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The last article I wrote for this site (though publication schedules won’t necessarily reflect it) was a profile of Thomas Twining, the man responsible for creating the company that became Twinings of London. It’s company that’s survived and thrived for more than three hundred years now, a considerable feat given the whopping number of businesses that have failed over the course of those same centuries.
Jump to the present day and examine the case of one Steven Smith, a tea merchant who has been behind not one and no, not two, but a total of three successful tea companies, at least for now. At the Web site for his current venture, Steven Smith Teamaker, Smith claims that his mother referred to him as “a born teamaker” and it could well be that Mrs. Smith was on to something.
Smith’s tea making and tea selling activities got underway in 1972, when he was the manager of a natural foods store in Portland, Oregon and he and two partners founded a company known as Stash Tea. The company thrived (and still does to this day) but in 1993 it was acquired by a Japanese tea company and Smith moved on to his next tea venture.
That was Tazo Tea, a brand which got underway in the kitchen of Smith’s home and grew to the point where, in 1999, it was acquired by another company based in the Pacific Northwest, a little coffee chain known as Starbucks. Smith hung around for a while after the acquisition to run the show at Tazo, finally leaving the company in 2006 and spending a couple years in France.
When the many charms of Europe began to pale Smith moved back to his old stomping grounds in Portland and started his third and current tea company. Steven Smith Teamaker is something of a departure from his previous ventures, which, though they started out in a modest way, eventually grew to become fairly sizable players in the mass merchandising of tea. As noted in a press release announcing the creation of the company, in 2009, “Steven Smith Teamaker is a family-owned business focused on producing small batch, whole leaf tea crafted at the hands (literally) of passionate tea pioneer Steve Smith.”
For more on Smith, take a look at this recent profile in the Wall Street Journal.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Times have been kind of tough lately for high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), a substance which has been coming under fire over the course of the past few years. The popular and rather ubiquitous sweetener has been disparaged in certain quarters of late, with some blaming it for contributing to an increase in obesity, among other things. Depending on who you ask the jury seems to still be out on this matter and while this is hardly the place to hash things out, it’s interesting to note that high fructose diets play a role in a recently released research study involving tea.
The study found that drinking tea may help offset some of the ill effects of high fructose diets and may also assist with weight loss and reducing the risk of metabolic syndrome. Results of the study were published in late 2011, in the journal Food and Function.
While it’s already known that green tea extracts may suppress hyperlipidemia, or the abnormally elevated levels of any or all lipids in the blood, researchers Hsiu-Chen Huang and Jen-Kun Lin took a look at how tea extracts affected fatty acid synthase expression in rats fed on a diet high in fructose. To do so they prepared extracts from four types of tea – green, oolong, black and pu-erh.
The high-fructose was diet fed to rats during the twelve weeks that the study was being carried out. It tended to increase serum triacylglycerols, cholesterol, insulin, and leptin concentrations. But, as the researchers noted, “rats fed with fructose/green tea and fructose/pu-erh tea showed the greatest reduction in serum TG, cholesterol, insulin and leptin levels.” In contrast, Huang and Lin noted, “serum cholesterol and insulin concentrations of the fructose/oolong tea-fed rats did not normalize.”
Pearl River Green Tea
Of course, when it comes to HFCS or any other type sweetener, moderation is probably the best preventive medicine of all, not that I would ever discourage someone from drinking tea, whatever the reason might be.
For more information on the study, including a free copy of the full results (registration required), look here.
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Republic of Tea Black Teas
Do you need a gimmick to stand out in the great wide world of tea selling? There are many successful merchants whose continued existence disproves that notion. But a great gimmick probably doesn’t hurt, especially if it’s combined with a good product.
Take the case of the Republic of Tea, for instance. While they offer plenty of great tea, their gimmick has been to structure themselves as an actual republic of tea (well, sort of) in which the employees serve as ministers, sales representatives are ambassadors, customers are citizens and retailers who sell their tea are known as embassies.
Things got underway for Republic of Tea on May 1, 1992, in Novato, California, where the company still makes its headquarters and where they concocted their first tea, Ginger Peach Black. Among the company’s co-founders were Mel and Patricia Ziegler, who were previously co-founders of the popular clothing company, Banana Republic. Though they later sold their interest in the company they recounted their story in a 1994 book called The Republic of Tea: The Story of the Creation of a Business, as Told Through the Personal Letters of Its Founders.
As they note in their charter, which was adopted in 1994, one of the company’s purposes “is to enrich people’s lives through the experience of fine tea and the Sip by Sip rather than Gulp by Gulp lifestyle” and “to become the leading purveyor of full-leaf teas and herbs in the world.” Whether or not the company has achieved those goals is anybody’s guess, but as they mark their 20th anniversary in the tea business the company claims that their products are now available in more than “20,000 gourmet retailers and restaurants throughout the United States.”
Over the course of their two decades in business, Republic of Tea also claims to have come up with a number of tea-related firsts, including the first line of unsweetened bottle iced teas, the first tea inspired by the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia, and many more. See a selection of these at the company’s Product Launch Timeline page.
Most recent among the company’s many offerings, two teas specifically put together to commemorate their 20th anniversary. They are a 20th Anniversary Celebration Tea, “a delicious blend of premium high-grown, Ceylon black tea leaves from the Tommagong Estate in Sri Lanka, full tea blossoms lending a light herbal note, sweet white wine grapes from the Orange River Vineyard in South Africa, and infused with the essence of champagne,” and Twenty Herbs, a tisane which blends — you guessed it — twenty herbs and spices.
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Once upon a time, you could safely say that the art of tea and the Chinese art of tea were the same thing, given that the Chinese are credited with being the first people to drink our beloved beverage. But even though tea drinking eventually spread to other countries it’s worth noting that the Chinese culture of tea drinking is still a strong one. There’s also the fact that the Chinese are the world’s top producers of the stuff, including a number of varieties that are considered by many to be among the best available.
The Chinese Art of Tea
Over the course of the last decade or so the Western world has seen a considerable rise in interest in tea and tea culture, be it Chinese or otherwise. But this was not the case in 1985, when lackluster tea bags still ruled the roost in many parts of the West and the notion of drinking tea that was actually recognizably Chinese would have been considered very exotic.
It was in this landscape that John Blofeld published his pioneering book, The Chinese Art of Tea. A scholar who lived in and traveled extensively throughout Asia, Blofeld published a number of books on Buddhism, Taoism and other aspects of Asian religion and culture, with this particular volume the last of his works to be published in his lifetime.
It’s a work that would have been considered impressive even today, when tea scholarship is arguably a more common thing, but in Blofeld’s day it was quite a striking accomplishment. He starts off with a chapter on Tea in History and Legend and then explores such classic works as The Emperor Hui Tsung’s Treatise on Tea and A Ming Dynasty Tea Manual. There are chapters devoted to tea gardens and teahouses and also the relationship between tea and ceramics.
On the more spiritual side of things are chapters devoted to Poems and Songs of Tea, A Manual for Practising the Artless Art, and Tea and the Tao. Blofeld winds up things with a chapter devoted to tea’s potential health benefits, a chapter that predates much of the flood of interest in tea and health that we’ve been deluged with over the last decade or so.
Blofeld’s book was an important pioneering work on tea and tea culture in China, but it’s interesting to note that it was hardly the last such work. In 1990, authors Kit Chow and Ione Kramer released the appropriately titled All the Tea in China. More recently, in 2011, Daniel Reid, another noted scholar of all things Asian, released a volume titled The Art and Alchemy of Chinese Tea. For more on that work, look here.
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Typhoo tea
If you head out to the Internet looking for tea books from yesteryear, you’ll find enough to keep you occupied for a very long time. I’ve written about quite a few such works in these very pages, but to the best of my recall I can’t think of one that was written by an author who later went on to found a well-known tea company.
Until I recently ran across a book called A Popular Treatise on Tea: Its Qualities and Effects, that is. This particular tome first saw the light of day in 1863 and its author was John Sumner. Along with his father William, Sumner later founded a grocery business that went on to become Typhoo Tea, though it was apparently John Sumner, Jr., who took the firm into the territory of tea selling. Trivia fans, take note: the name Typhoo is apparently derived from a Chinese word for doctor.
Sumner opens the book with the bold statement that “the great Anglo-Saxon race are essentially a tea-drinking people.” Which is a matter that could probably be disputed, given that Europeans had only been drinking tea for about two centuries. But there’s no disputing his further assertion that among said people tea was now considered “one of the necessaries of life.”
From there the book is broken down into a structure that’s fairly typical for these kinds of works, starting with a chapter on the history of tea and moving on to one that looks at various botanical aspects of the plant. From there it’s a chapter on the assorted and sundry varieties of black and green tea that were popular at the time, many of which (Twankay, Hyson Skin, Imperial) will be unfamiliar to tea drinkers nowadays.
Chapter four tackles an unusual topic, looking at various tea substitutes used in other parts of the world. Among them are coffee; Paraguay Tea, or what we know today as yerba mate, and enough other items to fill a large chart. Other chapters look at the chemistry of tea, in which Sumner remarks on the beneficial compound theine, or what we know today as theanine.
Sumner also looks at the medicinal properties of tea and summarizes the various pros and cons regarding its consumption. He winds things up with a chapter on the social influence of tea, where he quotes an earlier writer who goes so far as to make the grand statement “tea and the discontinuance of barbarism are connected in the way of cause and effect.”
Here, here.
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Thomas Twining
The British were not the first people to drink tea and they were not even the first Europeans to do so. They have never grown tea on their own soil, except in very modest amounts at one or two plantations, nor do they drink the most tea on a per capita basis. And yet when we think of great tea-drinking nations Great Britain is probably one of the first ones that will spring to mind. It would be beyond the scope of an article like this one to list all of the great British tea pioneers responsible for this state of affairs, but here are a few noteworthy ones.
Catherine of Braganza
It’s not completely certain when tea first appeared in England. It may have been a decade or more before the marriage of Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza to Englishman Charles II, in 1662, but it’s Catherine who’s typically credited with popularizing the drink among English royalty and upper classes.
Charles Bruce/Robert Bruce/Robert Fortune
While the British could supply their need for tea by dealing with the Chinese as time passed it became more and more to their advantage not to do so. In the early nineteenth century, the British decided to grow their own supplies in India and it was largely thanks to the efforts of Fortune and Scottish brothers Robert and Charles Bruce that it all came to pass. Read more about Fortune’s exploits in China, here.
Anna Maria Russell, Duchess of Bedford
It may be one of the many myths and legends of tea or it might just be true, but it’s the Duchess of Bedford who’s credited with coming up with the distinctively British custom known as afternoon tea.
Thomas Twining
While there were undoubtedly British tea merchants doing business before Thomas Twining started a tea shop in 1706, it’s probably a good bet that none of the companies they started have survived and thrived to this day, as is the case with Twinings of London. (See products.)
Thomas Lipton
Arguably one of the most recognizable names in the tea business, the man who lent his name to Lipton tea was a relative latecomer to tea selling. Read a brief overview of his exploits here and get more on the whole thrilling saga in his most recent biography, A Full Cup: Sir Thomas Lipton’s Extraordinary Life and His Quest for the America’s Cup.
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Honeybush
There’s no such thing as red tea, at least not in the strictest sense of the word. But there are some beverages that have come to be referred to as “red tea” over the years and will probably continue to be referred to as such by anyone but the most exacting sticklers for accuracy. Take China, for instance, where the tea most of us refer to as black is often called red tea, a name most likely refers to the reddish color of the finished product.
But some of the most popular red teas are not tea at all, at least not in the sense that they are derived from Camellia sinensis, the tea plant. The most popular of these “teas” is rooibos, a distinctive herbal beverage that only produced in a certain region of South Africa. Rooibos, also known as redbush, is known for the red color of its processed leaves and also for the deep red color of the steeped liquid, but it’s actually not the only red “tea” that hails from South Africa.
The distinction of being South Africa’s second most popular red tea goes to a product known as honeybush (Cyclopia spp.), which is also known as heuningbos, in the local Afrikaans language. The name of this beverage is said by some to be derived from its taste and by others due to the fact that its flowers smell something like honey, so take your pick as far as that is concerned. Honeybush is typically not as “red” as its South African cousin, whether in the form of processed leaf or finished product and it tends to have a more delicate taste than rooibos, which can be an acquired taste for some (as the editor of this blog will certainly attest).
While there are nearly two dozen types of honeybush plant there are really only two at the most that are used as an herbal beverage. Honeybush has seen something of an upswing in popularity over the course of the last decade or so, with about a tenfold increase in production from the years 1997 to 2004 and will undoubtedly continue to do so.
For more in-depth information on honeybush, look here and here. Here’s a honeybush review I wrote at my own site a few years back.
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Golden Heaven Yunnan China Black Tea
As much as I like a great cup of Chinese or Japanese green tea, I have to say that, for me, there’s nothing quite like black tea. I’ve said it many times before and I’m sure I’ll say it many more – for me Assam is the be all and end all when it comes to black tea, though it’s important to note that not all Assam is created equal and much of it is actually quite mediocre, at best. But I digress.
After Assam, it would be tough to pick my next favorite but if pressed I’d probably have to go with Yunnan tea. This is a term that covers a great deal of territory, so it’s probably a good idea to narrow things down a bit. Yunnan is a province in southern China that’s well known for its output of a variety of teas. Yunnan may be best known for its production of Pu’er, a type of tea so tied to this region that the city of Simao, in the heart of the Pu’er growing region, recently changed its name to Pu’er City.
Puerh can be an acquired taste for some (present company included). For my money the Yunnan tea most worthy of sitting up and taking notice of is a black tea that’s often just referred to as Yunnan and more specifically as Dian Hong, or sometimes Dien Hung. The ancient Chinese term for Yunnan, Dien Hung roughly translates to Yunnan Red. Red tea in China is what those of us in most of the rest of the world typically refer to as black tea.
Dian Hong is typically harvested from older bushes and tends to be characterized by a relatively high concentration of golden tips. This quality is recognized in such names as Yunnan Gold, Yunnan Pure Gold, Golden Tip, or Golden Buds, among others. It’s a relative newcomer to the pantheon of Chinese teas, having only begun production in the last century or so.
Dian Hong typically has a rather robust, even malty flavor with faint notes of spice or perhaps a hint of pepper, though this may vary considerably depending on the grade. Most varieties that I’ve had the pleasure to try are almost completely free of the bitterness or astringency that makes any tea-drinking experience less than satisfying. Looking back over the Dian Hong varieties that I’ve reviewed over the years at my own site I see that I have yet to run across a dud and one of my favorite everyday teas, one that’s almost always in my cupboard, is a Dian Hong.
For a recent review of English Tea Store’s Golden Heaven Yunnan, look here.
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As I’ve noted before, on more than a few occasions, the Internet and the trend toward digitizing old books has opened a whole new world of access to tea books from days gone by. But to be perfectly honest, with their somewhat dry style and specialized subject matter many of these books have languished in obscurity for a reason. While they’re a treasure trove for amateur tea historians like yours truly they’re hardly likely to burn up the bestseller charts anytime soon.
The Book of Tea
Among the relatively rare exceptions to this unofficial rule regarding dusty old tea books is a work that first appeared in 1906 and which has remained in print, apparently with no break, for more than a century since. While it’s available in a variety of free electronic editions these days, it’s a mark of its continued popularity that you can still find The Book of Tea, by Kakuzo Okakura, in a number of old-fashioned print editions as well.
A slim volume that’s not much longer than a very long article, The Book of Tea might as well have been called The Book of Japanese Tea, as it’s primarily focused on this aspect of tea and culture. In his introductory chapter Okakura briefly sketches the early evolution of tea from medicine to beverage to poetry and then, in the hands of the Japanese, remarks that it was elevated “into a religion of aestheticism—Teaism.” This, the author describes as “a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence.”
Several of the seven chapters that make up this brief work go beyond tea as merely a beverage and explore its connections to other areas of art and culture. In Chapter Three, for instance, the author looks at the links between tea and Asian schools of thought such as Taoism and Zen, while the following chapter explores the aesthetics of the sparse Asian-styled tearoom. Later on, Okakura devotes a chapter to flowers and flower arranging. He winds up with a chapter on Tea-Masters, in which he underscores their importance by stating, “great as has been the influence of the tea-masters in the field of art, it is as nothing compared to that which they have exerted on the conduct of life.”
The Book of Tea at Project Gutenberg
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String and tag style tea bag
If we go by the most commonly accepted version for the origin of the tea bag, this handy little gizmo has been with us for a little more than a century. If you have any doubt that it’s still going strong consider the relatively recent innovations in tea bag design, such as pyramid tea bags and other so-called gourmet bags that allow for brewing of better quality tea.
Over the years a number of inventors have turned their hand to designing what they felt were improvements in tea bags, as well as devices used to make them and assorted other items. We took a look at a number of these in a recent article, but there are so many more patents in the patent office files that it’s time for another look.
Here’s a tea bag that was patented in 1934 by an enterprising inventor who took the notion of “tea” quite literally and came up with one that that was actually T-shaped. If that wasn’t enough the cardboard tag attached to the string is T-shaped as well. Speaking of tea bag strings it was around the same time that inventor Walter Ingram turned his attentions to creating a nontangling tea bag that would resolve the pesky problems of tea bag strings…tangling when more than one bag is placed in a container. If you didn’t know that was even a problem, join the club.
Of course, when drinking tea made from a tea bag one of the age-old problems is what to do with the clammy bag after the tea has steeped. Here’s a patent from the early Fifties that strives to tackle this problem with a gizmo that hangs on the edge of the tea cup and has room for the used bag. About a year later another inventor received a patent for a device along similar lines. Which is nothing compared to Shin-Shuoh Lin’s Rube Goldberg-ish device that was patented just last year. It appears to resolve the used tea bag dilemma with a crankable cup lid that lifts the bag out of the water after it’s been used. Now that’s progress.
From the just plain silly category, there’s the Teabag with Teapot Shape and (a rather timely one, given that the holidays have just passed) a Teabag with Christmas Tree Shape, both from the same inventor. Last, but certainly not least, a pair of tea bag cufflinks that presumably cannot be used to actually prepare tea.
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