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Sylvakandy Estate Orange Pekoe
If you ask the average person on the street to name a brand of tea, chances are pretty good that they’re going to come up with Lipton. Which is not surprising, since, as the company points out at their web site, “Lipton is the world’s best-known and best-selling brand of tea.”
But of course it wasn’t always that way. Even the biggest guns in the business world had to get their start somewhere and in the case of Lipton Tea it all began with one Thomas Lipton, who traveled the world and kicked around in a number of jobs early in life before returning to his native Scotland and taking up in the grocery business, as his parents had done before him.
By about 1890, some two decades after getting into the grocery trade, Lipton had made a considerable fortune for himself. While traveling on holiday around that time, he made a stop in the Asian island nation of Ceylon. The coffee crop here had been wiped out by disease a few decades earlier and tea was beginning to take hold in its place. Lipton invested in properties in Ceylon and began growing and exporting tea. His prices tended to be more affordable than many of his competitors and he introduced some packaging and marketing innovations that helped make his tea business as successful or perhaps even more so than his other business ventures.
Which is Thomas Lipton’s story in the tiniest of nutshells and obviously, it’s a story that deserves to be told in more detail. Which is exactly what assorted and sundry authors have sought to do. A cursory search reveals that numerous books have been written about Lipton in the eight decades since his demise. While many of these are somewhat obscure nowadays there are a few that may be of interest to modern-day readers.
Not surprisingly, given that he was once a sailor by trade and then later as an avocation, some of these books focus as much on Lipton’s unsuccessful attempts to win the America’s Cup yacht race as they do on his tea selling and other ventures. They include The Man Who Challenged America: The Life and Obsession of Sir Thomas Lipton (2007), by Laurence Brady, and A Full Cup: Sir Thomas Lipton’s Extraordinary Life and His Quest for the America’s Cup (2010), by Michael D’Antonio. For a review of the latter volume by yours truly, 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.
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When it comes to tea books of yesteryear, it seems that China and India get much of the attention. That’s based on my own decidedly casual and unscientific observations, and it’s not really surprising, given that they’ve been the world’s top producers for a long time. But it also led me to the tentative conclusion that old tea books about Japan are fairly few and far between.
Japanese Tea Ceremony
Of course, the best known of such books is Okakura Kakuzo’s The Book of Tea, an influential work that has been in print continuously for more than a century. The Preparation of Japan Tea, by Henry Gribble, is decidedly more obscure, but this 1883 publication provides some interesting insight into perceptions of Japanese tea in this particular day and age.
It’s actually something of a stretch to call Gribble’s work a book, since the actual text is rather brief (but informative). Gribble makes up for this by including a fairly extensive selection of interesting illustrations to help round things out.
Early commentators on tea tended to either love it or loathe it, and Gribble counts himself among the former group. He addresses this issue early on, giving an overview of some early attitudes toward tea and remarking, “it is amusing to record the imagined danger felt by our forefathers for the beverage which cheers us all, for the innocent drink which gives occasion for an afternoon gossip, for the refreshing cup which renews the energies of a midnight student.”
In the very next sentence Gribble goes on to give an indication of the size of the tea industry in Japan, noting that it was supplying 35 million pounds of tea a year to the United States alone. He goes on to sketch a brief history of tea in Japan, from its supposed introduction from China in the ninth century to its increase in popularity a few centuries later and up to the present day. Interestingly, Gribble notes that early on, much as was the case in many European countries, tea was an expensive luxury that was accessible only to the wealthiest members of society.
From there it’s on to a discussion of more practical matters, such as the botany, chemistry, cultivation and processing of tea, among other things. Gribble pays particular attention to the last of these before moving on to some remarks on Japanese black tea from a Mr. James Green and then on to his concluding remarks. There’s more on the Japanese tea trade in the appendix and then sections on the chemical composition and artificial coloring of tea by another guest commentator, Edward Divers, and then it’s on to the illustrations.
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Sensational headlines are hardly unusual nowadays (or in the past, for that matter, to be historically accurate about it). Five minutes of the most cursory research would probably turn up more of them than you could shake a stick at. But for my money one of the more sensational tea-related headlines to come down the pike lately is one that recently appeared in the Indian press: “Want Baby? Drink 2 Cups of Tea Daily.”
The Times of India - interesting reading!
Now, if your mother, father or health teacher have already had “the talk” with you, then you probably know that it’s not quite that easy. But seriously, what the accompanying article was actually trying to convey is that women who drink tea are 27 percent more likely to get pregnant than those who don’t. This from a group of researchers at Boston University who studied a group of 3,600 women who were actively trying to have a baby.
While the article was not clear on exactly what two to three cups of tea daily had to do with increasing the chances of pregnancy, researchers also found that carbonated beverages in similar amounts could reduce the chances of pregnancy up to 20 percent and that coffee drinking had no appreciable effect either way.
Green Tea
In other tea-related health news, a recent British study indicated that green tea might hide testosterone from the standard tests used by Olympic officials and others to detect doping. Said officials are apparently considering whether they need to tweak their tests accordingly to account for this development.
In lab tests researchers used catechins, compounds extracted from green and white tea, and found that they tended to reduce the concentration of testosterone by about 30 percent. Experts were careful to point out, however, that tea is not unique in this quality and that there are various other foods and beverages that can skew the results of doping tests. They also noted that tea’s effects appeared to be relatively minor and would probably require athletes to consume large quantities frequently to attain desired results.
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The world of tea is a pretty vast one. It’s comprised of countless varieties of proper “tea” (which is derived only from the Camellia sinensis plant) and there are also numerous tea-like beverages that are often lumped in with tea. Most of these are more properly known as tisanes. When you consider that all of the aforementioned might be blended and tweaked with various flavors and prepared in a number of different ways, the number of combinations rises to something akin to all of the grains of sand on all of the world’s beaches.
Builders tea is not a terribly exotic type of tea, but it’s probably unfamiliar to most of us here in the good old United States. In the United Kingdom, this creamy and heavily sugared blend, typically made strong from inexpensive black tea, is quite common and takes its name from the construction workers said to favor it. While a recent report indicated that it’s lately been losing ground to green tea, it’s still a very popular tea variation there.
If the word “chifir” rings a bell, then you may have spent some time in a Russian prison. The prisoners there are said to favor this brew, which is essentially just black tea prepared at concentrations that are not recommended for casual drinkers – or anyone. For a brief primer on this eye-opening treat, look here.
Genmaicha is a popular variety of Japanese green tea that’s flavored with roasted rice, which gives it an aroma and taste that some liken to popcorn. Here’s a report from the Indian press about a tisane that skips the green tea and just uses the roasted rice. It’s a concoction that apparently has a taste that’s something like coffee.
While Hawaii is one of the few places in the United States that grows modest amounts of “real” tea, they also favor a tisane there that’s made from nettles and which is known locally as mamaki. More about it 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.
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The consensus seems to be that tea is the second most commonly consumed beverage in the world, after water. It’s a fascinating fact that’s often repeated and I’ve done so myself on a few occasions. Of course, there are a number of other “facts” about tea that are of dubious origin, including the one about rinsing tea leaves for 30 seconds to decaffeinate them or the one about tea being discovered 5,000-odd years ago when leaves blew into a kettle of water being boiled by a Chinese emperor.
Given that these and other myths and legends about tea are so often presented as truth, I couldn’t help wondering if tea really was the second most popular beverage in the world. Or has this nugget of wisdom somehow become the truth simply due to the fact that it’s been repeated so many times?
A cursory spot of research reveals that Wikipedia also makes the claim that water and tea are number one and two (and beer is allegedly the top alcoholic beverage worldwide). But while Wikipedia might be a good starting point for a research venture, I thought it might be useful to seek out something more authoritative. Which is no small feat, as it turns out.
Though you can find this assertion repeated over and again, finding the evidence to support it is kind of a tricky business. While organizations like the Tea Association of the USA and Tea Association of Canada both repeat this claim, I was not able to locate a citation at their web sites to support the notion. In addition, I tried a large assortment of search strings and pored through numerous pages of related results only to find this “fact” repeated again and again, with no evidence to back the claim. And though it seems that such a conclusion could only be made by an agency that has access to beverage consumption stats worldwide, I was not able to locate any supporting evidence from the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), among others
On the other hand, I’ve never claimed to be the be all and end all when it comes to research, and so I wouldn’t discount the notion that tea may very well be the second most popular beverage in the world, after water. What I will say is that the evidence for this claim (if there ever was any) has apparently become obscured over the course of time and the jury is out on the matter, at least for now.
© 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.
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If you’re like me then your knowledge of collectible cards begins and ends with baseball cards and I have to confess that I’m not even all that knowledgeable about them. Baseball cards first came into being in the years just after the Civil War and were followed in subsequent decades by popular cards from cigarette companies as well as cards from other merchants seeking to promote their products.
40 years of collectible tea cards
Products like tea, for example. While these apparently never made much of a splash in the United States, tea cards were quite popular in the U.K. from about World War II onward until about the turn of this century. One of most notable purveyors of tea cards was Brooke Bond, a company which came into being in 1845 and took up tea selling about a quarter of a century later.
The company rolled out their first tea cards in the mid-Fifties and, according to one collector, were turning out more than 700 million of them every year in just a little more than a decade. The cards featured a wide variety of subjects, everything from natural history and wildlife to aviation to inventors and their inventions, the popular PG Tipps monkeys (advertising mascots) and even the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
As is the case with pretty much any other type of collectible the range of prices for tea cards is a wide one, though perhaps not as wide as for some items. If you peruse the extensive selection of Brooke Bond cards from The London Cigarette Card Company you’ll find that prices range from about two dollars (US) to nearly four hundred dollars for the rare Butterflies of the World, Our Pets, and Transport Through the Ages sets, all of which were issued in the mid-Sixties. Which is small potatoes compared to the millions that a 1909 Honus Wagner baseball card might bring but then again it’s hardly a small chunk of change.
For more information about tea cards than I could ever hope to provide, you could start with the Web sites already mentioned. Other good resources, particularly for novices to this sort of thing, can be found at the collector’s sites, TeaCard.com and Brooke Bond Tea Cards.
© 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.
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The consensus seems to be that tea is the second most commonly consumed beverage in the world, after water. The good news for tea lovers, tea producers, and anyone else who stands to benefit from this sort of thing is that the world’s tea drinkers have taken to downing more of the stuff. That’s official, by the way, if we’re to believe the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), who recently weighed in on the matter.
A glass of cold tea — as good as a glass of water!
As the FAO’s Intergovernmental Group on Tea reported, total world tea consumption in 2010 was four million tonnes, which is an increase of 5.6 percent from the previous year. Production of black tea increased by 5.5 percent and that of green tea increased by 1.9 percent. The fact that demand for the former has been higher than the supply has resulted in higher prices for black tea and presumably in happier tea growers all around.
The FAO attributed the increase to higher income levels in China, India and other countries with emerging economies. Historically neither China nor India, the world’s top tea producers, have not been in the top 30 of tea consumers, on a per capita basis, but because of their large populations they rank high in total amounts consumed. The FAO report indicated that total consumption in China increased 8.2 percent in 2009, and 1.4 percent in 2010 and in India by 2.4 percent in 2009 and 1 percent in 2010. For more on the world’s top tea drinkers, as measured on a per capita basis, look here (give yourself a pat on the back and two gold stars if you guess the top ranked country before clicking).
For the future the FAO group predicts that black tea production will continue to grow at just under two percent annually for about the next decade. Overall tea consumption is also expected to grow at nearly the same rate during that period. Green tea production (and presumably consumption) will grow significantly more than black tea in that period, with much of that growth coming in the tea growing powerhouse of China.
For a summary of the FAO report, look here. For more detailed documents from the group’s recent session in Sri Lanka, 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.
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It’s been a while since our last roundup of tea books, but that doesn’t mean that the flow of said books has abated. Here are a few titles that have just come out or are on publisher’s calendars for upcoming months. Half of the eight titles mentioned take a look at China’s connection to tea and tea culture in some way or another. Which is fitting, given that the Chinese have the world’s oldest tea culture, are the world’s top tea producing nation and the world’s top tea drinkers, in terms of total quantity consumed.
More books about tea coming every day!
All the Tea in China is hardly an original title, by any stretch of the imagination. If you do a quick check online you’ll see that it’s been used (verbatim or with slight variations) several times for books about tea and in numerous other cases for novels and books on other topics. All of which didn’t stop author Wang Jian from appropriating it for his All the Tea in China: History, Methods and Musings. If that’s not enough on Chinese tea for you, then be sure to reserve a copy of Luo Jialin’s forthcoming The China Tea Book, which promises to cover “everything from the leaves to the pervasive culture they spawned.”
Bearing the rather simple title Chinese Tea, Tong Liu’s upcoming volume will provide “a fascinating insight into the ancient culture of Chinese tea, the trade, tradition, literature, philosophy and ceremony associated with tea in China and its popularisation around the world.” Last but not least of the books about China and tea is one that’s not exclusively about tea. It’s a historical tome by Eric Jay Dolin called When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail.
For the crustless sandwich crowd there are a few upcoming volumes that are worth noting. There’s Susan Cohen’s rather specialized London’s Afternoon Teas: A Guide to London’s Most Stylish and Exquisite Tea Venues. Also on the schedule, Traditional Afternoon Tea, by Martha Day, a recipe collection that comprises “a delicious collection of teatime treats.”
HOB Tea Cozy - Cheetah Design
How wild can a tea cosy be? You might seek the answer to that immortal question in Loani Prior’s Really Wild Tea Cosies. Prior is the author of several other books on tea cosies and if you happen to see one you like you can make it yourself (that’s assuming that you know how to knit). Last up in this particular roundup is Agony of the Leaves, a fictional outing by Laura Childs. It’s lucky number 13 in her popular series of tea shop mysteries.
© 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.
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To say that deciphering the terminology of tea is a tricky matter is an understatement of vast proportions. It’s impossible to say how many varieties of tea are currently in existence, but they surely number in the hundreds and possibly even into the thousands. Then consider that many varieties of tea, particularly those that are grown in China, may have more than one alternate name in both Chinese and English.
Young Pu-erh
Take Puerh, for example, which is a term for a category of tea and is a word that has several alternate spellings. Even after many years of writing about tea, I still don’t know which of these spellings is correct. Ditto for the likes of varieties like Green Snail Spring, which may also be known as Pi Lo Chun or Bi Lo Chun and possibly some other variations I’m not aware of. Or take the myriad of arcane grading terms (some of which are apparently still in use) such as Orange Pekoe, Flowery Orange Pekoe, Special Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe and so on.
If you really want to throw a monkeywrench into the works, consider that there are also many tea terms that have either fallen into disuse nowadays or are used very rarely. I’m frequently reminded of these terms when I’m reviewing the old tea books I often write about at this site. I was especially reminded of them when reading Joseph M. Walsh’s Tea-Blending as a Fine Art, which was first published in 1896.
Walsh’s book contains more of these outdated tea terms that I can really expound upon in a brief article. Although some of the teas he refers to are ones with names that we would recognize today, such as Oolong, Gunpowder, Souchong or Pekoe, to name a few.
Some of the other terms you may recognize if you’ve been around tea long enough, though they’re not used as often nowadays. They include Congou, Bohea, and Hyson and there are also more obscure variations on the latter term, such as Young Hyson and Hyson-skin.
Then there are the tea terms that you’ve probably never heard, unless you’re a tea historian. These include a number of varieties of Oolong tea, including Ankoi, Amoy, Foochow, and Saryune. About these, the author claims that Ankoi might not even be “real” tea at all, while he confuses the issue in the case Foochow, calling it one of China’s best black teas. Saryune Oolong, along with Pekoe Oolong, are cited as very rare varieties of this type of tea. Other obscure varieties that come in for a mention are the Congous known as Kaisow, Moning and others, as well as “Scented” teas like Caper, and green teas such as Moyune, Hychow, Fychow, Tienke, and Pingsuey.
One of my personal favorites of these archaic terms is Twankay. I’m not sure why. I guess it just has kind of a nice ring to it. Walsh calls this “a large, loose and flat-leaf tea, varying in color, liquor and flavor, according to the grades from which it is separated.” Nowadays the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is a little more pointed with its definition, calling it “a green tea of inferior quality and of open leaves.”
You’re likely to read about these terms and others in any old tea book, but Walsh’s would be a good place to start. Or you might try Liu Yong’s The Dutch East India Company’s Tea Trade with China, 1757-1781. Some of these old tea varieties were also among those tossed into Boston Harbor during that renowned tea party a few centuries back. More about that here.
See also:
What’s All This “Orange Pekoe” Stuff Mean?
Tea Terms: Fermentation vs. Oxidation
The Mysterious World of Aged Pu-erh Tea
A Tea by Any Other Name
The A-Z of Tea Terms
Some of the Strangest Tea Names
Some of the Coolest Tea Names
Women’s Names and Tea
Men’s Names and Tea
Tea Name Circus
Tea Taste Terms Circus
© 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.
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The consensus seems to be that tea is grown in about 40 countries around the world. Some of the powerhouse producers, such as China and India, account for much of the world’s total, while tea growing in some other nations — like the United States and England — is more of a novelty. Below is a rundown of the few of the world’s notable tea growing nations and regions.
As for the “almost” in the title, coming up with an entry for the letters L, O, P, and X was more than I could manage. If you can think of any, feel free to leave a note in the comments.
Where was your tea grown?
Assam
A state in India and the world’s largest single tea-growing region. Not to be confused with China, the world’s largest tea-growing nation, which is comprised of many growing regions.
Bangladesh
If you grew up in my generation you probably know of Bangladesh as the country Beatle George Harrison and others gave a much-publicized concert to benefit. Located in the same general vicinity of the Indian states of Assam and Darjeeling, Bangladesh is the world’s 11th largest tea producer.
China
The powerhouse of tea production, China is not only tops in quantity grown, but is also the first country to have a tea culture, as well as being the producer of a number of outstanding black, green, oolong, white, yellow and puerh varieties.
Darjeeling
A region in northeastern India that produces modest amounts of a premium black tea renowned for its distinctive aroma and flavor.
England
Never a significant producer of tea on their own shores in spite of being avid consumers. Tea is currently only grown in England at Tregothnan Estate in the western part of the country.
Fujian
A province in eastern China that’s probably best known for its output of Wuyi oolong, a tea grown in the vicinity of the northern Wuyi Mountains.
Georgia
Tea accounts for about of one-third of the agricultural output of this former Soviet republic, but they are not considered a major producer in the overall scheme of things.
Hawaii
Aside from South Carolina and Washington, the only state in the U.S. that currently produces a significant amount of tea.
India
The world’s second largest tea producer, after China. Comprised primarily of the Assam, Darjeeling and Nilgiri growing regions.
Japan
The world’s eighth largest tea-grower. Primarily known for its output of a wide range of green teas.
Kenya
An African country that’s ranked third in the world for tea production, Kenya is primarily known for its output of black tea.
Malawi
A small country in eastern Africa that grows the most tea on the continent, after Kenya. Ranked 12th worldwide in tea production.
Nilgiri
After Assam and Darjeeling, the other well-known tea-growing region in India. As with the other Indian regions, is best known for producing black tea.
Nonsuch Estate Tea
Qimen
A region in China’s Anhui Province that’s best known for being the home of a type of black tea known as Keemun.
Ratnapura
One of six main tea-growing regions in Sri Lanka. Located just east of the capital city of Colombo.
Sri Lanka
Formerly known as Ceylon (tea grown there is still called Ceylon), this island nation off the shores of India has been turning out black tea for more than a century following a failure of the thriving coffee crop there in the late nineteenth century.
Taiwan
Best known for its high-quality oolong tea, the island of Taiwan was formerly known as Formosa, a name still given to some of the varieties of tea grown there.
Uji
A Japanese city renowned for its production of high-quality green tea, which has been grown in the area for nearly a thousand years.
Vietnam
The world’s sixth largest tea producer.
Wuyi
A mountain range in the northern region of China’s Fujian province. The point of origin for a number of popular tea varieties, most notable among them Wuyi oolong.
Yunnan
Located in southern China, Yunnan province is a producer of a number of varieties of tea, including several well-known black teas and the post-fermented type known as puerh.
Zambia & Zimbabwe
Neighboring countries in southern Africa that grow modest amounts of 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.
