Palate, Commerce, Tradition: The Variables Behind Every Product

[TheOudDood]

Something I've learned over about 15 years in tea, incense, agarwood and kyara, and internal arts, that people may not realize:

In niches like these, a lot of the time you're really paying for a person: their palate, their skill, their perception and their preferences. Depending on your own experience level and background, that person's palate may or may not line up with yours. That's where some of the subjectivity people talk about genuinely comes in.

But a person's palate isn't the only variable. A few others sit on a sliding scale, and together they have a huge impact on what you end up buying:

• Skill and depth of perception. How well can this person actually perceive what they're selling or recommending?
• Commerce. How much does making money drive their sourcing and filtering decisions?
• Tradition. How much real grounding do they have in the traditional standards and structures that came before them?
• Language. How much of the pitch is flowery word salad compared to actual substance?

Some people are low on tradition and real perception, and high on commerce and exciting language. That combination is everywhere.

In my own businesses I stick to the traditions and hold myself to their standards, the accountable metrics and classical criteria everything was originally based on. That means I sell far fewer products and keep a much smaller catalog, and I don't sell anything that doesn't fully meet my criteria.

Plenty of vendors are much more flexible. The downside is that you can't trust their palate or their catalog as much, because their standards are all over the place and so is how well they stick to them, depending on what sells, what story they can tell, or what they think will make money.

Some examples:

• Aged puer. People explore a huge range of aromas and flavors, and most of them don't match the classical parameters of what good tea actually was. Harsh notes, weird fermentation, funk, dirt and odd flavors get bragged about as if they're good, when traditionally they're the opposite.
• Incense. Same thing. Synthetics, harsh chemicals, fillers, weird formulas.
• Internal arts. Most of what's called tai chi and qigong doesn't relate to what the words mean, or to the specific processes and mechanics those arts actually involve.
• Chinese herbs. People get caught up in sales stories, fantasy and wishful thinking, and lose track of what the herb even is or should be.

In all of these, people go with whatever they think or feel is good, or with whatever's commercially pushed, or they simply haven't been exposed to the real classical levels of quality the whole thing was built on. The less people understand and hold themselves to classical standards, the more everything degrades.

That's the cosmic joke for me. Almost everything I've sold and almost all the content I've made over the last 20 years boils down to one thing: this is what it is.

I'm sharing this as both a consumer and a passionate connoisseur of all of these, and as someone who has worked from the inside on the business side for 20 years. Keep these variables in mind the next time you're deciding whose palate to trust.

 

[roflwaffle]

The less people understand and hold themselves to classical standards, the more everything degrades.

I agree that the vendors tastes matter, particularly how they align with your tastes, but how do you reconcile with the phenomenon of changing tastes and advancements in quality?

Examples:
* Bret in wine used to be celebrated, now considered a defect. Similarly, old world vs new world styles. For a long time old world was the benchmark, but since the.. 1970s new world has shown it can meet and exceed old world terroir
* Oud oils, traditional heavy ferment, traditional manually stoked distillations vs the more modern light/no fermentations. To diminish clean light fermentations as "not holding to classical standards" feels like folly
* Similarly, traditional patchouli, steel barrel, now indonesia sees the iron as contamination. Personally, I fall where both has their place, but many, including their own industry now considers the classical standard as inferior.
* Even codistillations of different oud regions would not have been historically viable, a distiller in thailand wouldn't have had any trading access to get meroke wood for instance, but now, such things are common enough to codistill. Global trade enabled huge opportunity.

The world changes, and it's not always for the worse. One should be aware of the past, but strictly considering old=good, new=bad is super limiting imo. Our understanding of the world is constantly evolving, learn from the past, as well as current advancements and tastes

 

[Shiningrobes]

It’s nice to know a bit more about that specific Chinese tradition. It’s fascinating for me as someone who had a good amount of training in general Asian and specifically Buddhist, Indian and Japanese art history. Most of my understanding of traditional Chinese culture is framed through the backwards lens of Japan and the forward lens of India. You can’t talk about a lot of Japanese culture without understanding how much of it came from China. Especially when what eventually became the Japanese empire was taking shape and burgeoning regional lords feeling insecure about their status adopted the Chinese writing system. Which meant they had to import Chinese scribes who brought along a lot of the mandarin scholarly culture with them. Tea, incense, painting, calligraphy, kodo. Buddhism in general and then once more a few centuries later with chan/zen. The almost maniacal mandarin tendency for taxonomy; classification and hierarchy. And then to understand how incense traditions in both China and Japan are dependent on the import of agarwood and Buddhism from India via the Himalayas. Everybody added their own cultural touch. And then the outflow of tea itself from China into India, Korea, Japan etc.

I’d love to hear a deep dive on the Islamic tradition of oud and Agarwood.

 

[Mr.P]

Something I've learned over about 15 years in tea, incense, agarwood and kyara, and internal arts, that people may not realize:

In niches like these, a lot of the time you're really paying for a person: their palate, their skill, their perception and their preferences. Depending on your own experience level and background, that person's palate may or may not line up with yours. That's where some of the subjectivity people talk about genuinely comes in.

But a person's palate isn't the only variable. A few others sit on a sliding scale, and together they have a huge impact on what you end up buying:

• Skill and depth of perception. How well can this person actually perceive what they're selling or recommending?
• Commerce. How much does making money drive their sourcing and filtering decisions?
• Tradition. How much real grounding do they have in the traditional standards and structures that came before them?
• Language. How much of the pitch is flowery word salad compared to actual substance?

Some people are low on tradition and real perception, and high on commerce and exciting language. That combination is everywhere.

In my own businesses I stick to the traditions and hold myself to their standards, the accountable metrics and classical criteria everything was originally based on. That means I sell far fewer products and keep a much smaller catalog, and I don't sell anything that doesn't fully meet my criteria.

Plenty of vendors are much more flexible. The downside is that you can't trust their palate or their catalog as much, because their standards are all over the place and so is how well they stick to them, depending on what sells, what story they can tell, or what they think will make money.

Some examples:

• Aged puer. People explore a huge range of aromas and flavors, and most of them don't match the classical parameters of what good tea actually was. Harsh notes, weird fermentation, funk, dirt and odd flavors get bragged about as if they're good, when traditionally they're the opposite.
• Incense. Same thing. Synthetics, harsh chemicals, fillers, weird formulas.
• Internal arts. Most of what's called tai chi and qigong doesn't relate to what the words mean, or to the specific processes and mechanics those arts actually involve.
• Chinese herbs. People get caught up in sales stories, fantasy and wishful thinking, and lose track of what the herb even is or should be.

In all of these, people go with whatever they think or feel is good, or with whatever's commercially pushed, or they simply haven't been exposed to the real classical levels of quality the whole thing was built on. The less people understand and hold themselves to classical standards, the more everything degrades.

That's the cosmic joke for me. Almost everything I've sold and almost all the content I've made over the last 20 years boils down to one thing: this is what it is.

I'm sharing this as both a consumer and a passionate connoisseur of all of these, and as someone who has worked from the inside on the business side for 20 years. Keep these variables in mind the next time you're deciding whose palate to trust.

Are you a vendor of tea or something like that? I realize I don't know much about your background or where you're coming from etc. and you mention sales, etc..

in any case the only thing that I find interesting in all of this other than the aromas themselves is accurate information about the materials. From whatever tradition.

I wish things were different but over the years I've come to accept that along with the baby comes some bathwater from time to time

 

[TheOudDood]

I agree that the vendors tastes matter, particularly how they align with your tastes, but how do you reconcile with the phenomenon of changing tastes and advancements in quality?

Examples:
* Bret in wine used to be celebrated, now considered a defect. Similarly, old world vs new world styles. For a long time old world was the benchmark, but since the.. 1970s new world has shown it can meet and exceed old world terroir
* Oud oils, traditional heavy ferment, traditional manually stoked distillations vs the more modern light/no fermentations. To diminish clean light fermentations as "not holding to classical standards" feels like folly
* Similarly, traditional patchouli, steel barrel, now indonesia sees the iron as contamination. Personally, I fall where both has their place, but many, including their own industry now considers the classical standard as inferior.
* Even codistillations of different oud regions would not have been historically viable, a distiller in thailand wouldn't have had any trading access to get meroke wood for instance, but now, such things are common enough to codistill. Global trade enabled huge opportunity.

The world changes, and it's not always for the worse. One should be aware of the past, but strictly considering old=good, new=bad is super limiting imo. Our understanding of the world is constantly evolving, learn from the past, as well as current advancements and tastes

Fair question, and I agree standards evolve. But look at how they evolved in every example you gave.

Brett became a defect because people who knew the standard identified it as spoilage. Iron in patchouli became contamination because it was recognized as an impurity. New world wine earned respect by beating old world wine in blind tastings judged on classical criteria. That's the whole story of the 1976 Judgment of Paris.

It came from people holding themselves to a standard, testing against it, and refining it. That's my entire point. Standards evolve through the discipline, not by abandoning it.

What can't change is what a thing is. Clean modern distillation can improve oil. It can't make cultivated wood into wild kyara.

Heating kyara on a variable temp electric heater is a lot more efficient than charcoal. Heating water for tea in a kettle is more efficient than charcoal.

Learn the past and use the advancements, agreed. You just need the standard to tell which changes are advancements.

Take aged puerh as an example. The quality markers are codified, not vibes. The top aromas are camphor, jujube, medicinal, aged wood, agarwood, sandalwood, honey, lotus, orchid and longan, with ginseng ranked highest. Good taste is sweet, mellow, thick and smooth, with returning sweetness (回甘), mouthwatering (生津), a lasting throat sensation (喉韵) and real body feel (茶气). The liquor should be red, rich, bright and clear. The faults are just as defined: mold, storage taint, sourness, staleness, smoke or char, mixed off-notes, and bitterness that never turns sweet. Aroma is even scored on type, strength, purity and persistence. So when people brag about funk, dirt and sour fermented notes in aged puer, they're praising exactly what the standard marks down as faults.

 

[TheOudDood]

Are you a vendor of tea or something like that? I realize I don't know much about your background or where you're coming from etc. and you mention sales, etc..

in any case the only thing that I find interesting in all of this other than the aromas themselves is accurate information about the materials. From whatever tradition.

I wish things were different but over the years I've come to accept that along with the baby comes some bathwater from time to time

Fair question. Yes. I've run a Chinese tonic herb company for 16+ years, and [I also source/sell tea and incense / I source kyara and incense for my own collection, not for sale]. That's the business side I was referring to.

I'm not posting to sell anything here. I mention it because being on the sourcing side for that long is how I learned how much commerce shapes what ends up in front of buyers, and why I hold my own catalog to the standard instead of the market.

Agreed on accurate information from whatever tradition. That's all I'm after too.