you're dumping
22:54
that in that has high viscosity, the suspension qualities will be
22:57
much better, right? So in a lot of cases it is
23:00
probably better because it makes the product cheaper.
23:03
But people who put a huge markup on that stuff, you know, it's a
23:07
it's a very convenient non transparent labeling, especially
23:11
when you make some assumptions about some brands that it's each
23:14
uses stone mill and the result it it's actually not.
23:18
I'm sorry I was a little disappointed seeing that but
23:21
everyone says it generates tons of heat and what we learned is a
23:24
lot of them are water cooled and we got to touch one while it was
23:27
on and it was cold to the touch. So this technology is actually
23:31
pretty good without ball and bead mills.
23:33
Most people cannot afford to buy matcha.
23:36
EC uses don't scale. That's true, that's true.
23:39
But they also say that that you know, like if you have the ball
23:42
meal continuously to run for, you know, 20X hours, it will
23:46
eventually gets hot. So what they do is that they
23:49
will blend the tea powder from end to end so that it will
23:53
maintain a more homogeneous. That's right.
23:57
Which is the flavor changes it does.
23:59
Have an impact on the flavor at the end.
24:01
But what they do is that very interesting.
24:05
They keep all of the ball meals in all of these cold warehouse
24:08
to where where they store tea. So this like industrial cooling
24:13
system really acts as a huge he sink for these ball meals.
24:17
Yeah. So which is very interesting to
24:20
see, yeah, because like the powder, management of the ball
24:23
mill is far easier than you should use.
24:26
No. Oh, for sure.
24:27
Although it still gets very powderless, but you know, like
24:31
you, you don't necessarily have a lot of fine powders
24:33
everywhere. Also, one thing for anyone who
24:36
who works there, Matcha not only forms a suspension in water,
24:41
definitely forms a brief suspension in air.
24:44
Air quality in that room was, I feel like I needed a respirator.
24:49
Like I walked out and was coughing.
24:51
And they you look up at like the air conditioner and it's like it
24:55
looks like it's 50 years old, but apparently it was almost
24:57
brand new. It was interesting to see.
25:01
It actually maybe poses a little bit of a risk if you don't wear
25:03
a mask. So it's a, it's a messy
25:05
business. So we'll just put it that way.
25:07
Yeah. Yeah, pretty interesting.
25:10
It was very interesting. I'm very happy we get to see
25:12
them and actually I have much fewer judgments against them now
25:17
having seen them in person cuz I've never seen one.
25:20
And I feel like in previous episodes of the podcast, we'd
25:22
love to make the comparison difference between ball mill or
25:25
bead mill, which can do hundreds of kilograms a day, versus an
25:30
Ishiyusu, which can do about 1/2 a kilogram a day, maybe a little
25:34
bit more if you're running it quickly.
25:36
And I actually think they're really important.
25:38
Now. There's you.
25:39
There's not enough Ishiyusu. It's just would be such a dumb
25:42
way to do anything. I mean, imagine having a bunch
25:45
of little teeny tiny little coffee grinders, like a big
25:48
plant like Nestle. And like they just had a room
25:52
full of these little tiny coffee grinders that someone had to
25:56
refill all the time and take out the little baskets.
26:00
It's the idea of EC uses scaling is just it's not possible.
26:04
Especially the fact that they're nearly all pseudo handmade, or
26:07
handmade completely by very few traditional Craftsman with huge
26:11
waiting lists. Yeah, it'll be interesting to
26:13
see what the actual flavor profile difference can be
26:19
because right now, like it's really very few people I would
26:22
say will actually label the matcha beet milk unless you
26:25
know, like you really know the source and know how the matcha
26:28
is getting milked. Very you have no idea how your
26:31
matcha is, you know, is, you know, getting getting milk by
26:34
the end of the day. So, but Ryan, you know, since
26:37
Fuji and to Ismo and all the way to Yami, we've been keep asking
26:42
people the question about, you know, like what's the flavor
26:45
difference between or issue USU and how exactly issue USU is
26:50
better than the other building mechanisms.
26:54
And we have heard a lot of these statements about the difference
26:58
like suspension is 1. And also in Wuji we learned that
27:04
issue USU would generate a less homogeneous powder formation.
27:10
Which about the particle size distribution?
27:12
Yeah. Whereas ball mill creates a much
27:14
more homogeneous particle sizes and we learned that
27:18
unhomogeneous particle distribution actually creates a
27:21
more dynamic flavor profile. So it will be very interesting
27:25
to actually validate all of these claims.
27:28
It's interesting because of the exact same thing is true in
27:31
coffee and the way coffee extracts.
27:35
And one of the things that you're paying for, like
27:38
basically the thing that you're paying for when you're going
27:42
from let's say like a $10 kitchen spice blender coffee
27:46
grinder thing. But let's say like a fellow
27:50
conical Burr or flat Burr grinder all the way through like
27:53
EK43. And then at the really
27:55
industrial scale, the best grinding technology for coffee
27:58
is called a roller mill. And comment here who does those
28:01
little concentrated frozen coffee pucks is famous for
28:05
having invested in one of these roller mills apparently gives
28:08
you insanely good particle distribution, but what you're
28:11
paying for is particle size distribution and how different
28:15
particle size distributions can give you different flavor
28:18
profile outcomes in a really radical way in coffee.
28:22
That is like something that you really want to avoid is what
28:24
they call the superfine in coffee, which will really over
28:28
extract and generate a ton of bitterness.
28:30
Or fines and boulders. Or you have these huge gigantic
28:34
pieces that hardly extract because they're way too big and
28:37
water can permeate in and get stuff out of those beans.
28:41
And then all of these little tiny fines where the extraction
28:44
happens super, super efficiently and they result in a liquid that
28:48
doesn't taste as good. So it's interesting that that's
28:50
true for matcha. I've never heard of anyone
28:52
studying it. I'm assuming the person who told
28:55
us this read it in some papers and there's been some research
28:57
studies, but I've never heard of anyone talk about this in
29:00
English. So it's something we need to dig
29:02
into further. Yeah, yeah.
29:04
And what's interesting too. So diving into the taste, one of
29:07
the biggest contrast that people talk about when they talk about
29:10
matcha from Uji versus matcha from Yame is the flavor profile
29:15
difference. And I'd say that the
29:17
generalization is that matcha from Uji is generally rich umami
29:22
because the puns can be very creamy if especially comes from
29:25
cultivars like Uji Hakari or from Asahi.
29:29
And then Yame is super famous for what they call Hika aroma,
29:32
more roasty, toasty profiles, and sometimes a lot more
29:36
chocolate. So we did a tasting of tea that
29:40
we bought from Uji that was Uji Cha and we shared on a previous
29:43
podcast episode. And now we did the same thing
29:46
for Yame. And so we have two different
29:48
producers and we bought one of the cheaper selections and the
29:51
most expensive selection that we could buy retail.
29:54
We just did a tasting. So it's really fresh in our
29:56
minds. So I thought we would share some
29:59
notes. Again, not a review.
30:01
We're going to tell you what these teas are and how much we
30:03
paid and what we know about them.
30:05
We don't want to be a review channel and we just want to give
30:08
our sensory impressions and we will share our preference, but
30:11
our preferences are just that. And we'll also share how our
30:14
preferences have changed even over the course of this trip.
30:17
And we both having done a lot of sensory work this trip, very
30:21
diligently tasting and comparing things have changed and evolved
30:24
our ideas a little bit. So just to give a little bit of
30:27
background, Zhongjun and I used to work in product development,
30:30
AI and sensory sensory analysis is the the science of taste.
30:34
So we used to do this what almost every day.
30:36
We're pretty experienced tasters when it comes to what we call
30:40
quote UN quote objective tasting.
30:42
We were using a very specialized system back then, which now, you
30:46
know, we don't have access to necessarily using a very
30:48
specialized system back then that required a lot of extra
30:52
data analysis. In our case this trip, I'd say
30:54
it's much more analog in spirit of the Ishiusu has technology
30:59
driven. So we come in with the tasting
31:01
skills and experience experience, but we're just doing
31:04
handwritten notes and not doing any like intensity scales of
31:10
attributes or anything like that.
31:11
So take everything. As a grain of salt.
31:15
Yeah, with a grain of salt. So starting off the first T that
31:18
we got from the 14th generation Yami producer who just started
31:22
to do Hanshou shading. And we don't know actually if
31:25
any Hanshou shaded ended up into this matcha that was not shared
31:29
with us, but the first one. Sam, would you want to introduce
31:32
the first T? Because you're Japanese
31:34
pronunciation is not like mine. Yeah.
31:38
So the producer of this T is Konomi, and this very T is
31:42
called Suikoku, basically means virgin J.
31:46
And the cost of this T is ¥1328.00 for 30 grams.
31:51
And the main cultivar that went into making this matcha is Oku
31:56
Midori Yabukita Goku. OK.
32:00
And I would say when we tasted this, we definitely got the
32:04
characteristic Hika aroma. That was the very first thing
32:08
we've been tasting tons of Uji matcha and just like jumping
32:12
into this, it was like wow, wow, hard right turn, completely
32:16
different. Yeah, the pungency of Hika and
32:19
just the taste like this, like Verdun, like it's almost like
32:25
tasting a mountain of green, like grass and vegetation
32:30
covers. It's like this really kind of
32:34
almost wilderness kind of flavor that you don't necessarily get
32:38
it in the very delicate UGT. Yeah, absolutely.
32:42
Some of my tasting notes were chocolate, burnt butter, creamy
32:46
toasty roasted almonds, a bit earthy, a little bitter, some
32:49
cocoa powder. And we use A7 point hedonic
32:52
scale. So hedonic means preference.
32:55
Basically it's how much you like it.
32:57
And we're very used to our seven point scale.
32:59
I apologize. We don't do anything on five
33:01
point scales. It can be a topic of a different
33:03
podcast, but we do, we do 7 point scale.
33:06
And I gave it a four out of seven.
33:07
And as I'm doing, you said that it was nutty, creamy, Milky pint
33:10
of Nori bitter, fresh cut grass, pine resin and roasted seaweed.
33:14
And you gave it a three out of seven.
33:16
Yep. It's a little bit too pungent
33:18
for me. I thought this would be very
33:20
good with milk and they serve a drink at MTCH that's a blended
33:24
frappuccino style matcha latte and this with the milk.
33:29
I can totally. See that?
33:30
It's like when I tasted that, this tasted like the base
33:33
material for that drink and it tastes so chocolatey.
33:36
It's insane. It's so good.
33:38
I think there's a lot of Americans, especially people who
33:40
are new to matcha like this. It's much.
33:43
I don't want to say it's more coffee like because I don't
33:45
think people need coffee as a crutch to get into matcha, but
33:50
this taste tasted less foreign to me in the same way that gin
33:55
my cha tasted less foreign to me when I first started getting
33:58
into tea than Sancha did. Sencha was too grassy, too
34:03
Omami, too weird for me when I first started drinking tea when
34:07
I was like 1314. But in my cha, these toasted
34:10
rice notes, I get this. This is very tasty.
34:12
I never had these roasted profiles before and it just
34:16
brought me back to that sensory memory.
34:18
And I think it'd be very approachable and for a lot of
34:21
people, because the flavors are a little more familiar.
34:23
You know, when people talk about like, I don't know, like
34:26
champagne, having brioche notes or having like, very yeasty beer
34:30
taste like bread? It's familiar.
34:32
Yeah, it's something that you like and you, you know it.
34:36
Yeah. It's easy to appreciate.
34:39
Yeah, yeah, it's a it's interesting.
34:41
Like we review and prepare all of these teas as a usucha, but
34:46
you know, for a matcha latte or something that you want to blend
34:50
with matcha together, you probably want something that's
34:53
more pungent. Yeah.
34:54
To kind of cut through the base material and to, you know,
34:57
offered a flavor diversity. Whereas, you know, if I, you
35:03
know, put in a very delicate home, so shaded uji that made
35:07
from Asahi into a milk, you probably would only taste like
35:12
milk, No. So yeah, like a lot of these
35:14
nuanced T notes will probably just get shadowed away.
35:18
Or a lot of these very like mass market, very industrial, high
35:23
volume like Kagoshima matcha. Like for example in Paris, most
35:27
of the single origin matcha is Agoshima and it's not good.
35:32
I don't know. It does doesn't make good
35:33
lattes. It's just the whole thing just
35:36
feels imbalanced to me. And this profile in general,
35:39
what we just described, which I would say is very
35:42
characteristic. Yame is very underrepresented.
35:45
You go around to New York and you try different matchas,
35:48
you're not really going to find, it will be very hard to find
35:51
something that tastes like this. It doesn't get represented.
35:54
Everyone's either does Fuji or some very, you know, mass
35:58
market, who knows what it is. Kagushima Shizuoka high volume.
36:02
Stuff single origin doesn't necessarily mean it's good.
36:05
Yes. You are you can have single
36:08
origin from very very industrial mass produced area.
36:12
Are you telling me you don't like like Pennsylvania wine
36:15
that's not from the Finger Lakes area?
36:18
I'm telling you that. I'm from central PA and all the
36:21
wine in the surrounding area is disgusting.
36:24
This just encapsulates this so well.
36:27
I went to a talk of East Coast wine producers seven or eight
36:32
years ago. It was an industry conference
36:34
when we were trying to sell into the wine industry, sensory tools
36:37
or tasting tools at the time, and someone walked up from, I
36:40
forget where, but it's somewhere in Pennsylvania that was not a
36:43
famous area and their best selling wine was the cotton
36:47
candy flavor. Oh my God.
36:48
I was like, wow, I don't know who your customers are.
36:51
I ain't not necessarily a judgement on them, but I mean
36:54
like you're really venturing into the realm of a formulated
36:58
product then I consider like wine to be.
37:01
That's pretty much a wine flavored juice.
37:04
And that could be single origin. You know like single origin is
37:08
really a confusing term like if you really think about it,
37:11
because within a origin like, how do you define a origin?
37:16
There's really no such thing as single origin.
37:18
Yeah, When you, I mean, it's like Xenos paradox.
37:20
Like, for example, halfway there, you go halfway there, you
37:22
go halfway there. And you never actually arrive at
37:24
a destination. But it's the same thing, right?
37:27
Anything more than one tea leaf is a blend, technically.
37:30
Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, within a well
37:32
defined region, you can have like really bad product and
37:36
really superior product coexist at the same time too.
37:40
Like for example, the famous ceramic town in China,
37:44
Jingdajin. You can have super high end
37:47
artisanal product made by generations of craftsmanship and
37:52
you can have factories right next door producing like like 10
37:58
million pieces a year like and get sell into the world and can
38:02
also be marked as Jindajan like. I bet same thing goes into
38:05
Kagoshima tea. Like I I bet there are, you
38:08
know, artisanal tea farmers exist in Kagoshima, but you also
38:11
have all these automatic GPS guided harvesters harvesting
38:17
thousands of miles of, you know, square miles of tea a year.
38:22
So it's true yes and no because some it it depends on your level
38:26
of consumer education. So single origin can tell you a
38:30
lot if you know a lot about the region.
38:32
So for example, matcha from Uji like Uji city, there is no
38:37
industrial tea in Uji City, right?
38:40
So that as a single origin product to an educated consumer
38:44
who knows these things that you can be very sure is a pretty
38:48
pure product. I don't know, Ryan.
38:50
It's a lot of these Wuji TS don't necessarily come from.
38:54
No, no, no, I'm talking about matcha that is actually from.
38:57
Uji TS matcha actually from Uji, OK.
38:59
Not Uji Matcha. I mean, that's a different,
39:00
that's a different topic, right? Because that could be Sisuoka or
39:03
whatever. Can be anything that gets
39:04
shipped into uji and gets processed there labeled as Wuji.
39:08
TS But you know, different different areas have different
39:10
expectations and we were even being told of these different
39:14
sub regions within Kyoto Prefecture or within Yame where
39:17
it's pretty safe to assume that you're not getting very
39:19
industrial tea, whereas you go to somewhere like Wazuka.
39:22
Wazuka is much more industrial, right?
39:25
They do much higher volumes of tea than they do.
39:28
And you know, just, I don't know what is it 2040 kilometers away?
39:33
I mean, not that far an hour driving distance, pretty close,
39:37
right? So like it depends on how
39:39
specific you are, but in some case single origin can be a good
39:42
thing. Like single origin, different
39:44
wine producing areas. There's like rules within these
39:46
origins. You can't do certain things and
39:48
you just know that it's not happening.
39:50
So I agree that single origin on its face isn't, but it can give
39:54
reliable information if you can pattern match against and there
39:58
is the pattern of quality because there is no industrial
40:01
produce tea in those areas. Yeah.
40:04
Well, it really takes because like that kind of policy in wine
40:08
doesn't necessarily exist yet in Japan.
40:11
And it's quite of a consumer journey and a lot of tuitions to
40:16
pay to be able to construct that structure by yourself.
40:19
I feel like that's, you know, as a criticism that the current
40:23
Japanese. Why?
40:24
You, you have to be in a very privileged position to actually
40:28
understand everything that is going on, from the mislabelling
40:33
to the tasting ability to understanding which areas are
40:36
good, which areas are industrial or not industrial.
40:39
Then that's exactly what's going on in Paris, to be honest.
40:42
So like I, I recently, or I'm about to sort of, I lived in
40:45
Paris this summer and I'm about to move there.
40:47
My girlfriend found a job there and they're marketing this
40:51
matcha a single origin. And like French people don't
40:55
know any different. It's like, oh, OK, these
40:58
beautiful T fields. So the problem with single
41:01
origin that gets abused so easily, It's so easy to mislead
41:06
someone who has the knowledge structures that wants to learn
41:09
and wants to know where their food comes from.
41:11
French really want to know where their food comes from.
41:14
They're like different chicken cultivars, cultivars, chicken
41:18
varieties when you go into the grocery store and they have
41:22
different names and very different prices.
41:25
Like a people really care about that sort of stuff there anyway.
41:29
It's it's interesting. And we're also not like
41:31
completely hating on Kagushima or she's Woka.
41:34
We just think that the very industrial products are exactly
41:37
that. And there might be tons of great
41:38
little artisanal producers, but it gets washed out by the
41:41
perception of these people. Abusing this term?
41:44
Yeah, like our I guess criticism really eventually lands on all
41:50
of these, I would say, sneaky retailers or marketing strategy.
41:54
Yeah, because like for all these farmers that we have met, like
41:58
very honest people, like they tell you exactly what they did
42:01
and they're not really hiding anything.
42:03
And do you? Have any questions?
42:04
Any more questions we can answer for you?
42:06
Yeah, they're so nice. Yeah, they're super nice and
42:09
like, they show us everything, tell us everything.
42:11
And dirty goes into all these obscure plants that were
42:15
actually really, you know, package at the end by the
42:17
retailers. And the story was, you know,
42:19
told by the retailers. Like these farmers don't tell
42:22
any stories and their voice can be hardly heard.
42:25
Weird industry. Very weird.
42:27
Like you see very segmented groupless people.
42:31
Like you have the farmers, you have the retailers, you have the
42:34
tea drinkers, and they don't necessarily talk to each other
42:38
and they have a very separate perspective on viewing this, you
42:43
know, reality as matcha. Yeah, that's totally right.
42:48
And the more we talk about our mill idea, fresh milled matcha
42:52
using technology, everyone's very open to this.
42:56
It's really these people who are building these brands that we've
42:59
talked to that don't have a great understanding and are not
43:02
on the ground that are like ultra reverent and respectful of
43:07
this culture and not willing to have an open and flexible mind
43:11
about how industries can change with the fear of, I guess the
43:16
right fear of like being a outside change agent like has
43:21
been done for so many cultures for hundreds of years.
43:24
Sometimes in colonial context, sometimes in very commercial,
43:27
capitalistic, industrial context.
43:30
The people are hyper aware of this.
43:31
But like people on the ground, they're like, Oh yeah, that's
43:34
cool. I just saw the Iyamoto of ero
43:37
Senke make an usuchai using sparkling water.
43:39
Here's a video. It was like so innovative, not
43:42
traditional. This tasted so good.
43:44
It's like, oh wow, interesting. Very interesting.
43:47
And we're, I'm sure you go to some tea workshop in some
43:50
country that there's not a high appreciation of matcha and like
43:54
someone wants to make a sparkling matcha, some some
43:57
sensei there or some quote UN quote sensei there says, oh, no,
44:01
not traditional. They would never do it this way.
44:03
Yeah, I mean to add some color, Edo Senke is one of the major
44:09
and one of the oldest tea ceremony.
44:11
School, it's not part of the Sen Senke, I think, or it's.
44:14
A old branch. It's smaller, more than the
44:16
Sensei K, but it's still very, very old.
44:19
And Yamoto is the head of the house basically, and he was
44:22
using sparkling water, making a sucha and posted on Instagram.
44:27
So very, very cool. Very cool to see how innovative
44:30
people are. All right, so going back to the
44:32
tasting, we're gonna save you the names and the exact notes.
44:35
If you're interested, just DM us on Instagram or send us an
44:38
e-mail. We'll send you these products
44:39
and what we paid for them on our tasting notes, but we bought
44:42
another one from the same producer that was around 15 U.S.
44:45
dollars, so 50% more. So we went from about just under
44:48
$10 to just to $15.00 for another can that was a blend of
44:53
Oku, Midori, Sammidori. Suhi Curry.
44:57
Suyu Curry. Wow, that's embarrassing.
44:59
And Yabukita. And by the way, both of these
45:02
products were shaded for three weeks.
45:03
This one was noticeably richer. Creamy, full body milk
45:06
chocolate, a little bitter, some roasty bready notes.
45:09
I wrote Umami Nutty Toasty when I gave it a four out of seven on
45:14
how much I liked. It Yeah, I gave it a four out of
45:17
seven too. It's significantly more smooth
45:21
than the last tea. And the intensity and complexity
45:24
was overall higher. Yeah, yeah.
45:26
So it's better as a usucha, but you know, if you blend this into
45:31
a milk I, I don't think you would perform as well as the
45:34
previous tea, honestly. Yeah, it's a more delicate
45:37
flavor. Yeah, you have more nuance.
45:39
Yeah, quite a bit more nuance. Some of that complexity I think
45:42
would be lost. And then you also, you gave it a
45:44
four. So what's interesting is between
45:45
these two, I gave them both fours out of sevens on how much
45:48
I like them, even though there's a 50% price increase.
45:52
So we tasted everything, and everything that we taste is
45:56
sequential monadic, which basically means we taste one T
46:00
at a time. We write our notes and then we
46:03
refresh our minds, pretend we didn't just taste that tea and
46:07
taste the new tea. Because comparative tasting is a
46:10
horrible, horrible, horrible way to have form objective opinions
46:15
about something. Because the differences magnify
46:19
when you're doing comparative tasting and your notes become
46:22
very distorted. Because if, if we were to
46:24
compare this to an Uji matcha while drinking a Yami matcha,
46:28
our notes on the differences would be so radically different.
46:32
And so that's the way that we taste.
46:33
And that's the way we've tasted professionally in the past,
46:36
which is a very difficult skill to develop.
46:38
But anyone who does matcha reviews and especially who post
46:41
matcha reviews, we beg you, please don't do comparative
46:45
tasting. Don't taste two things at one
46:47
time, unless you specifically want to magnify the differences
46:50
between products. But if you want to form an
46:52
objective opinion, one product at a time, this is the industry
46:55
standard for doing this type of sensory evaluation.
46:59
The next thing that we tasted, and we'll do this one pretty
47:01
fast because we know that this podcast is running a little
47:03
long. So I do want to introduce the
47:05
producer. This is one we kept hearing one
47:07
of the the most well known producers in Yame.
47:10
Yeah, and it's also one of the furthest away the tea garden
47:14
from the yame. You need a.
47:15
Car. Car to travel there, but this
47:19
producer is called Hoshino N and the owner of Hoshino and
47:23
Yamaguchisama apparently is a very reputable man in the
47:27
Japanese tea industry and inspire a lot of younger tea
47:30
farmers. Like one of the tea farmers we
47:32
end up meeting in Gizmo City and the first tea we are tasting is
47:36
also one of their cheapest product and then we will be
47:40
moving to the the more expensive product. $6 versus 12, yeah.
47:45
Double the price and the first one is Hoshino to you?
47:49
For 20 grams. And we don't necessarily know
47:53
what exactly went into this kind of matcha.
47:56
Yeah, we don't know the blend components.
47:58
We tried asking, but no one knew.
48:00
It didn't sound like anyone we talked to knew.
48:03
And we prepared these two teas also as usucha.
48:06
And what did you taste right? Yeah, So I got cream bitterness.
48:12
This is for the cheaper one, a lot of cream bitterness,
48:15
chocolate, some praline, some toasted.
48:17
Nori found it very clean, smooth, silky, some Hika aroma
48:21
of this nice toasty profile. And I also gave it a four out of
48:24
seven on how much I liked it. It was really good.
48:27
We put a big star next to this flavor profile.
48:30
We think that this would perform so well in a latte, like you'd
48:34
really would kind of taste like milk chocolate.
48:36
It really is very tasty. And the intensity was very high.
48:40
I'd say the complexity is, but the intensity was very high and
48:44
it had a very, it didn't have an after taste, but I mean that in
48:48
a good way. It just kind of fell off.
48:50
It was very clean. Yeah, totally agree.
48:53
Creamy, smooth, a lot of Hika notes that's not necessarily
48:58
very burnt, but it's like a really well roasted, like
49:02
caramelized almost kind of Hika and quite nutty too.
49:06
Pecans, peanuts, Very very delicious cup of tea.
49:10
Yeah, for $6.20 gram can retail, yeah, what a great deal that's
49:15
this is a good product. That's insane.
49:17
I give it APQ of five. You liked it even more?
49:20
I like it. I like it even more.
49:22
And maybe you shouldn't say PQ. I gave it a score of five.
49:25
I give it a score of five. I like it even more.
49:28
Wow, even more. Yeah, Crazy.
49:30
And the one that's a little more expensive or double the price, I
49:33
said umami. I tasted more umami from this
49:36
one, unsalted butter, very sweet after taste.
49:40
So this one did have a very pleasant sweet after taste when
49:42
to me tasted objectively higher quality.
49:45
I got a canale note like the pastry from Bordeaux, some
49:48
walnuts. It made me thirsty.
49:50
I wanted to drink more and it had that effect for me.
49:53
And it had a little bit of bitterness that kind of
49:55
supported the whole flavor. And I gave it a 5 or 6 seven in
50:00
terms of how much I liked it. Yeah, give it a four initially,
50:04
still kind of debating because like it's, it's pretty
50:07
delicious. I agree with all of the tasting
50:09
notes. You just say, Brian, but I get a
50:11
little bit hint of like green pepper bell pepper note at the
50:15
end, which kind of reminds me of like a less mature Grenache in
50:20
wine. That's kind of a put off for me,
50:23
so I'm still debating whether or not I should give it a four or
50:27
five. That's totally influenced by my
50:30
own. Preference.
50:31
Green bell pepper. It's not a note you hear very
50:33
often in my job. Yeah, no.
50:36
That's just something that has a roasty, toasty profile.
50:38
A bit weird. Yeah.
50:40
So I don't know if you taste that, but.
50:42
A little bit, I see. To me, it's a little more grassy
50:45
than green bell pepper, but I get a sense of where that's
50:48
coming from. Yeah.
50:50
Yeah. So both pretty good tea.
50:52
I have a much stronger preference of the previous tea,
50:56
which is half of the price. That's crazy.
50:58
This one. Yeah, it is crazy.
51:01
Yeah, me too. Actually the price and my
51:03
preference were not correlated at all for any of these teas
51:07
that we've tasted. The extreme between price and
51:11
quality that we had in Uji tasted much larger than this
51:15
extreme. And I think part of it's the
51:17
Hika aroma, the roasting and the processing of tea.
51:20
And yame is a little bit more of an equalizer where it really is
51:24
good at making like lower quality base material taste
51:28
great because you're adding in other flavors to process.
51:31
Yeah, this is very similar to how you treat the coffee too.
51:34
Yeah, for like more medium style roast coffee.
51:37
Yeah, we increase the roastiness and can really mask a lot of the
51:41
off flavor from the base material.
51:43
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
51:45
So how have your preferences changed now that we've done all
51:47
these tastings between Yame Cha and Uje Chao?
51:51
Before coming to Japan I definitely had a slight higher
51:55
preference towards Yameiti. The Hikanos is great and it's
52:01
just the sheer taste of wilderness kind of reminds me of
52:06
a lot of Yunnan tea, Chinese Yunnan tea that I had a pretty
52:11
big preference towards. So love Yami tea in the past and
52:16
for me Wuji tea you know before was really very umami.
52:21
Strong all the examples you've had.
52:23
Yeah for all of the Wujits I have tried before was very umami
52:27
driven and it wasn't really until this trip after meeting
52:30
with all these artisanal farmers in Wuji City, started to learn
52:36
what Wuji tea really is or. Could taste.
52:39
Like or could taste like, you know?
52:41
Honestly probably a lot of the wuji tea I try in the past is
52:44
not really from wuji. It gets processed.
52:45
Very possible it. Gets processed in wuji.
52:48
It's just how little tea is actually from wuji Just blowed
52:53
my mind. And the really the highest
52:56
quality of like some of the higher quality tea in Wuji are
53:01
not really umami driven, they're actually very light.
53:05
Or creamy or nutty unroasted nuts.
53:08
A. Lot of nuances, like it's almost
53:11
like like drinking a Burgundy wine for the first time.
53:14
You know, I did not really taste a lot of things when I first
53:19
drink Burgundy wine and it's really until later that I have
53:22
more formative experience and really learn like what wine
53:25
could be or should be that I start to be able to, you know,
53:28
pick up all these flavors. Similar things happen to to my
53:32
experience with. Wujiki.
53:33
It's so interesting because a lot of the blends that get
53:36
labeled as Ujimatcha from these large blend houses, probably all
53:39
of which doesn't come from Fuji City.
53:42
It's like a fiction. It's like this made-up story,
53:46
flavor profile of Ujimatcha, and tasting real Uji matcha from Uji
53:53
producers in Uji City. The variation was huge between
53:56
the different cultivars and the different gardens that we got to
53:59
taste, and it's so different than all of these blends.
54:02
My mental picture was so inaccurate but it's this weird
54:06
collective fantasy of all these blend houses of what Uji matcha
54:10
is and tastes like. It's very painful.
54:13
I almost need to unlearn what I have learned in the past and
54:17
relearn with all these new data points and you.
54:19
Really have to go to the source or source just from someone who
54:22
really has some transparent sourcing and you can trust that
54:25
they're getting it or they shared who the producers are.
54:29
Yeah, so quite a friction or almost you you really have to
54:34
pay a lot of tuition and effort outside of Japan to be able to
54:38
learn a lot of these things. Yeah, But it's actually in
54:40
Japan. It's surprisingly cheap.
54:42
The infrastructure's good. I mean, we got to a lot of
54:44
places by just the public bus system and paid like $2.00 to
54:48
take an hour ride to show up and then walk a mile.
54:51
Like, I mean, we were doing this on a shoestring budget and,
54:55
like, shockingly inexpensive to do sourcing, especially when
54:58
you're outside of the big cities.
55:00
The food's cheap. The lodging was cheap.
55:02
Like, on a per person basis. When we were just outside of
55:05
Yami, it was 16 bucks a night. It was clean.
55:08
It was nice. It's totally fine.
55:10
Yeah. It wasn't luxury.
55:11
Totally fine. Very comfortable.
55:13
Any place to be scrappy in the entire world?
55:15
Japan's probably the best country.
55:18
Yes, indeed. So clean, Yeah.
55:20
I was actually flying to Malaysia right during COVID and
55:24
Japan hadn't opened yet and my flight got delayed and I had a
55:27
flight from Tokyo to Kuala Lumpur that I missed because the
55:31
incoming aircraft is late. So there's a group of 50 people
55:34
stranded in the airport who literally had to stay in no
55:38
man's land because the hotel was outside of immigration and
55:42
immigration was closed to foreigners and non residents.
55:47
So we all slept on the floor of the Narita airport.
55:50
And they gave us blankets and pillows.
55:52
And I remember sleeping between two rows of benches where, you
55:55
know, the normal waiting seats area.
55:57
And I was looking up at the seats from the floor that I was
56:01
sleeping on. It's spotless.
56:03
It's so clean. There is literally no better
56:07
place than I could have possibly been stranded where I had to
56:09
sleep on the floor. But the same thing for a lot of
56:12
these travel accommodations. They're not perfectly spotless,
56:15
but it's a great place to be scrappy traveling.
56:18
Yeah, yeah, you can definitely see some ages, you know, like.
56:21
When everything's well treated. A lot of these Tatames
56:23
definitely have seen better days, but they're very nicely
56:27
kept. Like you can see the age, but
56:30
they are like, nice. Yeah, very interesting.
56:33
I mean, it's essentially how a lot of people here start forming
56:36
these preference towards older objects like older trains, cards
56:41
or the record players, like older cars, like everything.
56:45
Like they are very nicely kept. And you know, it's very easy to
56:51
also source a lot of these things in Japan.
56:53
So really it's not just about Lt. too like for all of these
56:57
places we end up traveling to, you have great food, you have
57:00
great people. People outside of Tokyo is are
57:03
just great. Much more friendly.
57:05
Much more friendly. It's really like Tokyo and the
57:08
rest of Japan. The people are easy going,
57:10
friendly and a lot of these places are very accessible.
57:14
It's. Inspiring and we need to see
57:16
more of Japan. We saw we saw three tea
57:19
producing areas. In the future we want to go to
57:22
sub regions like in Kyoto prefecture outside of Uji and
57:25
like Wazuka and we want to go to Kagushima, Shizuoka, maybe Kifu,
57:30
couple other places as well and. A lot of these interesting
57:34
regions around Wuji too, like places like eBay.
57:37
People keep telling us that there's good tea there.
57:40
You know, like Japan is pretty large.
57:43
Like Japan looks small like because it's sitting right next
57:47
to China, but it's actually a very large country.
57:50
Yeah, lots of Terra wars to discover and explore.
57:53
Very exciting future. I had probably decades worth of
57:56
work to really have a deep understanding because I feel
57:59
like we're just at the very top of the surface and our
58:01
understanding. But I can't wait to do that and
58:05
to explore. This is a specialty product
58:07
outside of the context of a blend.
58:09
It feels very exciting and kind of almost on the edge of
58:13
knowledge a little bit because no one's done this or very few
58:17
people, like just a handful of people are like understanding
58:21
matcha as a specialty product and the different flavors that
58:24
each of these places produce. It feels like we're discovering
58:27
a lot of things, maybe for the first time in such a public way,
58:31
in the way that we're talking about it.
58:33
Yeah, very hopeful journey. Not to overfluff what we're
58:37
doing, but you really get that sense that like the stuff that
58:41
you see in wine where people talk about these different
58:43
regions and can do deductive tasting and stuff, right?
58:46
Like that is such a protected craft that is abstracted so far
58:50
away from the consumer in the matcha industry or in the
58:53
Japanese tea industry in general.
58:55
Yeah, that's or not only abstract or almost distorted.
58:58
Yeah, abstracted and distorted away from the consumer.
59:02
So we can't wait to do this in the spirit of knowing wherever
59:05
our food comes from and what the flavor variety is for this leaf,
59:10
whether or not it's the place it's grown, the processing, the
59:13
cultivar, and all the other things that we haven't
59:15
discovered yet. So very exciting future if
59:19
anyone wants to source their own tea, their own macho or anything
59:22
in Japan, we'd be happy to share our experiences even from as
59:26
practical to getting around and how we communicate with people
59:29
or how we discover farmers. We'd be happy to share sort of
59:32
what we've done. We're not experts by far when
59:36
especially when you compare us to some of the other Western
59:38
vendors who've been, you know, coming for decade plus to Japan.
59:41
But we don't think that sourcing should be the core competency of
59:46
a tea company anymore. It should be storytelling.
59:49
It should be doing things in a new interesting way.
59:51
But just getting to the source should be the the barrier should
59:55
be lower. And so we can have a much more
59:57
interesting thriving specialty matcha industry.
1:00:00
All right, I think that's all we have time for today.
1:00:02
And this was a very unstructured conversation.
1:00:04
Our opinions that we shared will probably change as we have new
1:00:08
experiences and learn new information.
1:00:10
So this is very much more of a travel diary than.
1:00:13
Digested opinions that we're ready to defend and stand by.
1:00:17
So if you disagreed with anything and you want to add to
1:00:19
the conversation, please reach out to us.
1:00:21
Be happy to have you on the show and thanks so much for
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