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  <title><![CDATA[Clay Crest Zone]]></title>
  <link>https://claycrestzone.com/</link>
  <description><![CDATA[Clay Crest Zone is a Kyoto juice bar that tracks every ingredient from farm to glass. Cold press, shrub sodas, and daily tasting flights on Fuyacho Street.]]></description>
  <language>en</language>
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    <title><![CDATA[The yuzu-peach ratio study: how we landed on 60/40]]></title>
    <link>https://claycrestzone.com/</link>
    <description><![CDATA[We ran 22 test batches over three weeks in June and early July before settling on the current ratio. The losing ratios are documented. Here is what we learned about why 50/50 does not work.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-07-14</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[Farm visit report: Tanaka Farm, Fushimi, June 2026]]></title>
    <link>https://claycrestzone.com/</link>
    <description><![CDATA[We visited Tanaka Farm on June 24 for the start of the Momotaro tomato season. The Brix readings this year are running about 0.4 points lower than 2025. Here is what that means for the juice.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-06-28</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[We published recipe #47: the Uji matcha-apple blend we could not fix]]></title>
    <link>https://claycrestzone.com/</link>
    <description><![CDATA[After eight months of testing, we retired the matcha-apple blend without ever putting it on the menu. Recipe #47 is now on the Stories page with all 31 test batch notes. Here is the honest version of why it failed.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-05-19</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[Why the Brix number on your juice bottle actually matters]]></title>
    <link>https://claycrestzone.com/notes/brix-reading-juice-bottle-explained.html</link>
    <guid>https://claycrestzone.com/notes/brix-reading-juice-bottle-explained.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[Every bottle of juice that leaves Clay Crest Zone has a Brix number printed on the label, tucked beneath the ingredient list where most people never look. It sits there like a footnote from a science textbook, and for years customers who noticed it at all mostly asked whether higher meant better. The honest answer is: it depends, and the longer version of that answer turns out to be genuinely interesting. Over 14 weeks of cold-press production runs this past harvest season, the team logged Brix readings at intake, post-press, and post-filtration for every single batch. What the data showed surprised even the people doing the pressing. This piece is an attempt to decode one small number that carries a surprising amount of information about where your fruit has been before it becomes a drink.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-07-12</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[34 percent: the fruit waste figure that started this bar]]></title>
    <link>https://claycrestzone.com/notes/fruit-waste-produce-logistics-kyoto.html</link>
    <guid>https://claycrestzone.com/notes/fruit-waste-produce-logistics-kyoto.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[Somewhere in the back of Haruki Nishimoto's kitchen there is a graph-paper notebook, water-stained on the cover, that contains four years of produce waste tallies from a mid-sized Osaka distribution hub. The number that fills the most space in that notebook is 34 percent. Not an estimate, not an industry average pulled from a trade association PDF — a figure Haruki calculated himself, route by route, week by week, during his time moving fruit and vegetables from the Osaka Central Wholesale Market out to restaurants and hotel kitchens across the Kansai region. This article is about where that number came from, what it actually measures, and why it is the honest founding document of Clay Crest Zone. The methodology matters here, because "food waste" is a phrase that gets used loosely, and Haruki's 34 percent means something specific — specific enough to be argued with, which is part of the point.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2026-02-11</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[How we tested 22 ratios to find the right yuzu-peach blend]]></title>
    <link>https://claycrestzone.com/notes/yuzu-peach-ratio-testing-method.html</link>
    <guid>https://claycrestzone.com/notes/yuzu-peach-ratio-testing-method.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[Most juice blends at most bars are built on instinct. Someone in a kitchen decides that equal parts sounds fair, and equal parts is what ends up in the bottle. We wanted to do this differently with our Kii Yuzu and White Peach blend, so we ran a structured tasting study across three weeks, logged every ratio, and treated the whole thing like a small sensory science experiment. The results surprised us, specifically how badly a 50/50 split performed, and how narrow the window of genuinely good ratios actually is. This article is a full account of the methodology, the measurements, and the failures, because we think the process is as interesting as the product.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-02-21</pubDate>
  </item>
  <item>
    <title><![CDATA[What happens to the pulp: a week in the Clay Crest Zone waste log]]></title>
    <link>https://claycrestzone.com/notes/juice-pulp-waste-log-composting.html</link>
    <guid>https://claycrestzone.com/notes/juice-pulp-waste-log-composting.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[Every cold-press juicer produces two things: the juice that fills the cup, and the solid fibrous mass that gets pushed out the back of the machine. At most juice bars, the second thing ends up in a bin. We wanted to know exactly what happens to ours — not in a vague "we compost responsibly" way, but in a day-by-day, kilogram-by-kilogram way. So for the week of Monday 9 September through Sunday 15 September, one of our staff members weighed every batch of pulp before it left the press room, logged the crop source and moisture level by feel, and recorded where it went. What followed surprised us in a few places and confirmed a few hunches in others. This is that log, more or less unedited.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-01-02</pubDate>
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    <title><![CDATA[Cold press versus centrifugal: the three-week test we ran in 2022]]></title>
    <link>https://claycrestzone.com/notes/cold-press-vs-centrifugal-juice-test.html</link>
    <guid>https://claycrestzone.com/notes/cold-press-vs-centrifugal-juice-test.html</guid>
    <description><![CDATA[Every juice bar worth its ginger shot has an opinion on cold press versus centrifugal. Most of those opinions come from marketing copy, not measurements. In spring 2022, the team at Clay Crest Zone decided to stop guessing and start timing. Over twenty-one consecutive production days, we ran parallel batches through a Norwalk hydraulic press and a high-speed centrifugal machine, tracking the same variables across both, on the same produce from the same supplier delivery. The goal was not to declare a winner in the style of a gear review — it was to find out exactly where and how the two methods diverge, and whether those differences are large enough to matter to someone who drinks juice for reasons beyond aesthetics. What followed surprised us in a few specific ways we did not anticipate going in.]]></description>
    <pubDate>2025-11-12</pubDate>
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