Editorial Conversations: AMA #7

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our Seventh AMA with the editorial team and special guest Max Falkowitz from Leafhopper! You can listen to the episode here, on YouTube, or on Spotify. The team debates a wide range of topics, from unforgettable tea experiences that recalibrated their taste scales to using Discord for tea education. We also discuss the complexities of tea culture and creating a community around tea, the merits of Wuyi Yancha, and the validity on vendor claims.

A full transcript is included on the episode page and below:

[00:00:05] Jason Cohen: Awesome. Well, thank you everyone for joining us in this edition of Tea Technique Editorial Conversations. We're doing in AMA, of course, with our editor Pat Penny.

[00:00:17] Pat Penny: Hey, hey!

[00:00:19] Jason Cohen: And a dear friend Max Falkowitz from Leafhopper. Hey, Max.

[00:00:23] Max Falkowitz: Hi everybody.

[00:00:24] Jason Cohen: So this is Max's first AMA with us. So he is about to get a very special treatment, something that he's totally unprepared for.

[00:00:35] Pat Penny: Max, just like mute, mute your speakers now. It's just, just mute the speakers now.

[00:00:41] Max Falkowitz: Yeah, I wanna see like what particular cult you've created in this digital space.

[00:00:45] Pat Penny: Oh, it's a strange one.

[00:00:47] Jason Cohen: Yes. Well, this I believe is the first ever shou puer disc track. And

[00:00:57] Pat Penny: The world's not ready for a good reason.

[00:00:59] Jason Cohen: Yep. And, I'm excited for it. Let's see. See if I can do this with just the sound is what I'm trying to do.

[00:01:10] Pat Penny: When you went to share your screen, I, I assumed it was gonna be the world's first shou puer disc track music video is what I thought was gonna happen.

[00:01:18] Jason Cohen: Yeah, yeah. Shou puer disc track music video. Wouldn't that be something?

[00:01:22] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. Like girls in thongs on big piles, like in the warehouse.

[00:01:26] Pat Penny: Just shou cakes. Just like falling down the shelves.

[00:01:29] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:01:31] Jason Cohen: There we go. Okay. Here we go. Let me know what you guys think.

[00:04:10] Pat Penny: So Max, this is just how we naturally drop the engagement on the post is like people listen to the first three minutes and then we just see the drop off rate is just a little precipitous.

[00:04:21] Max Falkowitz: When does the, when does the collaboration with Awkwafina come for this?

[00:04:26] Pat Penny: Make it real New York?

[00:04:27] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. That, wow. What, what does the story behind this? How did this come about?

[00:04:33] Jason Cohen: Just started messing around with this. And now for the AMAs, we usually play a song at the beginning.

[00:04:38] Max Falkowitz: That, beautiful. Love it. Great.

[00:04:40] Pat Penny: They've only gotten better actually. So, Max, you, now is the best version of this.

[00:04:45] Max Falkowitz: Mm-hmm.

[00:04:46] Pat Penny: It's only been worse in the past,

[00:04:47] Max Falkowitz: which means in the future they will only get better.

[00:04:49] Pat Penny: True, true.

[00:04:50] Jason Cohen: We hope. We hope.

[00:04:51] Max Falkowitz: Invest now for great returns.

[00:04:55] Jason Cohen: What did, what did you think Pat?

[00:04:57] Pat Penny: I mean, it, it's, it's the best one you've done to date. But, I'd love to get Max's thoughts on uh, AI music, AI generation, AI for tea related things. I'm sure you've got a nice nuanced take on that one.

[00:05:09] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. It it, it's, it's, it's rare to have something that is an existential threat to your work and your livelihood. And also an environmental disaster and an unregulated, rogue state project that fills you with dread every day. So for one technology to really combine all of those attributes together, those boys are working hard.

[00:05:33] Pat Penny: Yeah. Jason, way to start off light with that.

[00:05:38] Max Falkowitz: I'm gonna get my kettle, one second.

[00:05:39] Jason Cohen: As I

[00:05:40] Max Falkowitz: Good call.

[00:05:40] Jason Cohen: As I make my AI music and run an AI company.

[00:05:44] Pat Penny: Your AI company.

[00:05:45] Jason Cohen: Yeah.

[00:05:50] Pat Penny: Using, using at least three water bottles worth of water to make a song about bad shou cha.

[00:05:57] Jason Cohen: Well, I was inspired by of course our recent conversations, Pat. After the Yiwu trip where we were listening to Pan-African jazz funk, I progressed from there to British Dub, particularly Party Dub.

[00:06:14] Pat Penny: I'm, I'm still on the Pan-African jazz funk. I, I really enjoyed that. I've got a few albums downloaded now for just plain listening, all that kinda stuff.

[00:06:22] Jason Cohen: What music have you been listening to recently, Max?

[00:06:26] Max Falkowitz: This is a really cringe answer, but in addition to the Hans Zimmer soundtrack for Dune, the film.

[00:06:33] Pat Penny: Yes.

[00:06:34] Max Falkowitz: And I'm very Dune pilled. My dog is named after Frank Herbert. His name is Frank Herbert. And there is an additional album called the Dune Sketchbook, which is where he just kind of gets extra weird and funky with it. And that, while walking my dog and riding on the subway is like, you are so Bene Gesserit maxing while listening to that. It's beautiful.

[00:06:59] Pat Penny: I, I only made it to book four. I don't know how far, how far you've gone in this.

[00:07:04] Max Falkowitz: I, I haven't, I haven't gone past book three. I need to sit down and do the

[00:07:09] Pat Penny: You don't, you don't, you don't need to, you don't need to

[00:07:11] Jason Cohen: Just stop there.

[00:07:11] Max Falkowitz: You, you missed the sex nuns. You, you missed the, the nuns who, who turned sex into a narcotic.

[00:07:18] Pat Penny: I, I feel like I missed nothing. I really feel like I missed nothing.

[00:07:20] Max Falkowitz: Scare dogs. You've missed the, the survival of Judaism, more or less unchanged for over 10,000 years, which pops up at the end of the last book, I'm told. Yeah. I don't, I, I, I, yeah, I need to dig into, I I,

[00:07:34] Pat Penny: That, that I do feel like I missed and, and it is actually a question that I had coming into this podcast. So why, so I, I'm Jewish. It's not obvious, but why are all these Hebrews, He, He Bros into brewing Chinese tea? I, I don't, I don't understand it, but it's like a thing like across the tea world.

[00:07:51] Max Falkowitz: Really? The Jews, the Jews are, are interested in tea.

[00:07:54] Pat Penny: The Jews are into Chinese tea. Yeah.

[00:07:56] Max Falkowitz: Interesting. I mean, there, there's, there's, maybe this is an extension of the great affinity that Jewish and Chinese cultures have for each other. I think there's a reason that we get along so well, so often. And I don't know. I feel like anything else I say could be very cancelable, but I'm mean I'm gonna leave it there.

[00:08:18] Pat Penny: Probably a good idea. Probably a good idea.

[00:08:21] Jason Cohen: I think tea requires the same type of Talmudic study that few topics do.

[00:08:27] Pat Penny: At, at least the way that you've approached it. That's for sure.

[00:08:32] Jason Cohen: Well, Pat, why don't you kick us off in our standard opening question. What are you drinking?

[00:08:39] Pat Penny: Oh, well, you asked the question but yeah, what, what am I drinking? So I'm, I'm still at work right now, actually. I very luckily just kind of got outta my last meeting to make it here on time, so happy to be with you guys. And I am drinking just a, a nice glass, actually a, a branded glass. This is an audio medium, but I've got my nice branded glass for all you listeners.

And I just have a ton of San Jia Zhai (三家寨) sheng puer just floating in here. So it's some nice Yiwu puer 'cause we went to Yiwu this year. I think we're probably just gonna keep talking about Yiwu until we go somewhere else next year.

[00:09:13] Jason Cohen: Yeah. We're still gonna talk about Yiwu.

[00:09:15] Pat Penny: Yeah. Jason, I kick it to you. What are you drinking?

[00:09:17] Jason Cohen: What am I drinking? I am drinking a Yixing red tea. Really just to throw it back on the internet Debbie Downer group that says, oh, Yixing, they don't like tea. They just drink the local red tea. Well, here I have an example of an excellent version of the local red tea made by a real charan and Yixing maker.

And I am pairing that with a nice glass of Cardenal Mendoza Gran Solera Reserva Spanish Brandy.

[00:09:44] Pat Penny: Jason's standard, accessible and approachable answer. Max?

[00:09:50] Max Falkowitz: Beautiful.

Well, I'm recovering from a bout of sake education that happened last night, which is a great way of disguising, drinking too much. So I'm keeping it mellow with some competition, allegedly Dong Ding that I have been drinking out of this, I, I don't think the camera is recognizing how large this mug is. This was a recent unearthed find from my great aunt who I think somewhere between the sixties and seventies must have taken a trip to Mexico and brought back a lot of pottery that probably has lead in the glaze. And this has been my new lock in tea mug. And so the hope is that if this is a competition ish grade tea, that it can handle just being like sitting in here for an hour and a half, which so far it's been doing well.

[00:10:41] Pat Penny: The lead is just a little extra seasoning. So did you have a little too much like Muroka Nama Genshu, you know, what, what kind of sake were you having last night?

[00:10:49] Max Falkowitz: Oh gosh. There was, there was a lightly pasteurized one, aged for two years that was not proof down, that had these really nice like maple sap kind of flavors to it. And another that was, like all sake vocabulary goes in one ear and out the other for me. So I, I, I'm, I'm gonna not even attempt to try and describe what they were, but

[00:11:12] Pat Penny: I'm taking, I'm taking notes and I'm grading what you say.

[00:11:15] Max Falkowitz: Good, good. Please grade me harder, Daddy. I, the, and then we, we had another one that was, it, it was like ripe and lush to the point of having that like tropical garbage kind of flavor like jackfruit that's turned a little and

[00:11:29] Jason Cohen: Unfiltered?

[00:11:30] Max Falkowitz: No, it was, it was clear. But I think also unpasteurized and from a producer that makes their own koji, which I'm told is very uncommon. And it was beautiful. Like I, once you get past like the garlic, like it was, it was so many different things and like the language we're talking about it, I think was much more, like tea language was much more useful for me in talking about it than wine language.

[00:11:58] Pat Penny: Yeah. This, this time of year for sake, there's a type of sake called hiyaoroshi, which is basically either single pasteurization or then sounds like you had a lot of nama, which is the non-pasteurized. But this time of year is so popular for sake. So you're making me think that this weekend I've gotta go do the same. A little bit of sake education sounds like a good idea.

[00:12:16] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. Yeah. I highly, highly recommend. A tea friend of mine named Jenny Eagleton has gone very deep down the sake rabbit hole and is doing trainings and education about it. And so we have a good tea for sake samples and educational exchange.

[00:12:33] Pat Penny: I need those kind of friends. That's really what I feel like I'm missing over here in Seattle.

[00:12:37] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. I also recommend getting a cheese rabbi if you can, and then getting him hooked on tea 'cause then you definitely win the value proposition of that. 'Cause there's only like, you can give them a 10 gram sample of tea and they're thrilled and you get back like a half pound wheel of cheese and

[00:12:53] Pat Penny: Fair trade. Fair trade. Jason and I had a beer rabbi in college. So how different is a cheese rabbi and a beer rabbi, you think?

[00:13:00] Max Falkowitz: If like a few things happened differently in his life, he would totally be a craft beer guy. So I think basically same person.

[00:13:07] Jason Cohen: Yeah. He probably went through the phase. Everyone went through the, it's a,

[00:13:10] Pat Penny: Yeah,

[00:13:11] Jason Cohen: It's an up and down thing.

[00:13:12] Pat Penny: We're all drinking lagers now, right? Like just Coors Light across the board.

[00:13:15] Jason Cohen: Early twenties. I'm not even drinking beer anymore. I'm on, I'm on pure spirits now.

[00:13:22] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. I, I, I, I'm, I, what I want is I want four ounces of beer and then that is enough beer for me. Unless I'm like pounding a Guinness after a really shitty day, but like four ounces of a good sour is like perfect. And then get me some pickles.

[00:13:39] Pat Penny: Pickles all the way. Yeah. A, a little taster is all I need anymore. So this is a pretty Tea Technique AMA standard, we're like 20 minutes into the conversation. We haven't addressed a audience comment yet at all. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna shift gears a little bit and we're gonna address some questions that we got submitted. So, Jason, you sent me a few that I think we got through email. We had a few through Insta. I think, just an apology to listeners. I think we were a little late on posting this time, so, if you had questions that didn't get send to us, just send them, we'll get 'em into the next AMA.

All right, I'm gonna look over. Well this is one that we kind of end up addressing a lot anyway, so this is an easy one, but, Jason, recent changes to your brewing practice or biggest changes. We kind of address this every time we come back from like a trip. But Max, I'd love to hear from you as well since maybe you don't have the same kind of like trip cadence that we have. What's something that's changed in your brewing practice of late?

[00:14:36] Max Falkowitz: That's a good question and one that I expect to be able to answer differently in a few weeks. I'm heading to Japan on a very quickie junket to visit some producers doing a story about the matcha shortage because of course, but I've never gotten to see production and like tea agriculture at scale in Japan. So that's really what I'm hoping to get outta the trip. And basically I'm hoping to get corrected by a lot of people about, about how I'm brewing Japanese tea wrong. The trip is all gonna be in Fukuoka, so I don't think I'll be able to get to Kyoto on this trip.

[00:15:11] Pat Penny: Yeah. Probably doing all Yame area tea or something like that. Yep.

[00:15:14] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. The importer has a relationship with Yame and so it's, but I think it's, it's so great on, on any kind of exploratory trip to just focus on something deep, even if you have to come back later and visit a bunch else. Just like build a memorable experience for yourself where you get to investigate the culture a little more deeply rather than trying to get a little bit of everything. And I think it just always works to dig in deeper instead.

[00:15:42] Pat Penny: Fukuoka has amazing food culture too, so I think you're gonna be in for a treat. Like, I don't know if you're gonna Fukuoka City proper, but it's actually a really cool city.

[00:15:50] Max Falkowitz: I'll definitely gonna hit you up for recommendations about, about that.

Then changes to my brewing practice more generally have actually come out of conversations with Jason when we were discussing tetsubin versus clay pot brewing. I have a clay kettle and I have a tetsubin and my use of them tends to be pretty seasonal, like fall and winter. The tetsubin just feels more cozy. And then the clay kettle is lighter and feels more like what I want to use in spring and summer. And I tend to drink most of my roasted tea in the fall and the winter. But I have been switching to clay kettle for a lot more yancha and I need to do some side by side comparisons, but I'm intrigued to play around with that some more.

[00:16:31] Jason Cohen: That's awesome.

[00:16:31] Pat Penny: You, you and I are still on the same page with the tetsubin 'cause I actually just two weeks ago, literally dusted my tetsubin off. 'Cause I had not used it probably since the late spring maybe. Just not at all during the summer. And as I put it on the hot plate, I could actually smell the dust burning off. But now we're firmly into like tetsubin season for me. But it was all, all clay pot for me for a while. Jason, you look like you had something you wanna say about the Japan comments.

[00:16:56] Jason Cohen: Oh, just this, I thought the sake is a great preparation for, for Japan, but yeah, you'll, you'll have time. And one of our amazing guests and listeners is based in Kyoto area. So he, he put into the chat if you're coming to Kyoto. Reach out. I'll connect you guys.

[00:17:13] Max Falkowitz: Yeah, I, I don't think I'm gonna be able to do it on this trip. And that makes two trips to Japan where I have not been able to visit Kyoto. And so third time's really gonna have to be the charm. And I think it's gonna have to be like a big, long, like tea exploration time.

[00:17:27] Pat Penny: Yeah, your, your brewing practices are definitely gonna change when you come back. I, I go to Japan like almost every summer and I basically end up drinking like green tea for like a month straight after that. And, and then exclusively do no green tea the rest of the year, but just one full month of gyo kuro nonstop.

[00:17:43] Jason Cohen: But Pat, you stopped buying Chinese greens the last two, three seasons?

[00:17:48] Pat Penny: Just this past season. So the previous season I actually bought your excess greens. But yeah, I, I just had too much and it ended up sitting around for too long, so I am just giving myself a little break. Next, this, this coming season, I'll definitely be buying some Chinese greens.

[00:18:03] Jason Cohen: Okay. Well you'll just go in with me on the annual Longjing order.

[00:18:06] Pat Penny: Sounds good.

[00:18:07] Jason Cohen: I drink one month of green tea every year. I buy my top grade Longjing for reasons that are non-monetary. You gotta, gotta keep up the access. And I do enjoy it for a full year and then I, that's it, that's, that's what I drink.

[00:18:25] Max Falkowitz: So yeah. What, what does the investment cost of maintaining this relationship cost to you, like per session of actually wanting to reach out for Longjing?

[00:18:35] Jason Cohen: What does, what was it last year, Pat? $2.25 a gram?

[00:18:39] Pat Penny: Yeah, that sounds right. I, I got 25 grams I think and it was like 70 bucks, so, yeah.

[00:18:44] Jason Cohen: Yeah. It's like between $2 and $3 a gram depending on the season. And also depends if I can get in on the OG Cultivar, Cultivar 43? I always get the number wrong.

[00:18:54] Pat Penny: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:18:56] Jason Cohen: I normally miss the early season cultivar 'cause obviously, I'm not in China during Longing season, so, I normally wind up with the 43, but I, I don't really mind that that much.

[00:19:08] Pat Penny: Yeah, I do like the Qunti. When I was in Hangzhou pre-Qing ming, that was one of the only times I had tried kind of the landrace variety. And yeah, it, it was very interesting. I mean, I didn't really bring much back home, which was probably a good call 'cause it would've eventually just oxidized 'cause I don't drink greens fast enough. But it's the only time I think I had, it was when I was in Hangzhou.

Okay. I've got another one. So what's an aspect of tea culture that you personally don't participate in, but respect others doing? This is a cool one.

[00:19:38] Jason Cohen: Bowl tea meditation with Little John.

[00:19:42] Pat Penny: You mean Little John's specific meditation album, right?

[00:19:45] Jason Cohen: I do mean bowl tea meditation with Little John and his meditation album or bowl tea.

[00:19:51] Pat Penny: Yeah. You're not, you're not doing like a party rock, L-M-F-A-O type of situation?

[00:19:55] Jason Cohen: No, no. Just the actual meditation album.

[00:19:59] Pat Penny: Yeah. Who, who do you know that's doing this?

[00:20:02] Jason Cohen: I can't say.

[00:20:03] Pat Penny: I think you're talking about yourself.

[00:20:06] Jason Cohen: No. This is what, this is what I don't participate in.

[00:20:09] Pat Penny: Yeah.

[00:20:09] Jason Cohen: I respect.

[00:20:10] Pat Penny: Max, do you have an aspect of tea culture that you kind of respect but don't, don't really do?

[00:20:14] Max Falkowitz: Discord. Love it for everyone, but it is such an overstimulating environment and, and I, I struggle to keep track of conversations over any length of time. I think a lot about like the archives and architecture of content on the internet and how, on the one hand, moving to private spaces like these is kind of a necessity of the surveillance system that we live in now. But none of it gets archived and none of it is, is obtainable for future generations of people that want to learn. And so it just, it kind of feels like you're just burning through stuff and you're burning through people. And I don't know, and I know that in like gaming communities, Discord is huge and live streams are huge. But it, it has made me feel distinctly too old to understand how to engage with those platforms.

[00:21:05] Jason Cohen: It's, it's not even too old. I mean, I'll piggy, piggyback on that. I'm serious about the bowl tea. It's one aspect that I totally appreciate. We used to do more of in Institute days. We used to do the guided bowl tea meditation sessions pre little John and just never kept up with it. So deeply appreciated that and like the boiled tea.

But I think your answer is much more interesting than my answer because I think that the Discord channels incentivize this idea of asynchronous real time communication, kind of like Slack, except it's not a curated conversation. So you just get this constant barrage of people coming in, which creates the eternal September problem, right? Everyone's a new freshman on the university channel kind of situation where everyone's asking, rate this, suggest this, I'm looking for X. And so without that type of curated conversation, and with that kind of async choppy real time short snippet of text, it becomes both very difficult to search and to follow a trend of a thread of a conversation where there's multiple conversations interspersed and it makes it, even if you did have search access to the Discord, it makes it basically unsearchable. And so I, one of the reasons I don't partake in it is because I think that the values is in the long form content and the long form content isn't there.

[00:22:26] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. There's something to be said for, for unfettered access to personalities and intellects that you want to follow, but you learn quickly why people need editors and, and, and, and why unfettered access doesn't always produce good, good results.

I think there's also, and I, I think this is more of a linguistic trend that's emerged through Discord and other forums, is the very heavy reliance on acronyms for brands and regions and producers. It is, it, it's really it's, it's really alienating to someone who, who is not, even if they're familiar with tea, just not familiar with that ecosystem. And some Discord, some servers I've seen have glossaries for them, but then you're searching through something else and that pulls you out of the conversation. I also don't understand how you navigate Discord without tabbed browsing, but that's a separate issue.

And I don't know, I think as, as we think about how do we communicate about tea, both in public and private and semi-private, and, and we want to, to spread the hospitality of tea culture. How do we, how do we allow ourselves to use shorthand without making it seem like we're all speaking in chits?

[00:23:35] Pat Penny: Yeah. I, I, I think when Tea Discord became a bigger thing, tried to kind of ride the bandwagon and I think I kept up with it for about a month and just found that I felt like I was putting a lot in and really felt like I was getting nothing out of it. And I don't know if it's where I was right in my tea journey. I'm sure for the freshman, Jason, kind of as you said, that it's, it's probably more immediately helpful or could potentially be hurtful as well, depending on what kind of things they pick up. But, I basically just check it now, like once a year to see what kind of shit talk people are doing on Tea Technique. I'm basically not able to find anything via search, as has been mentioned here. And then I never look again for like another year and a year later I go, oh, did anyone talk shit on anything we're doing? And then I can't find anything. Yeah. And that's how it's gone.

[00:24:22] Jason Cohen: Did they? We don't know.

[00:24:23] Pat Penny: Usually, I can't find anything. It is, it's once again, the issue is I find nothing.

[00:24:27] Jason Cohen: Oh.

[00:24:29] Pat Penny: Except when I search Jason Cohen and then I find a lot.

[00:24:32] Jason Cohen: Yeah. Everyone's completely

[00:24:33] Pat Penny: Unrelated to Tea Technique.

[00:24:35] Jason Cohen: Everyone's complaining.

[00:24:36] Max Falkowitz: Oh yeah. All the, all the, all the AI music albums he's been working on, on the side.

[00:24:38] Jason Cohen: I know, I know.

[00:24:40] Pat Penny: Okay. Let's, let's see, what's the next question I got on here?

Jason, this one I think was to you specifically. If you rebuilt the Tea Institute at Penn State model outside of university, what parts would you keep and what would you change?

[00:24:53] Jason Cohen: Ooh, that's a really difficult question. So, the way the Institute was organized is we had the, the operational team, right? The exec team that had various marketing, recruitment and other types of tea house management and librarian, those types of, of positions. But then the way that the not yet institute members, the students were taught was through what we called lineages. So you had a lineage head, and a lineage head would take on a certain number of students, and those students would come to the lectures once a week. And then they would do lineage, hands-on educational brewing, the rest of the time. And then they would take the test in order to test into the Institute and unlock a bunch of opportunities.

So it depends how big it is, right? If you, in Chinese tea, you don't really see a lot of schools like that. You don't really see the Japanese iemoto system with the, the head guy and the disciples and everything goes down the chain and who's allowed to teach. And part of that is just the ethos of the, the culture around it. But part of it is also the size. Most people are learning from singular teachers and they're picking up all of their good and bad habits and their sourcing and their preferences.

And so I think one of the things, and, and I didn't have an appreciation of this until later, but one of the things that was really interesting about the Institute was having those lineage heads who had some different ideas or different preferences or created debate amongst different groups of teachers within the same school with all following kind of the same track. And they, they did a great job of setting up some really fun and interesting environments where it was very competitive, where you'd have people from different lineages doing brew battles, brewing the same tea, and everyone tasting their tea and critiquing.

And so how much of that is possible to, to recreate outside of a university system? That's really hard to say, right? If, if you have a small group, like take the talk taste triage group, which max 6, 7, 8 people show up. I can't fit more in my tiny Manhattan tea room. If they show up, I can either, it could be an open, easygoing conversation or sometimes people request specific lessons. So the one that we held last night was on Menghai tea, and I actually focused it around the areas of Bulang and the flavors between xiaoshu and gushu Bulang and related region tea. And that's easy to do as a one-off prior experience and all that depends who your teachers are.

Easy to do for me as a one-off and bring people in and, and get them to a level of understanding and, okay, here's what we should be looking for, right? So we were tasting each tea blind and saying, do you think it's gushu? Do you think it's xiaoshu? Where, how, what, what do you think of this tea? And by the end, everyone was basically getting it right, and it was amazing. It was a wonderful lesson. Is there a way to scale that? Is there a way to do that in a constructive lineage setting? I don't know. I don't really focus, as a detriment to myself, I don't really focus on beginner education anymore. I've left that to other people that are much friendlier than I am. And it, it's a personal fault, freely admit it. My, my focus is, is, is like, how do you take people that already know how to brew and are already drinking and already sourcing and tasting, and how do you drive them to get to this next level? How do you progress the praxis at, at, at, at the vanguard of, of this art form? And so thinking through, how do you get beginners trained to be good brewers and good tasters? I haven't been in that world for such a long time, but I don't know what's possible to do outside of a university environment and you were there, pat. I don't, so I don't, you can respond to, to, to that.

[00:28:34] Pat Penny: It, it's just so localized, right? It's so hard if you don't have a place to center around. We had, we had the Tea Institute, right? And the building and the room that we would gather in. And, it really that that gathering point became a third place. It was just somewhere we all kind of congregated whether or not there was a, a lecture scheduled or whether or not there was brewing practice scheduled. There's just such an open door of people coming in and out and congregating and learning about tea that I think without having that space, it's, it's very difficult to replicate or even do something similar from an educational standpoint without that that space existing first, like your living room or the room that you're in right now, Jason, can't really become that space 'cause it's a private, semi-private space, right? Like it's your apartment. So I don't know how we, whether you want to or not, like how you would go about having a public space that does education where you're also like paying rent in like a city, like Seattle or New York, and doing it in a way that makes sense, right? That's like educationally driven, not financially driven.

[00:29:37] Jason Cohen: What do, what do you think, Max? You deal with a lot more beginner education than, than we do.

[00:29:42] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. I'm thinking of, of a fellow named Miles who has been doing this project for the last few years where he's serving free tea to people around the city. He sets up a little folding table in parks or food pantry distribution lines, and then they do other events. And it's all, it's all donation based and it's just about giving people free tea, having conversations with your neighbors, doing the, like, actual work of building community in places using tea as a lubricator for that. And the organization has expanded beyond this, just this one person. There's other people that volunteer, but it behaves in a very classical, classical like anarchist type of environment where there's no centralized authority. And there's administration, but the, the shape of the group is formed by the characters of the people that populate it.

And I think there's a lot of potential for non-commercial groups like these in different cities that have some sort of public service component and then also provide ways for people to gather and that allow different people within that community to take different roles of education. And it encourages, it incentivizes the teachers by getting to deepen their own craft. And it incentivizes newcomers by getting a variety of programming from a lot of different people without it having to seem like a, like a cult from one particular weirdo. So I, I'm, I'm really bullish on what they've been doing at that project called the Tea Stand and I hope to see other programs like it elsewhere.

A few years ago, some friends who have various tea companies in or near the city and I did a series of classes that were, they weren't as focused as lineages, but they were like an introduction. And then let's look at Japanese tea. Let's look at Chinese tea, let's look at Indian tea. And different reps from different companies led those different classes. And I did the intro class and then somebody else did one on this and this and this. And we kind of, we, we eventually kind of wrapped up the program because it was hard for us all to maintain with our schedules, and we were mostly doing it as an excuse to go out for dinner and get drunk. So then we just started doing that without the classes. But it was really fun to do and it was really great to see people from different companies express their vision and allow the guests to just kind of pick up what they wanted. So I would love to see more of those types of collaborations between companies, especially ones that have places, like tearooms available that need nighttime programming. Like I feel like there's, there's a lot of useful collaboration there.

[00:32:36] Jason Cohen: That leads us to another question that we got about, you could find the exact phrasing Pat, but you've, but it was basically about that Max that you've held these pages,

[00:32:46] Pat Penny: I, I have it in front of me, actually. I can read it. So you've run a lot of, this was to you Max, you've run a lot of public events in a way that like Tea Technique does not. And we've attended some of those public talks. Like what have you learned about tea on the tea world from hosting these kind of ticketed events?

[00:33:02] Max Falkowitz: That's a really good question. One is, is how incredibly well-informed people have become. I've been writing about tea for about 10 years now, and people were even knowledgeable then compared to when I was learning about tea. But now there's an amount of sophistication about what gushu means, what organic farming actually is about, what direct trade looks like and how it behaves. That and, and a lot of, of interest in, in spiritual aspects of tea, the chemistry of tea people have gotten very into. So I think the, the, the, the, there is a, a growing group of people that are, that are progressing their praxis through whatever areas they're getting their information from. So that's very inspiring to see.

And it makes my job easier because I feel like as I've matured as a writer about tea, I get to kind of grow up with people who have been growing up with me. So that, that was, that's been my biggest impression from different talks and then otherwise how once you strip away a lot of the language of tea, people get it pretty quickly, like what Jason was describing with discriminating young bush from old bush tea. People can get it pretty quickly. I, I recently did an event with this art nonprofit that was hosting a show with a visual artist who does the, they're kind of like, like light bright installations, but about capitalism, et cetera. It, it's, I'm, I'm describing it poorly, but it was really cool.

And we, we did an exercise where I brought two puers, one very strong and tranquilizing (老曼娥) Lao Man E. And then 30 year aged ripe that was like very loosen and very drinkable and just really nice. And we had people walk around the exhibit and then we had them drink the Lao Man E tea. I led them through a kind of tasting exercise, kind of trying to draw their attention to different parts of their mouth, of their body. And then we had them go through the exhibit again and see how they kind of, how, what, what about the, what about the art changed of their impressions to it. The responses that we got were fascinating. People were really into it. They were picking up on the somatic effects of the tea that were, we were kind of seeding them for, but they were really going, they were describing their sensations in an articulate enough way that it seemed genuine to me. And I, I, I, I, and using this medium of art as, as a kind of focusing lens for looking at tea and vice versa, I was excited about the event going in, but I was, I was very pleased with how it went afterwards and want to try and do more projects like that just to get people to stop having to worry about what words they can articulate and more develop an intuition for what you're feeling and drinking.

[00:35:46] Pat Penny: I don't think I ever go to a museum and see art without having tea. I feel like now I need to do the opposite, go with no stimulus to like see an art exhibit and then see how do I feel differently about it after then coming back with stimulus. I feel like I've always got like a thermos with me and I'm just like chugging tea as I'm looking at art.

[00:36:04] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. I had an English teacher in high school who recommended that we read this one book every 10 years of our life to see how we relate to it differently as we progress. And I haven't taken a bump on it, but thinking about it, I think about that book and does different aspects of it hit differently as I get older. I think like more occasions to have a regular interaction with something where you were in different states could be really fun.

[00:36:30] Pat Penny: Yeah, I mean, it's very much the same for tea itself, right? Like, I mean, the way you approach it in your mindset every day is gonna affect how that tea tastes. So I think taking that instead and applying it to some other stimulus is really, really cool. Now I kind of wanna go to the Seattle Art Museum and just try a couple different teas and see how I feel.

[00:36:47] Max Falkowitz: Yeah.

[00:36:48] Pat Penny: All right. We do have some questions that the editorial team actually wrote. So we wrote them with you in mind, Max, but Jason, you obviously you can answer them as well. So some of these are based off the recent tea chat. So sorry to listeners. We're gonna do our own selfish questions first and then we'll come back to yours. In the recent tea chat, Max, you had said that many farmers have very strong opinions and sometimes they're wrong. And Jason, you, you've written about disagreements among tea makers as well. For example, the difference and acceptance of yesheng cultivar in Yiwu which we talked about in multiple podcasts. How do both of you navigate situations where your trusted sources might fundamentally disagree? What's your epistemology for competing claims when you can't simply defer to authority?

[00:37:30] Max Falkowitz: Hmm.

[00:37:32] Pat Penny: The editorial team put together the easy ones.

[00:37:34] Max Falkowitz: Yeah.

[00:37:36] Jason Cohen: The easiest questions for us, Max.

[00:37:39] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. This is a good question. I can, I can jump in or if you wanted to start off on that one, Jason.

[00:37:43] Jason Cohen: No, you, you, you can go right ahead.

[00:37:45] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. I, I treat learning from tea teachers as reporting and journalism. And one of the rules of journalism is that if someone says their mother loves them, you have to go and verify it with their mom. So I, I always maintain a kind of base levels of skepticism just because you, you, you don't, any, any source can misrepresent things in any number of ways intentionally or not.

And it's a mixture of skepticism and just kind of keeping an open mind and seeing where the conversation takes you and like once you start digging around and learning about something like your smell test for what seems right or wrong can be that, that, that is a separate skill to hone that I think is part of the benefits of this type of education.

And it's, it's really difficult in the moment to try and suss out what someone is saying versus what your, your gut is telling you. But if it's on a trip, then you get to go home and then you get to drink some tea in a setting you're more familiar with and you can think about it in a different way.

And I think it's kind of like watching a movie where like you might walk out of the theater not really digging it, and then like you realize you've been thinking about it for a few weeks afterwards. And it's sort of a realization of, oh, like maybe they were wrong about this thing, or maybe this technique that they used was flawed, but something else that they were pointing out like has resonated with me in a way I didn't expect.

[00:39:09] Pat Penny: Jason.

[00:39:10] Jason Cohen: It's different but similar in some ways. What we do has similarities to reporting, but is very different in its objectives and how we go about it. So we trust but verify, but I think of it almost as dividing the knowledge into things that are factual, things that are either true or false. Like is, is that flavor of yesheng is that wild tea? Is da ye cultivar Assamica, is, is there been hybridization between the Assamica and the China variety? So, you, you have these factual things where people will say things or there'll be inherited knowledge and those things you can go back and verify or you can understand the sequence of events that cause them to believe this. Either it being something that's common knowledge that's just adopted over conversations of time, or whether it's something that is the terribly named indigenous knowledge. Uh right? Things that matter to farmers, but perhaps matter less to drinkers or, or think of less to drinkers.

And then there are these things that are preferences that are acquired acculturated preferences. So when you talk about yesheng, right? There's, and they say, oh, that's wild type. Wild type is bad for you. Wild type is poisonous. You shouldn't drink wild type. Yiwu shouldn't be producing wild type. There are two sets of information in that. There's the information about factual is yesheng wild, right? Why do they believe that yesheng is wild. Is there evidence and can we genetically test and can we do other tests to determine if yesheng is wild or hybridized or something else?

And then there's this totally other side that can't be answered with a right or wrong about the preference. Why do they not, why are they promoting this idea of not drinking yesheng tea and why other families disagree? And so when you trace it, you can write factually, or the way that we go about it is we then write factually about the facts. And then we present both sides of the argument, where there's merit, on the opinions. And, in Cult of Quality, in in the more freer blog format, I'm pretty open about my opinions, but in Tea Technique, we try to do a thorough job of steel manning both sides of any argument.

And maybe, if one argument is obviously superior, we'll come down on a side and say this is, this is what we think. But, but yeah, we go, we go about it thinking through the what can, what is, what is factual and, and what is acculturated preferences, because those acculturated preferences can be as interesting as the facts, right? The fact that some tea making tea farming families in Yiwu produce yesheng and others avoid it and think it's bad is incredibly important and incredibly interesting. And it might be much more interesting to many people, particularly to drinkers, than any information around, well, here's the, here's the back, here's the six back crosses between Assamica and qizhong wild type that forms yesheng. That's interesting to me. And it's gonna be, all that's gonna be a hundred pages of, of genetic back cross information.

[00:42:25] Pat Penny: And just all captured in one footnote that Jason's just dreaming up right now. One footnote, at least eight semicolons, a few m dashes. It's a single sentence. That's what I have to deal with Max.

I think similarly on the parsing fact from fiction and parsing opinion or strongly held conviction from one authority to another, I think this is something that we were kind of like baptized early in Jason. We went and studied with various teachers that were kind of available in our local area. So, for us, that was mostly New York City when we were at Penn State. We brought in teachers from other countries. We had people who are considered relatively like experts from Taiwan, from Korea. We went and studied with experts in Japan. And, we found that across the board, whether it was about the same product or whether it was about teas from these different countries there wasn't always agreement on a lot of things. And so I think, within the first two years or so of studying tea, I had a pretty clear idea of everything that I learn I need to take with a grain of salt and realize that I may be presented with something that actually like completely contradicts it. And whether one is true or not, I kind of have to hold both truths as being possible. And it depends on who I'm engaging with or how I'm engaging with tea for my own purposes that I decide kind of which one do I think is more important in this scenario or more real according to my experience or when, as you mentioned, verifiable, what, what can actually be verified.

And it's interesting having to, I think, like navigate tea and information in that way. Particularly like over the last nearly decade now. Like I've taught tea to actually predominantly beginners just for fun at my company which is a relatively small and unheard of coffee company. But you know, people who are just interested in, in tea and I'm kind of approaching it from a beginner's lens. And these are people who are often pretty knowledgeable about coffee. So I end up getting a well-informed questions coming from an agricultural side where there's times where I'm like, well, actually, I can't give you a factual answer on this. These are the arguments I've been presented with from two different experts who are well-regarded in the field. And here's what I know, make of it what you will. It's kind of hard to give that to some people sometimes. I think it's taken years of having information presented to me that way to be okay with it.

[00:44:41] Max Falkowitz: And there, there's, there's a lot of value in the way that you distill the information that you've received into here's what some people say and here's what some other people say. And that there, there's, there's a, a creative act in the way that you're organizing that information.

But you are also doing a great service to people by, by giving them those options. And like I always say, teach the controversy. That's why I want intelligent design, like offered equal opportunity in schools.

[00:45:11] Pat Penny: Some things I feel like I have the ability, the creativity to synthesize. And there's others where I'm just like, here's the story guys. You figure it out yourselves.

[00:45:20] Jason Cohen: That's, that's why I like writing. Writing as the medium. And to that, to that point, Pat, there's been times that the editorial team starts with one opinion and ends with another.

[00:45:29] Pat Penny: There's times where you present something and I'm like, this has to be wrong. There's no way this is right. And I love to prove Jason wrong, so I do as much digging as I can possibly do. And, and unfortunately there's times where I have to admit that he's right. And it's greater than 50 50. You do, you do, you do your research. But you know, the, the few moments where I get to point something out and say, well, I don't think you took into account this, are, are pretty satisfying.

[00:45:53] Jason Cohen: That's, that's the role of the editorial team. It wouldn't, wouldn't be here and we wouldn't be doing this work without that type of rigorous background research and fact checking.

[00:46:03] Pat Penny: Well, thank, thank you to the editorial team for putting together that nice easy softball question. We'll, we'll throw it to an actual easy one, which I think will nicely queue up an audience question. So what was the last tea that reset your scale?

[00:46:17] Max Falkowitz: Mm-hmm.

[00:46:19] Jason Cohen: What was the last tea? I have two answers to this. One of them was you and I, Pat. It was one of the Yibang teas that we tasted while we were in Yiwu after visiting Yibang.

[00:46:29] Pat Penny: Maoerduo or like the da hei shu lin tea?

[00:46:33] Jason Cohen: The da hei shu lin and the, the danzhu.

[00:46:37] Pat Penny: The danzhu we did, the one that got away?

[00:46:40] Jason Cohen: Yeah. The danzhu that got away. The, the transcendental, the transcendent, reset your scale, top of the top danzhu. The, the,

[00:46:50] Pat Penny: The danzhu where, where we went, can we buy a hundred grams? And they were like, it's all or nothing. And we were like, oh,

[00:46:56] Jason Cohen: You buy the harvest. Yeah. And I was so close to just saying, okay, it'll be my tea budget for the year. But then I know myself well enough to know that meant it would've been my tea budget for the month. And I was going to, to Wuyi after that and had some other spots. So it was

[00:47:15] Pat Penny: Time to take out a loan.

[00:47:17] Jason Cohen: It was painful.

[00:47:22] Max Falkowitz: Look, your wife understands. She's, she's a supporter in your endeavors.

[00:47:26] Jason Cohen: I'm not married yet.

[00:47:29] Max Falkowitz: Good. Then you're not showing finances, then just do it. Do it now.

[00:47:33] Jason Cohen: No,

[00:47:34] Pat Penny: I think, I think Jason has a bit of a, a sugar mama situation going on, so I don't, I don't think, I don't think Nancy wants you spending that kind of budget.

[00:47:43] Jason Cohen: I mean, I don't think I want to be spending that kind of budget, but it is, it is painful. That is one that got away. And then the other one which I guess you haven't had yet, Pat, is, is I had some Wuyi red tea that is, that is on an entirely different planet. Like off market, yeah.

[00:48:05] Pat Penny: Standard Jason Cohen, super accessible product. You did tell me that you would sell me some of it though, once you got it, right.

[00:48:10] Jason Cohen: I will, I will.

[00:48:11] Pat Penny: Okay. Thank you. Max, how about for you?

[00:48:15] Max Falkowitz: This, this isn't a, a new drink, but I have been re reevaluating the category recently. I've been cupping a lot of Lu'an (六安黑茶) and just trying to learn more about it because it's a category of tea I really enjoy. And there's so little on it that it, it feels like treasure hunting. And I have a few baskets that I, that I like to drink through. And then a collector friend who specializes in vintage tea ware shared some allegedly seventies Lu'an that is probably in the $3 a gram range. And it just kind of broke me, like all the other stuff just tastes like a shadow of what it should now. And I, after, after some like period of grieving, I can still drink the baskets that I have and enjoy them. But when I hit it big on, on some project, I think like some really expensive Lu'an in my future.

[00:49:13] Jason Cohen: That is a very left field answer.

[00:49:17] Pat Penny: Yeah, we're, we're talking over here about Yiwu puer, Wuyi yancha, Wuyi reds, right? Lu'an was not my, what I expected either, but I mean, it's, it's amazing. I think tea from any category can show you heartbreak, can just show you how, what, what is out there and what you don't have.

[00:49:32] Jason Cohen: I have a basket, a Lu'an basket that I like never touch. I think I've touched it once every six to eight years since I acquired it. It was like a 1993 Malaysia stored basket, I bought it in China, but it went to Malaysia and it came back in an collector acquisition. But anyway, come over anytime. I am happy to break it out. It'll be the first time in probably eight years that I have looked at that basket.

[00:49:58] Max Falkowitz: Hell yeah. People should drink more Lu'an and I think especially people that are like shou puer fans should... there, there's a lot for them to really enjoy about it.

[00:50:09] Pat Penny: I think Jason, beyond the one that got away, the Yibang danzhu, I think for me, coming out of a similar time period on that trip, when we went to Kunming, we had a 1950s Liu Bao with a, a vendor and, and now friend. And he also sent us home with some dust from the bottom of that Liu Bao bin. So he was like, all right, we're, we're almost at the bottom basically of the, the basket. Here you guys go, here's, here's 20 grams of dust. Throw it in a tea bag and enjoy. And obviously the, the tea itself was scale resetting.

But when we flew home, and actually now basically every time I fly, I throw like a gram of that dust into a small 200 milliliter thermos and just hit it with boiling water and let it sit for like hours. And I mean that, sitting on a plane and just like drinking two or three cups of that Liu Bao just changes the entire plane ride. Like I am flying on another plane of existence just on Liu Bao dust fumes and every time that resets my expectations for body feel and all of that for a tea experience.

[00:51:06] Jason Cohen: That's amazing. I haven't actually touched that dust yet, but I will say that I love Liu Bao. So I think Lu'an is kind of left field stuff, but Liu Bao is my Sunday morning dim sum tea. I have a Onggi tea pot, a Korean ware from Onggi master that Pat and I, made some ceramics with, and I take that,

[00:51:29] Pat Penny: Is it your, your elephant pot or the one that, not the one you made.

[00:51:32] Jason Cohen: It's not the elephant pot. It's not the one that I made. That is in my mother's possession.

[00:51:36] Pat Penny: Okay. Yes, I know the other pot.

[00:51:37] Jason Cohen: But yeah, with the, the gold leaf. And I just pack that with Liu Bao and we go brew after brew after brew with dim sum. And I, I love it. I like Liu Bao I think a lot more than shou puer. I've pretty rarely ever taught shou puer and I love Liu Bao with food.

[00:51:55] Pat Penny: The problem is like in the last decade, everyone else has also started to like Liu Bao a lot on the West. And so I feel like, 2014, 2015, you could get some really good Liu Bao for a good price. Now Liu Bao prices compete with sheng puer prices.

[00:52:09] Jason Cohen: For age stuff, yeah.

[00:52:10] Pat Penny: Yes.

[00:52:12] Jason Cohen: Yeah.

[00:52:13] Pat Penny: Okay. So I think this question teed us up nicely for one of the audience questions. So, when you guys talk about reference teas or reference for tea quality teas, do you mean you've literally tried hundreds of different teas and remember what they all tasted like? Or is it more like you've had a few really exceptional examples that recalibrate your scale? 'Cause I have a terrible memory and the idea that I need to remember every tea I've ever had is stressing me out. So what, what do you say to this reader?

[00:52:37] Jason Cohen: Don't stress Pat.

[00:52:39] Pat Penny: It's not me.

[00:52:39] Jason Cohen: I'm just so trolling.

Why don't you answer that, Pat? You didn't answer the last question, so why don't you answer that?

[00:52:46] Pat Penny: I did answer the last question. It was, it was the Liu Bao, but yeah, this, this is hard. So I think for me, I approach it first as like just reference flavors and just reference to products in general. I think tea is like a, a category down or a bucket down.

So first it's kind of like, how do I, across all taste and all products, how do I just think about flavor and products? I think that that's what I reference more than I reference any singular tea. Unless I'm getting very specific about categories. But yeah, reference teas or references for quality tea, I don't, I don't feel like, well one, I don't remember every single tea I've ever drank. And you don't need to either.

I think what I really remember is what are some of the attributes of tea categories that I find to be really pleasant and I've been told by authorities that indicate high quality, whether it's for a certain area or a certain production style. And then, I think about how I've experienced those in different teas, whether that was actually a really good tea or really bad tea. How did that quality show up? And over time I think I learned to flesh out how that quality appears and how it feels to me and how I experience it. And then that's how I then approach teas across the board.

There are some rare instances where there's like a very specific reference tea, right? So Jason and I brought up that Yibang danzhu that we experienced this year. Year to year there might be a handful of teas, like probably under 10 that I remember and go on to remember because of how they might have recalibrated my scale. Thinking back to when I started drinking tea, there's a very few handful of experiences I probably still remember to this day that really still inform my references.

But I bet you if I revisited them, there'd be things that I feel differently about now. Right. So it's, it's not, I think, really about remembering everything you've ever drank. It's about I think building up the skills to, to then know what is important. Go ahead, Jason.

[00:54:42] Jason Cohen: But you're a better taster now than you were then.

And

[00:54:46] Pat Penny: Yeah.

[00:54:47] Jason Cohen: You've developed better sensory memory. 'Cause I, 'cause I actually take totally the opposite track of you. My, my answer is unfortunately yes, you should be striving to remember. Look, if something is bad and you spit it and you don't like it, right, like fine. It's not the most important thing to dwell on, but for anything that you believe is good, you, you should be building up a sensory memory and a catalog. Particularly if you want to do blind tastings, right? There's two schools in tasting and there's the ability to describe what you're tasting with a large vocabulary and all that. And there's ability to do blind identification and for various reasons, a lot of people believe that the true test of skill is blind identification. So sometimes people show up with a cake of something or a tea or something to like a talk taste triage event and say, identify this, right? And that is really a catalog search.

[00:55:36] Pat Penny: Identify this, you fraud.

[00:55:37] Jason Cohen: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:55:38] Pat Penny: That's how they say it to you, right?

[00:55:39] Jason Cohen: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's pretty antagonistic. And sometimes they believe they know what it is, and sometimes, they really don't know what it is. But, but in either case, it would be very, it'd be very troubling to get it wrong. And so, you have to go through all of the, the things that you've tasted and cross reference this.

And this is something that, that they train like in wine school, right? The, the ideas, blind identification is the proof that you are a Court of Master sommelier or Master of Wine. Is it identical in tea? Well, it's much harder in tea because of processing variations and agricultural variations and batch to batch and brewing parameters and all that.

But I take a bit of a different tracking. One, I do take very extensive notes and everything that we're tasting, and I transcribe those notes and I try to work it into a system. But beyond that, even without the notes, the sensory memory is there. You should be able to sip something blind. And recall, this is similar to these things for these reasons, which indicates this aspects. Like, is this the most important skill in your journey of tea? It depends what you want to focus on. But it is something that, that a lot of the most experienced practitioners and teachers can do.

[00:56:53] Pat Penny: And confirm the massive amount of notes you take on every single tea you think possibly could reference or inform you in any way, shape or form. Jason annoyingly takes out his notebook basically all the time.

[00:57:08] Max Falkowitz: I think it's really about finding a process that works for you because mine is, is kind of the exact opposite. It's really based on intuition. Part of the work is developing your palette and learning how to recognize dimensions that can point you towards reference teas.

But I also always wanna ask like, reference to whom and a reference of what. It's very tempting to think of this as, as a fixed canon that can be, that can be replicated to different people's mental mappings of something. One, the taste of things changes over time. Scotch used to be aged in cherry barrels and now it's aged in bourbon barrels. And also depending on who your sources are, their references and their cultural context is going to inform what they view as a reference tea.

So, for me, I look at it two ways. There's, there's top down canon and bottom up canon. And when I was a, a baby food writer who was covering barbecue, the barbecue boom in New York City, like 12 years ago, my, my boss, Ed Levine asked me, well, what's your reference for brisket? And I didn't have an answer to him and I was very embarrassed.

[00:58:19] Pat Penny: I mean, you are Jewish, so there, there's a reference, right?

[00:58:22] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. But the reference is like bad deckle, bad flat, that is cooked in too much Lipton onion gravy. But the brisket that I was writing about that angered my boss so much, I do consider one of the reference briskets. And it was from like a guy from, like a hipster from Brooklyn who just started doing brisket for himself and I have tasted a lot of brisket since, both in New York and not, not in Texas though, so don't at me. And I still feel like that brisket I had was a reference brisket. And yeah, sure, if I tasted again now, I'd probably have different perspectives on it.

But part of the skills, like you, you kind of know when something like clicks and you can either get that by really trusting someone who is trustworthy in the way that, that they think about something matches to what you're thinking about. Or it's, it's from like developing the intuition to recognize like, oh, like this is really special in some way. Does that favor teas that have some particularly memorable part, even if that also includes flaws? Probably. And that is a problem in a lot of different fields of food and drink that people have to reckon with. But that's all the more reason that I wonder, reference to whom and reference about what?

[00:59:44] Pat Penny: Yeah. I love the temporal aspect that you're bringing up there. 'Cause I definitely think there's recency bias, like in my references, right? Everything I remember from this past year being amazing has kind of reset the scale and it's reset it because it's the most recent, but in some cases I believe it's because it was better as well. But if I were to try, 7638 shou puer from 1976 again, how would I feel about it? It's one of the early reference teas I think for Jason and I, one of definitely the scale and defining teas of what shou puer could be. Jason, go ahead on what you were gonna say.

[01:00:12] Jason Cohen: Well, just, just, I don't disagree with anything that you said, Max, but it's interesting, right? 'Cause because I was talking about these two branches of knowledge, the, the ability to, to taste and understand and intuit what you're tasting, on the other side, this blind identification. And it sounds like from your description that you've decided to focus on one of those aspects above, above another. I don't know if you would agree with that.

[01:00:35] Max Falkowitz: I try to pay attention to both. And I think blind identification is important for all of the reasons that you say. And there's a reason it is the standard for wine schools, for cheese monger competitions. I, I just think personally I would probably be pretty bad at it and have accepted that as kind of a limitation for me. But also part of what I try to do as a writer is be like professionally dumb so that I can learn from people who are smarter than me and know more than me.

So, like part of it is that's kind of like my shtick, but it's also like that has been the way that has been useful for me to pursue and obtain knowledge. And that might not be the same for, for other people. I think you have kind of have to find your own path through what that means. But yeah, I, I, I do think it's, it's important to, to, to follow both of those pursuits and the way, Jason, that you were talking about, breaking things down into what can be proven factually versus what is opinion versus what is cultural context. I think it's a really useful framework for thinking about all of these things.

[01:01:43] Pat Penny: Okay. I love it. I think we'll, we'll jump into another question that we got from the audience. And I think this is maybe coming off of your guys' conversation previously. So, is Wuyi yancha even worth drinking at this point? Your trip report made it sound pretty grim. Should those of us in the West just accept that we'll never get real yancha and focus our energy and money elsewhere? 'Cause I've spent a lot of money on Yancha. So I don't know, Jason, if you wanna take it first since it's based on your trip report, but I think you guys talked a little about this in your conversation.

[01:02:12] Jason Cohen: I'm just gonna say he did not, whoever asked the question, I don't know how much you spent, but you did not spend a lot of money on yancha. I'm sorry, there. If we have to talk about the cost, you didn't spend enough.

[01:02:24] Pat Penny: Jason added another member to the Jason Cohen Hate Club.

[01:02:27] Jason Cohen: Yeah. The unfortunate thing is, is that it's basically true. I'm not saying you should never drink any yancha. I'm not even saying that Yancha from outside the Zheng Yan or the Ecological Protection Area is bad. It's not my, my, my goal or my point. If things taste good to you and you're tasting it against other things and you have multiple references and you like it, by all means continue to like it.

Just don't take it to be the target and don't take it to be the, the be all, end all. I mean, every single time I go back to, to Wuyi now, far beyond other places that we go, my scale gets reset on basically every cultivar in every region in every style of processing. And part of it is that the, the access isn't there. What people are willing to share with you depends on how often you, you, you show up, and you have to be able to prove that you could taste the differences.

So I'm not saying don't buy what's available to you or what's affordable to you in Yancha, but I am certainly saying don't, don't over index in this specific tea. My advice in every other class of tea is go out and spend as much as you can from a trusted source and try something that's great and don't, don't buy a ton of it. Buy enough that you can do a couple of sessions over the course of tasting with other things and with other people and see if you can come to the realization of why it's great. My advice in yancha is do not do that. Because you are not gonna get what you want to get.

[01:04:08] Pat Penny: Max, do you have a take on this?

[01:04:11] Max Falkowitz: Yeah, I'm a lot less teleological in how I approach learning about these teas and, and that's a kind of woo woo cop out. But I guess my first question to you've spent a lot on yancha is, how, how was it as a tea experience for you? How did it compare to other teas, both in that price range and, and not? Did you enjoy it? Did you feel good drinking it?

I used to write about restaurants a lot, so I'll put this in the context of restaurants. There's a lot of restaurants that are canonical in New York City that I have not been to despite, at various points having a, a budget from a, a company to, to do so. They're either too exclusive or they're just too full of models, and it's kind of annoying and triggering to be there, or just whatever, like you, there's a million restaurants in New York and a lot of them are so stuffed with reservation scalpers that like, you just can't get in. And so even though I live in the same city as, as these restaurants, the food that they serve is essentially academic to me. I, I will never taste it and thus it kind of doesn't really matter to my experience. And if, if I were being asked to rank, what are the best restaurants in New York? That would be a problem.

But if I were approaching this with the goal of I want to eat well and I want to not get ripped off, and I, I want to, to eat from people who have a, a creative vision. You can do that at a lot of different restaurants that don't have to be from that, that vaulted list. And I think what Jason is saying is absolutely true. You don't want to overindex on what your experiences are versus the apex of something.

But I think that's kind of true for, for everything. And ultimately, I don't know, tea is made to be consumed and enjoyed or at least hopeful, okay. Most tea is made to just be sold. But if you're presumably buying, spending enough on yancha that you feel like you're spending enough on yancha, you are buying tea from someone that is making it so that you can enjoy it. And if you enjoy it and you have a good experience with it. Like, mission accomplished. That's, that's the purpose of the transaction.

[01:06:06] Jason Cohen: Your answer is so much nicer than mine. That's why you have a much larger readership.

[01:06:12] Pat Penny: I, I think my, my take on this is just maybe a little bit more in line with Max's in that, whatever you were comfortable spending and whatever you got, if you enjoyed it, that's great. I don't, like, don't hyper fixate on what is real yancha. I would just, like whatever opinions you've formed from what you had and what you enjoyed, just be ready to hold them loosely.

And I think kind of similar to what you said as well, Max, just being open right to learning, you know what? Whatever you've consumed and whatever you got, whatever information your vendor gave you, know that that might be true for them and for what they said.

But how true that is, if you were to take that context and actually go to Wuyi and then experience something similar you might find contradicting points of view. So just hold those opinions loosely. And I think you can enjoy whatever amount of money you spent on your yancha and just keep enjoying it. Yeah, don't, don't focus.

I mean, I, Jason and I, the first time we went to Wuyi, I think we had a very suboptimal experience. I, I certainly think before that we had had yanchas from Taiwan. We had yancha from Western vendors, sourced through people in Taiwan, sourced through Western vendors that were better than a lot of what we had when we were in Wuyi.

So, always be open to learning and, and don't be too dogmatic on what you hear or learn about the products that you've bought. That's my hot take.

All right, I think we maybe have time for one or two more. And for those who have joined us online as well, feel free to, if you have your own questions that weren't submitted before, feel free to drop them in the chat and you'll, you'll be shortlisted. You'll go right up first.

[01:07:45] Jason Cohen: We'll always prioritize the live question.

[01:07:46] Max Falkowitz: I just wanna shout out to great aunt Jackie. This mug still has tea in it after an hour and a half, and that's the power of the giant fucking mug.

[01:07:55] Pat Penny: Hell yeah. See, I'm, I'm sitting here empty. I mean, you can see it's just the dregs now, there's no liquid in here. I'm getting thirsty.

[01:08:03] Jason Cohen: Okay. I just wanna say that this is great.

[01:08:07] Pat Penny: Jason's like I just wanna say, this bottle that none of you can find or afford is awesome.

[01:08:13] Jason Cohen: Yeah. Carl Cardenal Mendoza's, this is not

[01:08:16] Pat Penny: Accessible. Relatable. All right.

[01:08:20] Jason Cohen: It's the most accessible thing I've drank on this podcast.

[01:08:23] Pat Penny: That is true.

So, we were talking a little bit about vendors. So I think this is a fitting question. Should vendors explicitly say things like this tea is for drinking young, or this tea is for drinking aged or is that claim inherently speculative marketing? What do you guys think about that? Vendors making specific claims around how you should consume the product.

[01:08:41] Max Falkowitz: Hmm.

I, I think it depends on the vendor, and it depends on your, your vibe about them. There are some people that I would trust to say, hold off on this for a bit, but I am skeptical of someone who is selling tea that is not ready to be drunk at the point of sale. Why are you not? Yes, it's expensive to keep aging that tea, but why are you selling it before it's ready? Like in, in, in, in cheese, like affinage is a very important part of the process. And like, why would you sell a wheel of Brie before it's fully mature or before it's at a enough of a ripeness that it will keep maturing in someone's fridge without going bad. So I don't know. And I, I, I think it's a useful heuristic if you're saying like, okay, I want some tea that I know will still like, be good in 10 years or something. But I think that, that really has to be a choice that you make with your gut.

[01:09:43] Jason Cohen: I, I like that answer. I actually took this question almost the opposite way. I'd be totally fine with someone saying like, don't age this. Drink this now, drink this fresh, do not age this. Don't let this sit. But I, I totally agree with you, Max. Yeah. I don't know if I would trust the, the idea of someone saying buy this, it's not good right now. Give it, give it five years.

[01:10:03] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. I, I, I I like what you're saying too, Jason and I, I think it is very compelling when a puer focused seller says, drink this right now, that does typically get my attention and say, oh, like they, they probably, because of all of the speculative value that comes from saying it's ageable, to hear them say, drink this now feels very telling.

[01:10:23] Pat Penny: Yeah. I, I don't know that I have anything to add on that. I do feel like in any other product category, if someone says, consume now you, you consume now you don't think about it. Very few things I think are like puer, where we've placed such a, a value on what it might become or what it could become with no real evidence of how it's actually going to become, particularly in your storage environment.

So, if someone were to say, yeah, don't drink this for 10 years, you know that, that's a great business model for them. They could go ahead, sell a ton of it and become untraceable. Just, drop their business, never, never find a way to contact them. And then in 10 years, the tea's horrible. And you've got no one to complain about it to except yourself. So yeah, I think I'm totally in line with what you guys were saying.

[01:11:07] Max Falkowitz: There's a brilliant racket about this in the bonsai world where you sell juniper cutting that you've taken off a branch and put in some soggy soil. And juniper trees take three or four weeks to announce to you that they're dead, which is just long enough for the purchaser to think that the destined to die juniper's death is their fault. And then they go out and buy another tree, and then that one dies. And it's a great business model if you wanna sell snake oil. And I don't know if there's a similarly self-destructing analog for tea, but now I want to see if there is one.

[01:11:43] Pat Penny: Maybe 'cause I think often, people will not let their teas get through storage shock. They might have had a sample. They get a, a tea shipped to them. They take it, they taste it the first time and they go, this isn't really what I remember drinking. And it's not so much that they go out and buy another one then and there, but they probably do go and buy more tea 'cause they're not liking what they're drinking.

[01:12:03] Jason Cohen: Storage, storage shock is real. Even humidity shocks are real. I mean, my storage is pretty well regulated humidity, but even I just the other day and put my nose in one of the, the tea containers and, and smelled a little damp, a little off a little Hong Kong. And so I said, looked at my RH meters, a little high. It was closer to 80 versus the, which is not really all that high compared Taiwan, Hong Kong storage, but certainly had a little bit of that aroma. Aired it, came back, gave it a sniff the next day, fine. Exactly the, the smell that I, that I expected. But the interesting thing, right, if I had tasted it that day, if I had pulled a tea and tasted that day, particularly if I didn't rinse, brewed heavy, I would've thought, oh, my, oh, my tea is bad, right? It was, it was fine. Took a day, needed Rh regulate. But, but those types of things are real.

[01:13:00] Pat Penny: Okay. I've got one more. And then Jason, if there's anything that you wanna touch upon at the end, you can go ahead and do that. This one I think is a little bit more to you, Jason, but the Tea Technique change logs show a burst of writing following the research trips. What workflow do you follow to convert field notes or primary sources into books or posts? And actually, this might be a good opportunity to apologize for delays in content publishing. Go, go for it.

[01:13:23] Jason Cohen: Yeah. The amount of work that goes into writing Tea Technique is a little, a little unreal. I've said this before on the podcast, I, I have to do my writing first thing in the morning, or it's very difficult to do any writing that day. And, Pat was mentioning the amount of notes that I take. I usually fill a notebook on every trip and sometimes every area in a trip.

And those notes get transcribed. They're not just notes in a notebook. They then get cross reference with the other editors on the trip's notes. And then those notes get then turned into expanded notes or ideas that are gonna be written about in the book, and then they get cross-referenced with tasting notes, which are taken separately from information notes. And then they get cross-references with past things. So this builds, the 30, 40 pages of notes can turn into a hundred pages of draft material, which is all then going to be re-edited, written into the book, and then re-copy checked and re-edited. And so that happens before you can even get to the point of writing a chapter and having the editorial team review it and fact check it, copy edit it, and, and all of that. So it is, I mean, these books, we didn't think of this at the time, but these books have turned into a three to five year projects.

[01:14:46] Pat Penny: And any apologies you wanna add to the readership for recent delays or anything.

[01:14:51] Jason Cohen: Well, the recent chapters have been like 25 plus pages each, so that's a little bit of a longer publication schedule than our standard 10 to 15 page chapter.

[01:15:03] Pat Penny: Okay. So I know we're at like five thirty. First Max, anything you wanted to kinda add on to like field notes and, and the like, and then after that, Jason, I'll have you do closing words.

[01:15:13] Jason Cohen: Yeah.

[01:15:14] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. I'll say it's really helpful to have deadlines from people who are paying you in order to, to get your shit together. But the, the post trip digestion of what you've accumulated is for me, a crucial part of the process. Everything is so new and fresh when you're experiencing it, and then you kind of need to think about it. And as you're doing bits of research, different aspects of the trip come into focus and you realize, oh, this is a part of the story that that I need to report on more. So the digestion winds up shaping the post visit reporting about something. But yeah, without a regular deadline, either for myself on Leaf Hopper or with editors, it would be a much more difficult process for me. So I, I don't envy you guys. And, and, and the tasks that you've set for yourselves.

[01:16:04] Pat Penny: I think we're only like, just figuring out how to do like good field copy and good field, I'm gonna say quote unquote, reporting, but note, note taking. It was only this past year that Jason and I started using, like recording on our phones to take notes. Prior to that it was like everything we're in, we're in a tea field on a mountain hiking and have our notebooks out taking notes. And then somehow that has to be legible enough that like when we transcribe it, we actually get the information right. I think this year finally we were like let's just say some of this into a phone. Like, that's gotta be easier.

[01:16:37] Jason Cohen: And that, that works pretty well. The other one that we were really bad at sometimes is knowing where we took a photo. Like we took this photo. We know what it is, looking at it, but we don't know exactly where it is. Or we don't know.

[01:16:50] Pat Penny: Is this Mansa or Gedeng? Where were we?

[01:16:52] Jason Cohen: Yeah. Like why did we take these two ones side by side? There's something different about these two trees. Now what we do is we take the photo, we actually just type out what the photo is on a copy of the photo on the phone.

[01:17:06] Max Falkowitz: Yeah. So much of my reporting is taking photos of things that will never be part of an article that are just like, this is easier to record in a picture that will unlock a semantic memory for me later.

[01:17:20] Jason Cohen: Yeah.

[01:17:21] Pat Penny: I think this is where we have a, a lot of learning. So Max, we'll take, we'll take all the hints and tips and tricks because we're still, as I said, we just, we just started recording on our phones last year, so I think there's a, a few tricks for us coming, coming up.

[01:17:34] Max Falkowitz: I loved the, the, the recent trip reports. They, they feel informed and human. Like they're, they're like critics notebooks would be like the newspaper sort of version for them. And, and I, I, whatever you guys are doing, it's working.

[01:17:47] Pat Penny: Thank you. Thank you. All right, Jason, pass it your way.

[01:17:51] Jason Cohen: Yeah, I don't know. Is there, is there any questions that you had, Max, anything that you wanted to ask?

[01:17:55] Max Falkowitz: Oh, geez. I, I, I've just been preparing for another round of hot takes that you're gonna throw on me last minute. So,

[01:18:00] Pat Penny: And with that, let's take out our hot takes. Hot takes.

[01:18:06] Jason Cohen: I actually don't really have any hot takes for, for this one. We usually do around of hot takes right at the end, but I don't know. I think, I think, I think we mostly covered it.

[01:18:18] Pat Penny: Yeah, for anyone whose questions we missed, sorry, but I mean, feel free to resubmit at any time. Even if, even if we don't have an AMA, you can actually just send us questions, we will answer them. Depending on the length of your question, it might take longer to answer. We did actually have one that I'll throw in here at the end.

Jason, we did get a question on Instagram. What, what does it take to join a Tea Technique research trip?

[01:18:42] Jason Cohen: Hmm. Luck, skill.

[01:18:44] Pat Penny: So you're not, you're not sending out an open invite?

[01:18:46] Jason Cohen: No, there's not an open invite. I mean, there's places where it'd be easy to meet with us. If you, if you want to hang out in Taipei while we're in Taipei. If you wanna hang out in, even in, in somewhere like Kunming, Shanghai, Guangzhou these are areas where there are tea houses, where we have good contacts where we can easily go out for, for, for tea and have a nice time together.

Going on these actual research trips, one of the reasons that people meet with us that are, that are willing to say what they're willing to say is, and, and, and give us this information and share these references. One, because they know that we're not selling anything except, you know, our, our work is fully knowledge, very academic.

But the other thing is they know that if they don't want it on the record, the, the information won't be attributed. We don't say names. We don't say, X person said this and Y person said this, and we agree with X and Y is wrong because we, that's, that's, that's not our game. We, we learn from many different people. We try to, to synthesize the knowledge in a way that it can be presented publicly, right, where it's, it's verifiable. You could look at the way that we went about proving it, but it's not, we, these people said these things and, and so that's one of the reasons that, that people are willing to meet with us.

So it's not so easy to say like, oh, can I come on a, on a, on a trip, right? We've built up this trust over more than a decade now of this type of progressive work. And, and there it's not, it's not people, even visitors who go to buy tea have a very different experience than, than, than what we are getting when we sit down with, with the notebooks and say, we are planning to write a book about this topic, right?

Let's start from the start, from the beginning.

[01:20:31] Pat Penny: So I think in summary, we'd love to meet with you, just like, not like in Yiwu Village. It'd be more like, let's, let's meet somewhere we can go to some tea houses together.

[01:20:41] Jason Cohen: Yeah, which will still make great contacts. We love our tea houses.

[01:20:45] Pat Penny: And we love our readership, so thank you for sending in the question.

[01:20:49] Jason Cohen: Yes. Yeah, we do want to meet you. Just, just not in Niulan Keng.

[01:20:55] Pat Penny: Yeah. I'll tell you, there's a lot less cool places for us to drink beer and have shao kao in all these areas than there is in the cities. So let's go to the city, have some tea, eat some good food. It'll be a better experience.

[01:21:07] Jason Cohen: Yeah.

[01:21:09] Pat Penny: Okay. Jason, pass it to you.

[01:21:11] Jason Cohen: Oh, that's amazing. Thank you everyone for joining us in this edition of Tea Technique Editorial Conversations. Particularly thank you to everyone who submitted questions, everyone who joined us for the live event. This will be posted on YouTube and all of our channels and on podcast and particularly thank you, Max, for joining us. You've now done two of these live sessions where we put you in the hot seat and it's been, it's been amazing.

[01:21:39] Max Falkowitz: It's been really great to be here. It's great interacting with your flavor of nerdom and to be a sick little freaky tea pervert with you all. So I'm grateful to be here and these are fun. We should do more of these in the future.

[01:21:54] Pat Penny: The only way to describe it, durian flavor of tea nerdom, that's us.

[01:21:59] Jason Cohen: And that I'm gonna lead us out.