A Good Tea Renaissance
by Neeta Khanna

For most people who start their day with a cup of tea in Canada, any attention to what’s in their teabag is never really given. After all a teabag is a teabag, some brands taste better than others and a select few even make a half decent cup and those are the ones to go for. The half decent cup is indeed the highest benchmark attainable for the makers of the best of the mass market teabags. By methodical volume blending of teas from various sources, tea fannings (or tea dust) are selected to make a beverage which has a certain amount of ‘briskness’ and tastes dependably of tea. For most tea drinkers things end there given the slim pickings at their local stores.

Tea is similar to wine, a parallel often cited within the tea community. Huge amounts of it are produced in the tea growing countries every year, and as with red or white wine, the quality differences within a tea of any colour can be vast. Much of the tea produced in a given season is destined for the mass-market tea bag or for further blending, tea which yields intense colour but an unmemorable taste and aroma. Fortunately, the choice has recently broadened, with loose tea choices appearing in gourmet stores though in limited variety considering the breadth of what good tea can truly offer. Not surprisingly perhaps, it has been the internet which has introduced the ‘long tail’ of choice, and a number of web stores have sprung up selling good loose selections across tea’s colour spectrum (ranging from white, green, oolong or blue, black, yellow and Pu-erh teas). So in North America, loose tea is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Not all loose teas are created equal however – there are many full leaf teas which fall short of providing a good tea experience, so what is it that goes toward making a good tea?

As with good wine, good tea is the result of the estate’s terroir, that subtle interplay of its climate, soil, moisture and mists, whether the tea is high grown or low grown (high grown teas grow slower and yield more complex flavours). Very good tea is almost always mostly ‘orthodox’, that is, made from the hand picked 'two leaves and a bud', the topmost, youngest and most flavourful shoots of a tea bush. The technical skills, experience and judgment applied to tea making plays an equally big role. Only a small percentage of tea produced in the world can be considered fine ‘single estate’ orthodox tea.

With the forces of supply and demand very much in place, a few dollars will purchase hundreds of grocery store tea bags while some prized Darjeelings, green teas or Oolongs demand considerably higher prices. An extreme case, but of anecdotal interest is the story of a kilogram of a rare style of a Chinese ‘Red Robe’ Oolong famously auctioned some years ago to a Singapore businessman for US$1 Million, which works out to a staggering $2,500 per cup – sheer lunacy of course! Fortunately for tea aficionados, good tea is one of the most reasonably priced gourmet beverages, and after years of being subjected to the flat, dull and often bitter taste of dusty mass market tea, many are ‘trading up’ to the richer, more complex flavour and aroma of a fresh, well made loose tea which has considerably more appeal.

Remarkably, green, black, oolong and white teas all come from varieties of the Camellia Sinensis plant, native to the hot and wet area where China, India and Burma meet. In the wild, the plant grows to the size of a tree. Many ancient tea trees are still harvested in China, active testaments to a long-standing tea culture in the country where this beverage was first drunk. For the convenience of plucking, most tea plants are pruned down to the size of a bush, often giving the tea estate the appearance of a rolling garden. Unlike a vineyard where there is generally one harvest per year, tea is harvested a number of times during the growing season, many separate batches making up the spring, summer or autumn season or ‘flush’ as it is known in the Indian tea trade.

Processing of freshly plucked tealeaves consists of the withering stage during which water content is reduced, followed by rolling, oxidation and drying (or firing). Broadly speaking, it is the level of oxidation or how much oxygen the leaves are allowed to absorb that decides a tea’s colour. White and green teas for example undergo no oxidation, black teas are fully oxidized, while the different types of oolong are lightly or more oxidized depending on the style of oolong sought. Some artisan green teas, whether flat or twisted are still rolled and shaped by hand. It is after undergoing the drying or firing process that teas are then sorted according to their leaf grade and size. The tea dust or fannings left over from the sorting process, far from having no commercial value are purchased in large volumes for tea bag blends.

How does one then source and select good tea given there is so much of the average tasting stuff produced every year? It may sound like work, but you will be amply rewarded by asking your retailer or wholesaler (whether a web based or ‘bricks and mortar’ provider) what his or her own selection process is. A good provider of tea should ‘cup’ many teas before selecting one. In fact the selection of teas should be a process of controlled fussiness. Also, how is it assured the tea you are being sold is fresh and not some dusty old tea that is a pale shadow of what it should be? Even properly stored, the flavour of black tea starts to fade after two years, while that of green tea does so after about eighteen months, so a very fair question to ask is whether the tea being sold to you is fresh. Too often one hears of tea drinkers being sold tea whose taste has faded because it has simply been sitting on a shelf too long, has taken a lengthy journey to your cup through many ‘middle-men’, or has been improperly stored. Avoid buying tea displayed in a glass jar for effect - tea despises light, air and other odours. Some specialty stores sell strongly aromatic coffees right alongside tea, which should also be a warning sign.

Whether you prefer the delicate, crisp nuances of a good green tea, the lingering fruitiness of a fine oolong or the robust mouth feel of a full bodied black tea, selecting the right tea need not be confusing. As with wine, one should let one’s palate be the guide. Though there are many good teas to choose from, it is worth remembering that even the world's finest tea is of limited value if it is not to your taste. Keeping this in mind, it’s best to start with a taste profile you prefer and to educate your palate by trying smaller sample quantities of several varieties of tea, a sensory journey which will help you ‘find your teas’. It is time well spent, for the small pleasures in life are far too important not to be taken seriously.

Neeta Khanna is a good tea revolutionary and partner of Language of the Leaf, a gourmet tea retailer and wholesaler.