The Tea Letter #10: Song Tea's Surprising Taste in Matcha
Wherein I spend a ridiculous amount of time breaking down Song Tea's new matcha offerings.
Introduction
(Edit: A couple updates already. One regarding my comments on the cultivar’s suitability for “thin-style”: I misinterpreted that to mean usucha, but in fact it refers to the thickness of the leaf—which does in fact contribute to a finer matcha grind. Second is a clarification on the “hybrid breeding style”: I was correct that tenmyō is seed-bred from Samidori cultivar but I added that cross-breeding took place with an unknown “father” plant to produce tenmyō naturally from seeds.)
Song Tea is one of my favorite US-based tea brands. Based in San Francisco, they have built a reputation for themselves as a vendor that nails the classics while also pushing the envelope with interesting and experimental new teas. Their mainstay are Taiwanese and Chinese teas, which I have enjoyed greatly over the years.
I thought I had Song Tea safely bucketed in this space in my mind. But then, last week, they launched matcha.
According to their Instagram stories accompanying the release, matcha has long been their “most requested” tea. It makes me wonder: who goes to Song Tea, sees all the wonderful loose leaf teas from China and Taiwan, and says to themselves: “You know what this carefully curated collection needs? Matcha.” Perhaps it’s the proximity to San Francisco’s Japantown that puts matcha on the brain?
All that is to say: this launch is significant for Song Tea. Their two new teas are interesting enough that I decided to dive deep into what each of them has to offer.
Three quick caveats before we begin:
First, I have not tasted these teas. What that means is I’m offering my opinion based on what I can understand by reading what Song has to say. I’ve also spent time searching for other information on the internet in Japanese.
Second, my technical knowledge of farming and processing is still developing. While I try to research and understand things as best as possible before I write, I may have missed details or misunderstood something. Feel free to correct me if that is the case!
Lastly, I aim to be as neutral as possible, but any assessment of the value of tea is always a blend of the objective and the subjective. As such, I’d encourage each of you to consider each tea according to your own interests.
Okay, with that out of the way we can dive in.
The Announcement
The announcement came with the release of two teas: Old Grove Matcha 2018 and New Cultivar Matcha 2019. Both of these teas have interesting information in their product descriptions, so I’ll break down the most important pieces of each and share my perspective on whether and how they contribute to the value of the tea.
I bundled my thoughts on pricing as well as my verdict on both teas at the bottom after the detailed analysis of each one individually. Since this piece is so long, I’ll spoil it for you up front:
At nearly $200 total for both teas, I believe these two teas are suitable for tea enthusiasts who want the experience. Consider these two teas in the same way you would having dinner at a Michelin-starred restaurant–it may be expensive but you’re paying for the experience.
If you’re not ready and willing to invest the money in your own learning and be serious about your experience, don’t bother. There are many wonderful teas to try from other great vendors that deliver excellent matcha experiences with a much smaller price tag.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the detailed analysis.
Analyzing Song Tea’s Old-Grove Matcha 2018
Song makes a few key claims I’d like to examine here, namely that this matcha is: grown from seed-propagated (zairai) plants, picked from “old grove” trees, and aged nearly five years before grinding.
Let’s go through each of these claims and understand what they have to do with this tea.
Zairai (“seed-propagated”) cultivars vs. clonal cultivars
Based on my research, all tea in Japan was seed-propagated until 1936 (link in Japanese), when clonal tea plants were successfully planted and cultivated for the first time in the Nara Prefecture. Since then, cloning grew to become the main form of tea propagation in the country.
The reason for clonal tea farming’s success is simple: predictability. As the name implies, cloned tea bushes grow and behave in an identical fashion. Farmers like this uniformity and predictability. It improves harvest yield, saves them time and effort in the farming and harvesting process, and helps create a consistent product year after year.
Unlike cloning, which produces identical copies of the so-called “mother tree”, seed-propagated plants are more like natural offspring–they resemble their parents but also develop their own individual characteristics. While this can lead to interesting new developments in the end product, it’s far more difficult to account for such natural variance. Hence, clonal tea rules the roost.
That said, many new cultivars have been discovered from experiments with seed-propagated plants, which are then spread to farms through clonal means.
Impact of zairai on tea flavor
So how does this affect the flavor of tea for us? As with most things, one is not better than the other. There are tradeoffs that change what winds up in our tea cups.
Whereas clonal teas tend towards elegance and refinement, zairai is a rough and ready product of nature. Moreover, zairai plants have much deeper root systems than cultivars, which impacts the nutrients the plant pulls into its leaves (eg. more minerals, which are astringent).
This can add compelixty and depth to a tea, but it also causes challenges. Unlike other styles of tea which converts bitter constituents (catechins) into flavors (tannins) through oxidation, this doesn’t happen with Japanese green tea. That means if a tea is bitter to begin with, it will remain bitter even after processing.
When we combine these two factors, what we get is the potential for tea with interesting and unique characteristics balanced against a tendency towards bitterness and astringency.
Because of this, zairai is not nearly as popular as teas made from cultivars. The standard for “quality” in Japanese tea is high levels of umami and sweetness with low levels of bitterness and astringency. Unfortunately, zairai usually doesn’t clear this bar nearly as well as clonal teas do. Add that together with farming challenges I presented above and it becomes clear why zairai tea is not as common in the market.
What is “old grove” and why does it matter?
“Old grove tea” is a phrase we hear often in China and Taiwan. It generally refers to tea gardens over 100 years old or more and is a prized characteristic among many buyers. As I explained above about zairai’s roots, older trees will also have deeper roots and thus pull more nutrients from the soil. In Chinese and Taiwanese teas (and in oolong and puer in particular), this is said to result in a more complex, nuanced, and delicious tea. This is why old grove is a sought-after (and highly marketed) characteristic of high-end tea. However, it is highly unusual to see it in Japan.
In Japan, farmers generally completely turn over (literally tear out the plants and put new ones in) their fields every 30 to 50 years. There is one simple reason for this: according to the farmers, when the plants get too old the tea gets bitter.
As we discussed above, bitterness is the least desirable trait of Japanese green tea. If old tea plants get bitter, and bitterness is already a characteristic of zairai tea, then I’m left to wonder what the age of the garden has to do with the quality and flavor of the end product.
Aging tencha and making matcha
One of the biggest surprises I found when I first learned about matcha production is that fresher is not always better. In fact, the best matcha and gyokuro are rested on average six months from harvest before consumption. In the world of chanoyu (what we know as “Japanese tea ceremony”), we have a major event in October/November to celebrate the release of this year’s matcha called kuchikiri, or “opening the tea jar”.
Six months is one thing, but how about nearly five years, as in the case of this tea?
It is undeniable that storing tencha over time will have an impact on the tea–perhaps even more so in this case owing to the nature of zairai, as we’ve already seen. The only way for me to know for certain would be for me to taste the tea at different points throughout the five-year period of storage, which is obviously impossible.
If this tea was aged intentionally with the goal in mind to mellow out the bolder character of zairai, that’s one thing. However, it’s also possible this tea is “aged” simply because five years is how long the tencha sat in storage before grinding. Modern storage technology makes it possible to keep tencha (the crude tea leaves that will be ground into matcha powder) fresh for three, four, or even five years with noticeable but ultimately minimal degradation in quality.
What’s the difference between an aged tea and one that’s been stored? Mainly marketing, which I’ll discuss in the final section on branding, pricing, and packaging below my second analysis. My conclusion on the value of both of these teas will also follow.
Jump ahead if you like, or follow along into the second of Song’s new matchas: New Cultivar Matcha.
Analyzing Song Tea’s New Cultivar Matcha 2019
For anyone not nerdy about tea like me, it may come as a surprise that there are entire academic and scientific institutions set up for research and experimentation on tea. One of the most critical functions of these institutions is the discovery of new cultivars. The New Cultivar Matcha is the result of this process.
Made from tenmyō (展茗), a relatively new cultivar only developed in 2006, the main point of analysis on this tea is trying to understand what new experience this tea has to offer. There is also another discussion of aging on this tea, which will mostly follow in the same vein as the Old-Grove Matcha.
Tenmyō: what is it and why does it matter?
To understand the significance of tenmyō, I went to the website of the Kyoto’s prefectural government (link in Japanese) and read their description of the cultivar. Here’s what I learned:
Tenmyō is a result of “hybrid breeding” from Samidori seeds, which I understand to mean it was developed from a natural cross-breeding of seeds originating from the plant of the Samidori cultivar as the mother plant and an unknown father plant.
Tenmyō seems to be basically equivalent to Samidori and Asahi cultivars in flavor, with the added improvement of having upright leaves that make mechanical harvesting easier, improving farming yields. The website also mentions it responds well to shading, which suggests it will do well as both matcha and gyokuro.
I found a few other Japanese vendors also offering tenmyō as a matcha. When I read their descriptions, they only said tenmyō matcha is a tea full of both umami and sweetness with a good “shade fragrance” (覆い香), which resembles nori (Japanese seaweed), that makes it work so well as a matcha.
All that is to say, there doesn’t seem much to set this cultivar apart from any other matcha cultivar other than it is new, with its own individual twist on the matcha flavor experience, and rare.
Aging tenmyō: does it matter?
I don’t think so (but I could be wrong).
Based on my reading about this cultivar, I wouldn’t expect bitterness to be a challenge the same way I would with the zairai tea. It seems likely to me this is simply a 2019 harvest tea that has been stored as tencha until it’s ordered for grinding.
Once again, the best way to know would be to taste a 2022 and 2019 tenmyō matcha side by side, but that’s not currently an option for me. I have to chalk this up to opinion until I have that chance.
Now, without further ado, let’s talk about price.
Price, packaging, and brewing parameters
I’m going to start this section with a table that displays the top price for a few different vendors and separates it by gram and by serving to help us keep track of things. I selected the most expensive “retail” matcha, that is, not anything exclusive like competition-grade or rare micro batch products.
Price and packaging
Here’s how I think about the price for matcha in a nutshell: I expect to pay $1-2/gram on average for the kind of quality matcha I enjoy. The farther past $2/gram I go, the more my expectations rise.
Song’s two teas clock in at a whopping $110 (Old-Grove) and $82 (New Cultivar) for 20 grams, which is $5.50 and $4.10 per gram, respectively. As we can see on the table, these are the most expensive matchas currently available at retail in the US outside of rare or prize-winning teas sometimes offered exclusively by vendors such as Kettl and Tea Dealers.
With the price more than double my threshold, my expectations are sky-high for both of these teas. There are a few other elements of Song’s approach that are worth covering before I tell you whether or not I think they’re worth it, one of which is packaging.
Both of these teas come in paulownia wood boxes, which are known in Japanese as kiribako (霧箱). If you know anything about Japanese tea culture, you know that all good things come in boxes–kiribako specifically. The boxes are wrapped in beautifully designed and embossed labels. The matcha itself is also contained in a pouch made of nice material, rather than your standard silver plastic pouch.
In other words, the packaging is expensive. It’s clear Song wants these teas to come across as premium. Whether or not the carpet matches the curtains in this case is something I’ll discuss in the final verdict–right after I briefly discuss brewing parameters.
Brewing parameters and a comment on “thin” vs. “thick” tea
Song recommends both teas be brewed in “thin tea” style (usucha). Traditionally, usucha is considered the casual form of matcha. It can be made easily with tea of almost any quality as long as it’s not too poor (i.e. bitter) to drink and is often consumed simultaneously with sweets or snacks.
“Thick tea” (koicha) is the pinnacle of matcha as far as tradition is concerned. Therefore, only the highest quality teas are worthy of being made as koicha. It is highly concentrated and kneaded, rather than whisked, into something resembling more of a dense paste than a light, frothy liquid.
If you make koicha with a tea that can’t handle it, you’ll enjoy a five-finger death punch of bitterness to the face.
Seeing Song recommend such light brewing parameters for the tea (1g/70mL) makes me wonder about whether either of these teas can hold up as koicha. I can imagine zairai having difficulty presenting a balanced bowl of koicha, but if the aging of the tencha has done so much to mellow it out, then perhaps it can take it. Here, my lack of experience with these teas shows through.
What I can say for certain is that following Song’s recommendations will result in a thin tea, indeed. I’d expect light and crisp flavors, highlighting the bright notes while watering down the bolder notes. This may in fact be a great way to experience the subtleties and nuance each tea has to offer. Personally, I often find myself unsatisfied with such thin tea when consumed alone without nice tea sweets (wagashi) to accompany it.
With all this in mind, it’s finally time for me to come to a verdict.
Verdict
My verdict in one sentence:
At listing price, these two teas are suitable for knowledgeable enthusiasts looking to expand their experience with matcha.
Now for the longer version:
These are not teas for the casual matcha drinker. If you are early in your matcha journey or not willing to take these teas seriously, don’t buy them. There are many much better choices for you. If you’re a tea enthusiast like me, and you have the money to spend, then go for it.
My approach to these teas would be the same as I'd have walking into a fine dining experience. The money I’m spending is for the experience and the information, which makes me willing to open my wallet far more than I would otherwise.
That said, I’m both cynical and enthusiastic about these teas.
The Cynical Perspective
The cynic in me says both of these teas should be cheaper. I wonder whether such light brewing parameters are stretching the perception of price value per serving while also trying to protect the uninitiated matcha drinker from having a bad experience and passing it off as thoughtfulness rather than pragmatism.
The inclusion of paulownia wood packaging and elegant embossed labels contributes to this cynicism, as it gives me whiffs of what I often saw in China–expensive packaging wrapped around underwhelming products marked up exponentially. I would much rather have both these teas in standard matcha tins and cut the price accordingly.
The true spirit of Japanese tea is a humble or unassuming exterior that hides a heart of gold. Can we say these teas are embodying that spirit presented as they are?
The Enthusiastic Perspective
The tea enthusiast in me says Song has found something interesting in the world of matcha and done the hard work of making it available for the first time in the US market. That is worth rewarding.
We don’t see zairai teas in the US at all, let alone old-grove zairai matcha. Furthermore, Song has a reputation for quality, and if we pay a bit more for both their brand and the exclusive access they’re offering to this tea, then what we’re talking about is the price of admission no different than that of a prix fixe menu Michelin-starred restaurant or the omakase (“Chef’s choice”) price at a quality sushi restaurant.
Finally, I want to reward tea companies for trying to bring something new to American shores. Song Tea is a company that cares about precisely that, and they have the track record with Chinese and Taiwanese teas to prove it.
If their price is a little higher as a result I will happily pay it–as long as I’m convinced it’s worth it.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the matcha enthusiast should be interested in opportunities to try teas such as these. While staying within one’s own means, the money spent should be considered tuition for ongoing tea education. In that light, I recommend trying these teas if you’re interested.
The Old-Grove Matcha has many interesting attributes to offer the matcha enthusiast that you simply cannot find in one place from any other American vendor. The New Cultivar tea is perhaps less remarkable but still interesting as an opportunity to experience what counts as a “new” type of tea (16 years since its invention is a short time, all things considered).
The world of tea is a wonderful place, and I’m grateful that a company like Song Tea is working hard to make their contribution. The Old-Grove and New Cultivar teas are exciting additions to the pantheon of matcha in the US and I appreciate the effort Peter and his team went through to offer them to us.
Finally, I’ll be honest–I didn’t know what I was getting into when I started this piece. I’ve never written anything like this before. Honestly, I enjoyed it. I hope you did too. I’d like to do more of this sort of writing I think, so I’ll be on the lookout for future opportunities to do more of it.
Until next time, happy drinking.
A huge thanks to my good friends Phil and Thomas for their feedback on the very long drafts of this piece.