You are currently browsing William I. Lengeman III’s articles.
The potential health benefits of green tea are hardly a well-kept secret these days. Sometimes it seems like you can barely turn around without running into another report breathlessly touting the merits of this fine beverage. Given this, it’s probably not surprising that some enterprising merchants have attempted to take the essence of what’s good (healthwise) about green tea and distill it into supplement form.
Gunpowder green tea – better than a supplement?
Which doesn’t sound like a particularly appealing notion to yours truly, quite frankly, but to each his/her own.
While I’d prefer to take my health benefits in liquid form from the highest quality green tea I can get my hands on, there’s obviously some logic to taking what’s good about green tea and turning it into a supplement. For those who are primarily concerned about the health benefits of tea, there’s obviously the question of what method of ingesting it provides the most benefit.
It’s a question that the USDA decided to tackle recently. Researchers with the agency’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) took a look at the difference between actual green tea leaves and matched them up against various commercially available brands of green tea supplements. The study group took a look at “extractions of 20 commercially available green tea dietary supplement products and eight dry green tea leaf samples” to try to determine which was the best. The study used a technique known as HPLC/MS, which allowed researchers to more accurately separate and measure various chemical components in the tea leaves and supplements.
Researchers stopped short of actually coming down on the side of tea leaves and they did point out that “there are fine green tea dietary supplement products.” However, they noted that the quality of these supplements tends to vary quite a bit, with no way for the average consumer to know what’s good and bad simply by consulting the packaging.
Results of the study were published in the Journal of AOAC International. For more on the study, as well as the methods used to conduct it, look here and here.
Disclaimer: This is not intended as medical advice. Please consult your physician for your particular needs.
© 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.
Twinings Earl Grey
It seems like a natural assumption that people who live in countries that grow a lot of tea drink more of it than those in other countries. But it’s not always true. The Chinese, who grow more tea than any other nation, are ranked 33rd on the list of tea consumption on a per capita basis. As for India, the world’s second largest tea growing country, they rank 53rd on the list, drinking an average of just over a pound of tea per person per year. For some perspective on the matter, consider that the world’s top tea drinkers, in the United Arab Emirates, average nearly fourteen pounds of tea a year.
Regardless of how much tea the average Indian drinks, there’s been something of a buzz in the press there recently about a proposal to make tea the country’s national drink. Government officials suggested as much in late April, though if such an initiative did actually come to pass it may not be put into place until next year.
Needless to say, those in India’s tea industry would benefit from such an initiative in a number of ways, but the news did stir up some controversy. This came from at least one business group, specifically the dairy industry, who felt that their milk should be given a fair shot at being India’s national drink.
A recent article from the BBC News may help go a long way toward explaining why India’s citizens are not among the world’s top tea drinkers. As the rather in-depth article notes, tea drinking was on the rise in the early part of the twentieth century before a backlash started, partly as a response to the British colonial “overlords” who made India a tea producer in the first place and who exported and consumed so much of it themselves. Among those who gave tea the thumbs down were Mahatma Gandhi, who declared that it was not well suited for human consumption.
Other tea-related news out of India saw a recent visit there by one Stephen H.B. Twining, a 10th-generation descendant of the tea merchant who kicked off the Twinings dynasty more than 300 years ago. As this article noted, Twinings was there in part to push his company’s tea bag products, which might be something of a tough sell in a country better known for brewing loose tea.
© 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.
According to one educated guess from a fairly reliable source there may be as many as almost two million new web addresses registered every year. While web sites come and web sites go, every now and then you run across a golden oldie that probably should have fallen by the wayside by now.
Take Tempest in a Teapot: Tea & Politics & Health, for instance. It’s the online version of “An Exhibit held at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland April 16, 2001 – October 30, 2001,” one that’s obviously still available for anyone who missed the event some eleven years ago or who would like to revisit it.
The online version of the exhibit is divided into six sections. The first of these looks at the Board of Tea Experts, an actual governmental body that was created in 1897 to set and enforce standards for tea. The group last almost a century until it was phased out during the Clinton administration, in 1995. From there it’s on to America’s Tea Craze, a section that puts to rest the fairly common notion that Americans gave up tea drinking after the Boston Tea Party. As the site notes, “Tea imports [into the U.S.] grew exponentially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
From here, there’s a section on Tea Regulation, in which it’s further described how tea was regulated to make sure it was acceptable. Next, a section on Tea Types, which is a very brief (and not totally comprehensive) section that’s essentially another version of Tea 101. The title of Green Tea’s Medical Resurgence pretty much sums up what this section is about, with a sketch of how tea and especially the green type has come to be so much in the news in recent years, thanks to its alleged health benefits. Last up, a very brief and mostly pictorial segment about Green Tea’s Cultural Resurgence.
While some of these sections are rather informative, perhaps the most interesting part of this online “exhibit” is the wealth of packaging and advertising materials that accompany the text. And though the design of the site is quite dated, it’s worth a look nonetheless. Check it out here.
© 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.
It seems like only yesterday that we last ventured into the great wide world of tea gadgets. But of course the good people who bring us these fine gadgets have not been twiddling their thumbs in the meantime. It would seem that they’ve been working overtime, turning out what appears to be an ever increasing number of said gadgets. So let’s get right to it.
No gadget report would be complete without at least one wacky, zany novelty tea infuser and this time around we’re happy to present yet another one. Here’s a clever model, which lends a whole new meaning to the term “tea leaves.”
The centennial observance of the wreck of the Titanic has come and gone but not without at least one tea gadget maker paying their own form of tribute. It’s a ship-shaped tea bag holder that allows the user to press the extra liquid out of the bag before removing the bag from cup. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about a tea cup that recently sold for $75,000 at a Japanese auction for charity, except for the fact that it was used once and only once by a certain pop megastar known as Lady Gaga.
You can never have too many teapots, or so the saying goes. Okay, maybe there’s no such saying but, if there were, this would be the appropriate mutant freak piece of teaware to illustrate it. It’s a truly offbeat gimmick by designer Pepe Heykoop that manages to somehow merge two teapots into one. Also from the offbeat teapot front, this scary looking model that features a very convincing pistol-shaped handle.
It seems that some clever person is always finding a new way to utilize tea in one way or another to make art and we close this roundup of tea gadgets with just such a project. It’s a piece called Tea Sunburst that utilizes 3,000 colored tea bags hung on strings to make an offbeat curtain of sorts.
Don’t miss Bill’s other articles on this blog about offbeat tea gadgets:
Offbeat Tea News and Gadget Redux
Gadgets & Offbeat Tea News Revisited
Offbeat News & Gadgets
Tea Gadgets & Offbeat Tea News
Tea Gadgets of Yesteryear
More Tea Gadgets
Gadgets, Gadgets and More Tea Gadgets
Tea Gadgets & Novelties
And some of those gadgets rated:
Tea Gadgets Rated — Round 1
Tea Gadget Ratings — Round 2
Tea Gadget Ratings — Round 3
© 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.
David Lee Hoffman
Most people who know the name David Lee Hoffman probably know that he was the subject of a documentary film called All in This Tea. The movie premiered in 2007, and I caught up with it a few years later, when I reviewed it here at The English Tea Store Blog.
Based solely on his appearance in that film, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine that Hoffman is perhaps slightly eccentric and maybe even a bit obsessive about tea, a beverage he’s been involved with one way or another for about forty years. Obsessive and eccentric enough to build a cave to house his collection of rare varieties of puerh tea, although there are probably many connoisseurs of fine wines and other luxuries of life who wouldn’t find this all that unusual.
Like Robert Fortune, a tea pioneer of yesteryear, Hoffman has occasionally been saddled with the moniker, “the Indiana Jones of tea.” Which makes for a so-so sound bite, but in reality the comparison with Fortune, a Westerner who traveled extensively in Asia, is not so far off the mark. As he notes at his web site, Hoffman has been traveling “the remote backcounty of Asia for more than forty years seeking out the world’s finest rare, organic, and wild pure leaf teas.” He sells some of these at his site and not surprisingly the product list is heavily weighted in favor of rare varieties of puerh tea.
Though it has little to do with his tea life, it’s probably worth mentioning a tiff between Hoffman and officials in his home base of Marin County, California, a spat that spawned a recent article in the New York Times. To summarize briefly, the trouble arose over Hoffman’s offbeat compound, with its tea cave and much more. He calls it “a model environment that incorporated sustainable methods” though for the Times reporter it was more like, “part Himalayan kingdom, part Dogpatch rife with construction debris.” Details at Hoffman’s site and the New York Times article for those who are interested.
Which is obviously a fairly minor chapter in the life of someone who’s been an important figure in the world of tea for four decades. Perhaps the best introduction to Hoffman, the tea pioneer, is the film All in This Tea. For even more of his thoughts on tea, try this archived (PDF) copy of a Fresh Cup magazine interview from a while back.
© 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.
Like this:
Nowadays India takes a back seat in tea production to the nation where the whole tea thing got its start – China. But India can take solace in knowing that the Assam region, in the northeast area of the country, is the single largest growing region in the whole world.
Tea: A Text Book Of Tea Planting And Manufacture
The British started growing tea in Assam as a reaction to China’s near total domination of the tea trade in days of yore. Tea production began getting underway in Assam in the 1830s and grew quite rapidly over the next half century or so. By the time David Crole wrote his Tea: a Text Book of Tea Planting and Manufacture, in 1897, tea production there was quite well established. Read the free online edition of the book here.
There’s not much info available on Crole nowadays, apart from his book. Early on, he notes that his expertise in the tea trade came from his work in Assam. He also mentions an affiliation with the Jokai Tea Company, which doesn’t appear to have survived to this day. Before leaving Assam to move back to England Crole also spent time in other tea growing regions in India and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he added to his fund of tea knowledge.
As the title suggests, Crole’s book is a very practical one. He opens with a chapter that looks at the tea plant, which he refers to as “the great rival of alcohol.” Along with the nuts and bolts information in this chapter are some thoughts on how to properly prepare a cup of tea (fresh, cold water – only Indian or Ceylon tea, etc.).
From here it’s on to two chapters on the history of tea. Crole refers to these as the two most difficult chapters in the book to write, because it was so hard to arrive at “actual facts.” Crole claims that tea was originally from Assam and later imported into China. While he deals with the latter country, a good chunk of this chapter is devoted to tea history in India and Assam. Chapter three finds Crole tackling tea history in Ceylon and a few other miscellaneous tea growing nations.
From here on out it’s pretty much nuts and bolts stuff all the way, with various chapters devoted to different aspects of tea production and processing. One chapter that’s somewhat out of the ordinary for this type of historical text bears the not so terribly politically correct title The Coolie: His Ways and His Worth. It’s a not so enlightened look at labor practices of the day which might raise a few eyebrows with modern readers.
© 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.
Brandname teas
According to Inc. Magazine the five characteristics of a great company name are that it should “stick” with those who encounter it; should tend toward brevity; be functional; tell a story; and invent a new language. Whether or not some of the better known tea companies have names that meet those standards is a matter of opinion, but it’s interesting to look at the origins of some of those names nonetheless.
Probably the simplest and most common way to come up a name for a company is to name it after the person who founded it. There are a number of well-known tea companies who have taken this route. Among them, Lipton (Thomas Lipton); Twinings (Thomas Twining); Bigelow (Ruth Campbell Bigelow); Tetley (brothers, Joseph and Edward Tetley); Ireland’s Barry’s (James J. Barry); India’s Tata (Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata); and Brooke Bond (Arthur Brooke) that is now sold as PG Tips. A variation on this this theme is Sri Lanka’s Dilmah Tea, which took parts of the first names of its co-founders and combined them into a greater whole.
Another popular theme, especially with several British tea companies, are names that reflect a specific place. They include the Devonshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire brands. On the other side of the Atlantic the name Luzianne is not as clear-cut until you consider that it’s merely a twist on the company’s home state of Louisiana.
Some tea companies may not rely on their founders or home base for their name but it’s not a stretch to figure out how they got their name. Republic of Tea styles itself as an actual republic (well, sort of) with ministers (employees), citizens (customers), embassies (retail stores).
Then there’s health. Tea’s potential health benefits have been in the news in recent years, but that’s hardly a new thing. Tea companies have capitalized on this connection for more than a century. Among them, Typhoo Tea, which got underway in 1903 and which takes its name from the Chinese word for doctor. For PG Tips the name started as Pre-Gest-Tee, which suggested that tea might aid digestion. This was later shortened to PG due to rules prohibiting health claims for tea and Tips was eventually added as a reference to the best parts of the tea leaf being used for the product.
For some tea companies, the origins of their name are even less obvious. Celestial Seasonings took its name from a nickname given to one its founders. Stash Tea derives its name from the private stash of high-quality teas that the captain of a tea clipper would set aside for his own use. Of course, if a name with real world significance doesn’t immediately spring to mind that’s okay too. Consider the case of Tazo Tea, whose name was suggested by a designer simply because it sounded ancient and exotic.
See also:
PG Tips — “Perfectly Great” Tea!
The Story of Barry’s Tea
Over 200 (correction: 300!) Years of Twinings Tea
Typhoo Tea — The Doctor Is In
x
© 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.
Once upon a time the concept of overnight delivery to far-flung locations, rather than being a notion that most people take for granted, was something closer to a flight of fantasy like walking on the moon or sending vessels to other planets. In a time when most cargo being shipped long distances had to travel by ship such journeys were typically measured in weeks or months rather than days.
Which could be something of a problem when shipping perishable commodities, such as tea. This was especially problematic given that until about a century and a half ago all of the tea going to consumers in Europe and the Americas came from quite far away. Until the middle of the nineteenth China’s tea growers pretty much had a lock on the trade and obviously it was no small jaunt to ship a cargo of tea from there.
Which is where an innovation called the clipper ship became quite useful. While this is hardly the place for an in-depth history of clipper ships, suffice to say that it was during the middle part of the nineteenth century that they thrived and particularly the so-called tea clippers that were being built increasingly larger and faster so that they could bring back more tea more quickly from the East.
Cutty Sark in dock, Greenwich - January 2005
To say that these clipper ships are rare these days is to understate the matter considerably. In truth, there is only tea clipper left and that one narrowly escaped being wiped out by fire a few years back. That would be the Cutty Sark, which first took to the seas in 1869. The fact that the ship shares a name with a popular brand of whisky is no accident, since the founders of that whisky took its name from the ship, which was much in the news at the time (1923) as its days in active service were finally coming to an end.
Nowadays, the Cutty Sark is in the news for another reason. After it was nearly destroyed by fire in 2007, five years and about 50 million pounds were spent to bring it back to life. The giant ship, which could carry about 1.3 million pounds of tea (sufficient for a mere 200 million cups) was slated to go on display to the general public again on April 26, 2012, just a few days after I wrote this.
If you’d like to check out the restored Cutty Sark you’ll have to go to Greenwich, South London, where it currently makes its home. Find out more about the restoration in this article from the British press or at the Cutty Sark’s home page. For a good overview of clipper ships, look here. Also try The Clipper Ship Era, a 1910 book by Arthur Hamilton Clark.
© 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.
Flavonoids in tea and other foods may help with Parkinsons
Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder after Alzheimer’s disease. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the condition is “a chronic, progressive movement disorder that affects the lives of at least one half million patients across the United States.” The NIH also notes that “currently available pharmacological and surgical treatments provide relief from some motor symptoms, but do not halt the ultimate progression of the disease.”
But there’s some good news for tea drinkers (among others) who might be at risk for Parkinson’s disease. According to a recent study, the flavonoids in tea (as well as orange juice, apples, berries – such as strawberries and blueberries – and in red wine) can lower the risk of developing Parkinson’s by about 40 percent, with the benefits being significantly more pronounced for men than women.
Other good sources of flavonoids, aside from those five food types examined in the study, include most citrus fruits, onions, parsley and dark chocolate. In tea, flavonoid content tends to be much higher in the more lightly processed types such as green, white and yellow. For some useful background on the flavonoids and other assorted and sundry beneficial compounds in tea, start with this overview. For a more in-depth look at the antioxidant activities of flavonoids, refer to this article from the Linus Pauling Institute
Cadbury Bournville Bar - all rich dark chocolate - healthy never tasted so good!
The Parkinson’s study was conducted by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and results were recently published in in the journal Neurology. The researchers reviewed nutrition and health data from about 50,000 men from a project called the Health Professional Follow-Up Study and more than 80,000 women who took part in the Nurses’ Health Study.
Researchers said that flavonoids can help to guard cells from oxidative damage and also have anti-inflammatory effects, which may contribute to their effectiveness in guarding against Parkinson’s. Lead researcher, Dr. Xiang Gao, said it was not immediately clear why men should benefit so much more from flavonoid intake than women.
For an abstract of the study and access to the full results ($$), look here.
© 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.
Like this:
Tea Estates in Darjeeling
Darjeeling is a region in northern India that’s probably best known for the premium quality black tea it turns out. It’s beloved of tea connoisseurs, but oddly enough the total amount of Darjeeling tea sold in a given year is typically greater than the amount grown. Which sounds impossible at first until you realize that some less than scrupulous tea sellers will substitute a tea of lesser quality in order to turn a fast buck by passing it off as Darjeeling.
Which is a problem for tea drinkers and for Darjeeling’s tea producers as well. According to a recent article in the Indian press there are currently “87 estates producing about 8.8 million kilograms of tea” in the region. While this is a relatively modest amount compared to some tea regions, the old catchphrase about quality rather than quantity is applicable here. For more about the problem of fake Darjeeling tea try this article from a few years back.
According to the more recent article, Darjeeling’s tea industry has been contending with a somewhat similar issue over the years. In this case, it’s not the actual tea that’s at issue but rather the Darjeeling name, which a number of businesses and other entities have tried to hijack for their own purposes. Most recently the Tea Board there has been up in arms over a French lingerie company’s appropriation of the Darjeeling name for its products.
But this is not the first time the Darjeeling tea industry has had to deal with this sort of thing. According to one industry insider there have been nearly 30 such cases settled out of court, including an Italian maker of fragrances and other luxury goods, an Indian hotelier, and a French media concern. At odds here is Darjeeling’s “brand name,” which in reality is known as a geographical indication. Other such well known GIs, or “brands,” that are tied to a specific region are the French winemaking regions of Champagne and Bordeaux.
Interesting to note then, and probably not at all coincidentally, is the fact that Darjeeling is often referred to as the Champagne of tea.
See also:
Disappointing Darjeeling Tea
© 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.
