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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.
In my former life as an IT trainer, I remember the first few days of training to become a certified Microsoft Applications trainer. Every class started with KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid. The premise behind the acronym is when delivering a training course to ensure that you speak in layman’s terms: speak in a language that the audience can understand. Travelling around the world with my IT role forced me to do that in countries where English was the second language.
May King in action
Who’d have thought that my training skills would come in handy when talking about tea? With so many acronyms and tea terminology, it’s ever so easy to become daunted by them when you see them on paper, or online, but if explained with KISS, hopefully the audience can understand it better. Here are just a few Tea Terms you may come across.
In my Tea Appreciation classes, I have broken the class down into 6 simple modules:
- What is Tea? (In order to differentiate between tea and herbal infusions)
- Loose Tea Guideline – outlining the best way to store loose tea and tips for making tea
- Recognising Good Tea – This is probably self explanatory.
- Tea Processing Basics – explaining the journey of tea leaf: from the bush to the cup
- Tea Tasting Basics – how to fully appreciate tea in a similar vein to how wine or cheese is appreciated.
- Health Benefits of Tea – the most popular topic and one in which I separate fiction from fact. My favourite myth about caffeine is beau-tea-fully explained by the tea-lightful Stephen Fry.
Top 10 Tips to the Health Benefits of Tea
The best part of a Tea Appreciation Class though, has got to be the tasting. 
So tea lovers: when explaining tea terminology to someone new to tea. Remember to explain with a smile, but more importantly educate with KISS.
© 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:
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.
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.
With hundreds of teas available out there, both straight (nothing but tea of a particular type), blended (various teas mixed together), and flavored (non-tea “stuff” added to the tea), it’s hard to remember them all. As an exercise of your memory, see how many different teas you can name before reading on. It’s okay. I’ll wait.
*Interlude music*
All set? How did you do? I can usually only name a few dozen. You can always go by the alphabet, starting with A as in Assam and winding up with Z as in Zhen Shan Xiao Chung (Lapsang Souchong). Or you can start by general tea type such as green as in Sencha and going through white, black, oolong, and pu-erh. To me, that seems the best way, so here goes:
Green Teas
Gyokuro Japanese Green Tea
- Sencha
- Gunpowder
- Dragonwell
- Chun Mee
- Dragon Pearls
- Ceylon Green
- White Monkey Paw
- Gyokuro
- Matcha
- Gen Mai Cha
White Teas
Darjeeling White Tips White Tea
- Snow Dragon
- Gong Mei (Tribute Eyebrow)
- Adams Peak
- 100 Monkeys
- Darjeeling White
- Ceylon White
- Pai Mu Tan (Bai Mu Dan, White Peony)
- Yinzhen Silver Needle
- Drum Mountain White Cloud
- White Pearls
- Shou Mei (Noble, Long Life Eyebrow)
- Assam White
- Snowbud
Black Teas
- Golden Yunnan
- Keemun
- Ceylon black
- CTC Assam
- Kambaa Estate (Kenyan)
- Darjeeling
- Nonsuch Estate
Oolong Teas
Masala Chais (Spiced Teas)
Chai Assortment (picture on site may be different)
Flavored Teas
- French Blend
- Buckingham Palace Garden Party
- Angels Dream
- Jasmine with flowers green tea
- Granny Green Apple
Blended Teas
- Irish Breakfast (Kenyan and Assam)
- English Breakfast Blend No. 1 (Indian, Ceylon, Kenyan)
- Yorkshire Harrogate (luxury black teas)
I could keep going, but my teacup is empty and when that happens I get a bit cranky. Don’t worry. There’s tea in the pot and some fresh fruit in the frig. Snack time!
© 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 terms are popping up all over. Every so often the term grand cru (pronounced “grahn croo”) pops up in relation to a particularly fine tea. But what is grand crutea?
Fine terroir and fine tea plants combined with fine tending by knowledgeable humans make “grand cru” teas!
The term actually comes from the wine industry. Words are like that. They slide around from one area of knowledge to another, being applied in either the same way or in a slightly different way that fits their new “home.” In this case, the term grand cru means basically the same thing, whether applied to wine or tea, and is composed of actually two terms: grand and cru.
Cru comes from croitre (KWA-truh), which means “to grow” (related to plants) and so it means generally “growth.” In addition, it tends to encompass the idea of the soil in which wine grapes (or tea leaves) are grown (the terroir) imparting a particular flavor and character to the crop. This, then, leads to the term referring to specific vineyards or tea gardens where the terroir has been shown to impart those qualities to the grapes or tea leaves.
Grand indicates a high or great level of cru, so the term grand cru has a meaning generally of “great growth.” There is also premier cru which refers to “first growth” and is usually not considered as good. Confused yet? There’s more.
With regard to wine, the term grand cru has very specific rules for application, especially in the Burgundy region of France, but the same does not seem to hold for tea. Whenever I see the term, the vendor seems to be trying to indicate a generally exceptionally fine tea, especially with regard to oolongs. For you, the buyer, this term can mean very little, at least until standards are established for its usage. Just consider it a claim that their tea is better than other versions of the same tea. As always, exercise caution when accepting such claims, and happy hunting!
© 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.
One of the more pervasive legends about tea is that it was supposedly discovered in 2784 B.C. (according to the more detailed accounts) by a Chinese emperor (referred to as Chen Nung in some accounts) who was apparently keen to boil water for sanitary reasons. One day, as the story goes, the emperor was boiling water when some tea leaves were carried aloft on the breeze, landed in the kettle and it occurred to him to drink the resulting brew. The rest was history – or was it?
It all makes for a nice, compact story that’s been retold about a zillion times but it’s one that obviously doesn’t do much to actually explain the origins of tea drinking. Fast forward to 1889 and the publication of Toasted Leaves, or “Tudoces Fragrans”: An Essay on the Origin of Tea. This work was said to be written by “the shade of Charles Lamb,” a popular English essayist, but it was actually penned by Owen A. Gill and “Humorously illustrated by W.G.R. Browne.” A few years earlier Gill had written a work called A Short Account of How Tea is Made, which appeared under his given name.
Toasted Leaves is a short work that appears as though it may have been directed at a younger audience. The colorful illustrations of the Chinese characters may not quite pass muster with the politically correct audiences of today but were probably par for the course in Gill’s time.
The story takes place in the year 1018, some 3,800 years after Chen Nung’s alleged discovery of tea, and opens with the discovery of fire by one Chang Fat. His son, Chang Lin, is a lazy sort who likes to sleep and while he is zonked out one day his father’s hut burns down. Lin manages to save his father’s prize plant, a shrub called Tudoces Fragrans, which had been given to him by a Mormon missionary.
Upon finding that the leaves were scorched, Lin decides to taste them (for whatever reason) and finds that they are quite pleasant tasting. This kicks off something of a craze for toasting the leaves of plants, which was thought quite odd at the time and which lands the pair in court.
As it turns out, the judge in this case becomes a convert to leaf toasting and before long, as luck would have it, his own house catches on fire. Some of the toasted leaves of one of his plants fall into a cauldron and one of the firemen responding to the incident drinks the resulting liquid. His colleagues follow suit and, as the author puts it, “they were soon dancing and singing college glees.”
Which, to be quite honest, is probably not an unreasonable response to one’s first exposure to tea, and to this very day I occasionally find myself “singing college glees” when I drink the stuff.
© 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.
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.
