So... What would YOU call it?

Just following on from my previous post about Australian green tea, and whether it should be called sencha or not - Jackie, for example, seems to feel NOT - but what more exciting name than just 'Australian green tea' could be used instead?

For example: Oolong tea grown in New Zealand is called Zealong... Apparently the tea is very good but I am afraid the name doesn't really work for me; it just sounds kind of silly.

Moreover, what if there were more than one kind of tea being produced? For example, green tea grown in Australia but processed as for longjing, chun mee, bi luo chun? Clearly just calling the whole lot 'Australian green tea' wouldn't cut it - you would need to differentiate somehow. Would 'Australian XYZ-style tea' be adequate? I am a bit less sure now than I was when I wrote the previous post.

What do you think?

A couple of things

I've had a couple of interesting comments posted lately and I wanted to respond to them where more people may see the reply.

Alex commented on my post about What's a letter worth? :

The few times I've tasted tea from the same harvest and garden of different grades, I have not always preferred the "better" grades. Sometimes, higher grades taste more delicate, and I may want a more robust tea.
...
Also, you can't generalize about the price of grades. I've picked up some FTGFOP1 Darjeeling First Flush when it was a bit late and out of season, and yet still fresh and outstanding quality, for a lower price than a lot of "lower" grades.

Re: the first point he makes: I agree, I often prefer the more robust-flavoured teas myself (although I do enjoy a first flush Darjeeling). Sometimes I feel a bit bad about this: does it mean I am actually not as sophisticated a tea drinker as I like to imagine myself? But, really, does that matter? I like what I like... and there it is. Of course it's also good to try different things, of course and to be open to putting aside my preconceptions about tea (like with puerh for example, but more on that in another post) because I might be pleasantly surprised.


In relation to Alex's second point, I also agree - I have also picked up high grade teas for a bargain price, for example when they are from the previous season and the new crop is coming in and commanding the higher prices. In my experience though, this is something that is most likely to happen with online and, in particular, specialist tea vendors such as Thunderbolt Tea in Darjeeling. It seems to me that the average Australian consumer walking into a bricks and mortar store would be unlikely to be confronted with information about the latest, freshest teas and given an opportunity to purchase previous crops for a cheaper price regardless of grade... if that makes sense. Even in a store with a broad range of quality teas you would have to know what you were looking for, and be prepared to ask the staff about it if you wanted something so specific. Does anyone else have an opinion about this, from an Australian perspective or from elsewhere?

In response to my post on Sustainable, organic and fair trade tea, Jenny asked

How about you? Do you go for organic tea(products)?

In general, I would have to say: No, not specifically. I do my best to purchase as much as I can from companies who produce high quality goods - tea, food and so on - and this sometimes means that the products are organic (e.g. at the farmers' market) and sometimes that the company has a strong social ethic (e.g. Thunderbolt Tea). I like to purchase close to the source, hopefully ensuring that more of the money goes directly to the people involved - again buying tea from Thunderbolt Tea is a good way to do this and Obubu Tea in Japan is also excellent (and all of their teas are delicious as well).

It is important to me that the products I consume are as ethical as possible - but as the interview I linked to in the previous post indicates, ethical  production and consumption are not as simple and clear-cut as one might think!

Sustainable, organic, fair trade tea

I am quite the groupie of Nigel Melican of Teacraft Ltd - his knowledge and experience in the industry is vast and I am always interested in what he has to say. So, you can imagine how rapt I was to discover that Cinnabar of Gongfu Girl had interviewed Nigel at last year's World Tea Expo and shared the interview on Cha Dao.

If you care about issues of sustainability, organic farming and fair trade - in relation to tea in particular of course, but I think there is much in this interview that applies to agriculture and trade in general - then you should read this. The following excerpt is one I found particularly thought provoking:

NM: I'll give you an example of the dilemma that you might get into. I was working with a new tea grower in Hawaii -- not one of the small guys that we've seen at the Expo, but someone who wanted to do it on a hundred-acre scale, 200-acre scale. He wanted to be organic, said the production must be organic. He was a berry farmer on the mainland, and he always had an organic farm, and he wanted to have an organic tea farm. So we started off and sourced his tea and his raw materials from Africa and got it planted, and his soil was not acid enough, which is unusual for Hawaii, but this was an old sugar-cane plantation and they'd put down a lot of chalk, to benefit the sugar cane. This was 20 years ago, but it was still there. The normal way that you'd acidify soil for tea is to put sulfur on it. Sulfur is recognized by the organic people; they're happy with it. So he goes off to his supplier and when he sees the sulfur that he's offered, he says, "where does it come from?" and they say it's a by-product of the petrochemical industry, and he throws his hands up in horror! So we look and see what else we can get. It's possible to get sulfur which is rock sulfur, mined sulfur. The dilemma is, would you rape the countryside with big holes, ripping out rock sulfur, or would you use a by-product of the petrochemical industry that has to go somewhere, and is at least greening the petrochemical industry at least a little bit?

C: Why would the organic regulations say that you couldn't use petro-chemical by-products?

NM: the regulations don't say that you shouldn't, but they would prefer that you use the natural sulfur.

C: "Organic" meaning that you take it from the earth regardless of consequences? That makes no sense.

NM: No it doesn't make a lot of sense. That's why I say that sustainability and organic should be done with some degree of realism.

The interview is relatively lengthy, so it's been divided into three parts. Definitely worth every minute of your reading time and worth coming back to. Check it out here!

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Tea Stuff Round-Up: Mind-boggling Prices, Tourism and more!

Tea often seems to be touted as a (relatively) inexpensive luxury, particularly when you can infuse the same leaves multiple times. However, over the last few days my twitter stream has been boggling at recent news reporting that shows the commodity price of Da Hong Pao (Big Red Robe) has risen to $30,000 per kilogram. Yes... even if you could get say, 8 infusions from your teaspoon's worth of leaves... that's still damn expensive tea!

I have recently discovered the Travel and Tea blog - great photos of tea around the world, by the way - and was interested to read about tea tourism in India. I wouldn't mind staying at a tea plantation in Darjeeling... There are also apparently tea tours available for visitors to Taiwan. I'm far from being a seasoned traveller, and confess happily to being very much a homebody, but I would love to visit tea-producing areas and see how the process works. Too exciting!

A further post on the issue of tea being marketed as a medicine (and Unilever/Lipton getting smacked by the FDA, as I already mentioned here), this time from Cinnabar at Gongfu Girl. I particularly like this point that she makes:

...as tea drinkers we really do not want it to ever be sanctioned and regulated by the FDA as a medicine. This would have enormous and far-reaching impact on the tea industry which would severely damage it, because aroma, flavor, tradition, character, etc. have no bearing on the validity of a substance as medicine. Medicine just has to do what it is sold to do. 

When I was completing my naturopathic studies there was regular discussion of similar problems regarding the use of herbal medicines and the level of regulation which they attracted - trying to find the balance between safety and 'proven' efficacy - not simple (and of course herbal medicine is big business these days as well). The thing with herbs - and I'm including Camellia sinensis tea here as well - is that they are so much more than the sum of their parts, and when you put them into the complexity of the human body - no wonder it's hard to get a standard response. But should we want to? I think probably not.

And finally - have you ever wondered why the tea leaves sink to the bottom of your cup rather than sticking to the sides?

No, I haven't either. But now that I've seen this article explaining the science behind 'the tea leaf paradox', discovered by Einstein no less (thanks to this post by Tea Guy for the link) I realise that I probably should have! And I feel ever so much better informed. So should you.

Tea Stuff Roundup - Assam, & Mind Your Health Claims

I came across a link to this interesting article about the increase in the number of small farmers producing tea in Assam, India. The farmers grow the leaves and then sell them to larger companies to be turned into made tea. This can provide a significant and steady source of income for the farmers, which is great, although there may be some concerns about quality. However, since better leaf fetches higher prices at auction, i presume there's a strong incentive for the farmers to improve where they can.

Also spotted via Twitter, my main (only?) connection to the external world since I never pay any attention to current affairs, this article about Lipton in the US getting warned off by the FDA for making tea-related health claims. It is simultaneously funny and depressing to see companies claiming that their highly processed, sugar-filled, RTD teas are 'good for you' - come on, it's non-fizzy soft drink, people!

Plus it appears that the antioxidants in tea degrade over time, so fresh is going to be better than bottled - but we knew that anyway!

Finally, I boggled when I read this here:

Tea is generally considered to be safe, even in large amounts. However, two cases of hypokalemia (abnormally low serum potassium levels) in the elderly have been attributed to excessive consumption of black and oolong tea (3-14 liters/day).

To be honest, I think that anyone who was drinking that much (14 LITRES? How could you manage it?) of anything might end up just a little bit potassium deficient...

Tea Stuff Roundup - Tea Spaces, Tasting and Economics

I have just discovered the Bon Teavant blog and was so inspired by this post describing the creation of 'tea spaces' in Taiwan:

The "tea room" designs created by the students under the direction of Ms. Li are sometimes very contemporary and at the same time in rhythm with centuries of traditional tea cultures found in Asia. Ming Dynasty tea bowls sit on brightly colored modern textiles laid on the ground as a tea "tableau" rather than a traditional tea table. Dramatic overhead lighting is screened through trees brought in to throw shadows on the scene and highlight the drama of the tea ware.  Dancers spin through the empty space like human mobiles or constellations in a dark and open sky.

How awesome would that be... I would love to see something similar in Melbourne!

An interesting post from Alex Zorach about whether tasting tea affects your palate, and vice versa... and some more about tea-tasting on the Leafbox Tea forum. I've been thinking about this, as I've been re-reading some bits of The Harney and Sons Guide to Tea and trying to pay more attention to the flavours in my tea. Is it all too subjective though? What do you think?

And, on a more serious note, the ever-thought-provoking Corax from CHA DAO writes on the economics of tea: is tea an affordable luxury? Is the tea industry in danger? Should we develop our own 'tea stimulus packages' (I certainly do my best)? I don't understand a great deal about economics, but it seems to me that this might be another argument for purchasing tea as close to the source as possible, cutting out the middlemen and helping the manufacturers of high quality tea to make as much profit as possible from their extraordinary skills. What's your opinion?

Tea Stuff Roundup

I have read a few interesting tea blog articles over the last few days and thought some of them worth sharing.

This article 'Whose Tea Is That?' by Michael J Coffey of 'Tea Geek' has been getting quite a bit of kudos in my Twitter stream - deservedly so. Michael points out that most of the time we just don't know where our tea is coming from - and what's more, can you really say that one company's tea is better than another if they originally came from the same source? What is there to like about one, but not the other, in this case?

The issue is not just confined to single-origin unblended teas, either; in fact perhaps it's even more problematic in the case of flavoured teas. Take this quote from Charles Cain, who writes a fascinating blog about the process of opening a bricks and mortar tea store for a large US tea company, Adagio:

The supply chain for most teas sold in the US is ridiculously incestuous. Half of wholesalers buy from other wholesalers. It's not uncommon to find the same flavored tea, blended by the same large wholesaler, sold at dramatically different price points under the names of quite a few smaller wholesalers. Many independent retailers pride themselves on choosing only the finest teas for their collection. As proof of this, they buy from many different tea wholesalers. I've heard shop owners boast of having more than 30 tea vendors. The incredible irony is that I've also heard tea wholesalers boast of selling to the same shop owner under the name of a half dozen different companies. 

Read the rest of Charles' article here. Kind of depressing, isn't it. I suspect that things are not that different in Australia, although perhaps on a smaller scale; I know that in most retail tea shops I see a whole bunch of very similar blends, sometimes under slightly different names (think Monk Pear-type blends, French Earl Grey variants, Blue Mountain blends etc etc) that almost have to be imported from a bulk tea supplier somewhere in the world. They're just too similar to be individually made by each of the shops concerned. I'm not saying that these shops have NO originality because most of them probably do in some areas. I've just always found it a bit disappointing I suppose when I find that something I thought was unique actually isn't.

On the plus side it does mean you can shop around til you find the tea you like at the best price! Cloud, silver lining, etc.

Enough with the grumping, I didn't mean for this to be a depressing entry. Let's cheer ourselves up with a post from the awesome Stephane at Tea Masters (if you can't read the French, he does post a lot in English, and his photos are always worth a look). In this one he brews up a low-mountain oolong from Zu Shan and explains how important it is when starting out with tea to really get a feel for it. It can be so tempting to get a lot of small amounts of different teas and not really learn how all the variables (water, temperature, amount of leaf, even time of day) affect a single tea and your enjoyment of it. This is really sound advice and something I am going to pay more attention to.