Specialty Matcha Podcast

https://www.wanderlustea.com/
In this episode, Ryan talks with Lorela Lohan, founder of WanderlusTea, a Brussels-based consultancy for specialty tea businesses in Europe. Lorela has spent five years advising small and mid-sized tea brands on market research, margins, and positioning, has tasted over a hundred matchas in cafes from Amsterdam to Lisbon, and has published more than ninety interviews with tea founders on her site. Topics range from why matcha outran loose leaf tea in Europe, to what consumers actually think about origin and Chinese matcha, to why most new matcha brands look the same and what a new one could do differently.

*If you consider matcha produced from shaded Chinese-grown tencha as matcha.
In this episode, cohosts Ryan and Zongjun (Sam) report from Tongren, Guizhou, after touring Guicha and driving another hour into the mountains to see the tea fields. Topics range from EU compliance testing and poverty alleviation economics, to high mountain matcha grown above 1,000 meters, to the made-up choreography of Song dynasty diancha and the 70:30 foam to liquid ratio their host insisted on.
They also get into why Japanese tencha equipment makers are the quiet winners of the matcha boom, and why the commodity end of the market is what feeds the specialty end.

Referenced in episode:
12,325 active tea farmers in Japan in 2020 (source: MAFF) https://www.maff.go.jp/kanto/seisan/engei/tokusan/attach/pdf/index-8.pdf

In this episode, cohosts Ryan and Zongjun (Sam) talk with Maren Fichter, a tea educator and writer whose Substack Tea & all the rest covers farming, heritage, tourism, and education in specialty tea. She has worked with tea in Japan, China, the US, and the UK, develops and teaches the Matcha Power unit on the UK Tea Academy's Tea Sommelier course, and is currently based in Wazuka, Kyoto, where she works at Obubu Tea Farms. Maren thinks about tea knowledge as a web, where a term only means something if there are other terms for it to hang on to, and much of the conversation follows that idea. Topics range from what the matcha boom has changed on the ground in Wazuka, to why single origin means something different in matcha than it does in wine or coffee, to pairing "ceremonial grade" with harvest season and shading duration rather than simply debunking it, and how those same details explain price.

https://teawithmaren.com/
https://beingtea.com/teacher-training/
https://savouringbath.com/ 
https://matchathing.co.uk/

https://www.jefffuchs.com/
In this episode, cohosts Ryan and Zongjun (Sam) are joined by Jeff Fuchs, author of The Ancient Tea Horse Road and the first documented westerner to trek both main trunks of the route, fresh off filming with tea producers in Kyoto Prefecture. Topics range from the precision of herring meal fertilization, to whether shaded teas are terroir driven at all, the hijacking of the word ceremonial, old trees and zairai in Japan versus gushu in Yunnan, and what happened when Jeff served a punchy gushu sheng puerh to a master matcha producer.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4uIvpxzwyVbQRTeRrnrlvW?si=KqUfE4DJQFmM0Tw6Cue9Lg
Ryan and Zongjun (Sam) discuss the lack of unique perspective in contemporary matcha branding. Topics range from the emerging specialty matcha playbook, to chanoyu as a source of inspiration and a trap, the equipment and access barriers that limit experimentation, and why taking a risk in this industry is so expensive.