TEA.
BY David Williams.
A cat can be trusted, to purr when
it is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings.
This is going to yet another article, on something that is so British
that it could only be about possibly two things. One thing that is almost
always connected with the British is the weather, but that is going to be the
basis of another article if I ever get around to it. So this article is going
to be about that other of British of things and that is tea.
For this article on tea, I have actually done some research, yes I know
it is a bit drastic, but I thought that it would be a good idea to get my facts
straight from the start.
One thing that did strike me on looking at three or four encyclopedia is
how similar some of the articles on tea are. The similarities even go down to
the wording, so make of that what you will.
I intend to give at the end of this article a list of the material that
I used for research, and if you are interested then you can see if what I say
is true. It may be that you have different editions of the books to those that
I have looked up, in which case your findings may be different to mine.
So at long last, let us talk about that most wonderful of drinks, which
is of course Tea.
Tea is, as you well know is a beverage prepared by pouring boiling water
over the dry processed tealeaves of the tea plant with the scientific name of
Camellia Sinensis. It is a member of the tree plant
family with the name Theaceae, and no I have not a
clue what all that means. But all the books that I used in my research did say
almost exactly the same, so I think we are in good hands on this one.
I now propose to go back in time and give you a flavor,
(Sorry, but I could not resist the temptation to get at least one pun
in!)
What I was going to say was, that I intend to give a
bit of history as to where tea is coming from, where it was first found and who
found it, when it first got to Europe and then the
According to legend, and five or six of the
reference books that I have looked at. Tea was discovered by Emperor Shennong in
Now this next bit is what I find hard to believe in, that as a scientist
he was interested to find out about this new liquid. So he or a servant drank
some of the liquid, apart from not dying, they found the liquid to be very refreshing,
so as the legend goes tea was discovered.
The earliest mention of tea in the written records is in Chinese
literature in about 800 A.D by a monk called Lu Yu, who wrote a book called Ch’a Ching. This book details
within it, methods of tea cultivation, methods of preparation of tea in
ancient
According to what I have read, the custom of drinking tea then spread to
Yeisei to this day in
No, I do not know why it took it so long to get to
Tea finally got to Europe via the Dutch traders who imported it from
The
By 1720, in
The first time that tea was sold in
The coffee houses of that time where exclusively for men, they have
often been called “
This is where I intend to give some hard facts about tea. Most of this
information comes from several sources, most of the
data is for the year ending 1998. So by the time you read this, the facts and
figures may be out of date, so the figures might have changed somewhat.
Tea is apparently the most popular refreshing drink in more countries in
the world than any other non-alcoholic beverage. The worldwide production of
tea totals about 2.6 thousand million kilograms, that
is about 5.75 thousand million pounds, for the year 1998.
The main producer of tea in the world is
The second largest producer of tea worldwide is
Some of the other producers of tea include
The country the imports the most tea in the world is, and this really
should not be a surprise is
The consumption per person of tea between people in the
This is where I am going to talk more about Camellia Sinensis, that is the tree
plant to you and me. From the above paragraph it should be easy to see that the
tree plant grows in either tropical or subtropical climates. That means places
like
From the various books that I have looked at, the tree plant is an
evergreen. It will grow very quickly at low altitudes, where the air is warm,
but the downside of this is that the flavor is not so strong or at its best.
Therefore the best tea, is from plants at a high
altitude of about 900 to 200 meters or 3000 to 7000 feet where the air is
cooler and so the plant grows slower and so improves the flavor.
Tea plants have small white flowers, and give off a sweet smell. When
pollinated the flowers produce three seeds that for the entire world look like
hazelnuts in size and shape.
Tea plants can be cultivated either by planting seeds in a nursery bed
or by planting cuttings of tea plants in a bed. The growth of such plants is
such that within the year the plants will be about 20 centimeters tall. That is
about 8 inches high. These plants are then transplanted to the tea fields. A
typical tea field contains about 3000 plants and is about 0.4 of a hectare in size, that is about 1 acre in the old money, if I have
converted it correctly.
If the tea plant is allowed to grow wild it can reach a height of about
9 meters or 30 feet. But for commercial reasons e.g. ease of harvest they are
normally kept at a height of about 90 to 130 centimeters, that is to say 3 to 4
feet tall.
A typical tea plant will take depending on climate etc up to 5 years to
mature, but it could be in as little time as 3 years. When the plant is mature
it produces a growth of new shoots called a flush. Each shoot is made up of
several leaves and a bud. If the plant is at low altitude in the warm air, it
can produce a flush every week. At the higher altitudes in the cooler air it
can take up to two weeks for the plant to produce a flush. In colder weather no
flushes will be produced and the plant for all intents and purposes goes into a
state of hibernation.
On a typical tea plantation most of the tea is picked by hand. A good
tea plucker picks off the flushes by hand, a good days work is to pluck some 18 kilograms or 40
pounds of flushes a day. This amount of flushes when put through the
manufacturing process, would result in about 4.5 to 5 kilograms or 10 pounds of
usable tea.
There are three main kinds of tea produced commercially. They are black,
green and oolong. They differ in how the tea was processed at the factory on
the tea plantation. All the main tea-producing countries produce black tea. For
some reason mainly to do with national taste and the climate green and oolong
tea are produced mainly in the following countries,
The process to make black tea is, first the workers on the tea
plantation spread the leaves on racks called withering racks. Air is blown over
the leaves to remove a lot of the moisture; this process leaves them soft and
flexible. The withered leaves are then crushed between rollers to release the
juices. These leaves are then taken into the fermenting room, where in
carefully controlled conditions of temperature and humidity the leaves turn a
coppery colour and undergo a chemical change. The
final process in making black tea, is that these
coppery coloured leaves are dried in ovens where they
turn a brownish black.
Steaming the leaves in very large vats makes green tea. The steaming
prevents the tealeaves from changing colour so that
they remain green. The final process in making green tea is to crush the leaves
and dry them in ovens to produce the final product.
Allowing the leaves to partially ferment makes Oolong tea, which is
regarded as the “champagne of teas”. Which allows them to
change their colour to a stage between green and
black. The leaves end up a greenish-brown colour
and the last process is again crushing the leaves and being dried in large
ovens.
Tealeaves are graded by how large the leaves are, but the size of leaves
has nothing to do with the quality of the tea produced from those leaves. The leaves
are normally sized at the factory by the use of screens with different sized
holes in.
The largest tea leaves which are normally selected for loose tea are
classified in order of size as orange pekoe then pekoe and finally pekoe souchong, as you can tell these are not English words but
Chinese.
The smaller or the broken tealeaves, which are normally used in tea
bags, are classified in order of size as broken orange pekoe, broken orange fannings and finally fannings.
I can now see you wanting to ask, how is this instant tea power made
then? Aren’t you?
Well, instant tea is made by brewing the tea on a large scale e.g.
thousands of liters of tea at a time. This brew then has the water removed by a
clever drying process, which at the end of it leaves a powder.
This powdered tea will easily combine with moisture, so when it is
packed, it has to be packed under carefully controlled humidity and temperature
conditions. When you come to make instant tea at home, all you are doing is
adding the water back in.
Now you may wonder when instant tea was invented and first marketed and
the answer was a surprise to me, it was in 1948 and it happened in the
This last bit of this article is going to be about Iced Tea, how the
humble teabag came into being, and when this all happened.
In 1904, the United States held a worlds Fair in St. Louis, traders from
all over the world attended what was America’s first world trade fair. One such
trader was a man called Richard Blechynden who at
that time was a tea plantation owner. He originally planned to give away free
samples of hot tea to the fairs visitors. But it so happened that a heat wave
hit at about the same time, as the fair, so you can understand that the
visitors were not that interested in hot tea. So in an act of desperation and
to save all the money that he had invested in the fair, he dumped a load of ice
into the brewed tea, that he was trying to give away,
so he served the first Iced Tea. It is not surprising, that it became one of
the hits of the fair.
Some four years later, that is in about 1908, other
references give the year as 1904, Thomas Sullivan who was from
It turns out that instead of un-wrapping the tea from its silk bag,
because there was no written explanation, that some restaurants were brewing
the tea while still in its bag. Sullivan had expected them to open the bag and
pour the tea into the pot and brew it. By doing so the users found that it was
a much faster method, to prepare a cup of tea. It also had the added benefit of
enabling them to get rid of the used tealeaves after they had been used. When orders for the sample bags poured in Sullivan began to make
the bags from filter paper instead of silk, so the tea bag had been invented.
References
The Stash Tea Company Pamphlet 1999
The World Book Encyclopedia 1998
Encarta 1998
Webster’s World Encyclopedia 1997