Friday, April 04, 2008
Posted by 醉茶生 at 11:09 PM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Related

Miss Neddy has misplaced her memory card reader and so is unable to upload the new photos she has taken. She hopes to distract you with an excellent entry by her good friend 醉茶生. Enjoy.

It is rather difficult finding good Chinese tea in Britain. There are a number of shops that score well in terms of enthusiasm, but fail when it comes to results.

The problem is this: If you think you are going to import good Chinese tea wholesale, then you had better speak Chinese or have damned good friends who do, otherwise you will get cheated. Much like French wine, the route from tea plantation to shop requires navigating an intricate system of middlemen, all of whom do their best to fleece the next man in the chain. A common ruse is to send a sample of fresh, high quality tea, and after the shipment is booked and paid for by the unwitting Englishman, what is actually delivered is last year’s tea (which has by now lost its colour and fragrance) or a lower grade of tea. If you want to get it right, be prepared to do a lot of shouting down the telephone. One tea shop manager I know frequently rejects shipments because they do not match what she ordered. The other thing she does is to go to the plantation herself (which she tries to do twice a year), picks out the tea, watches them pack it, then ships it back herself.

And this is the main problem with most British tea shops: they naïvely expect the people they trade with to be honest. A fatal mistake. One tea shop I visited in Edinburgh was run by some lovely people, and the range of leaves on their catalogue was impressive, but the quality of their merchandise was appalling. The leaves were what they ordered from the middlemen, but what got delivered was brown, insipid and at least a year old. They knew enough to know that what they got was the real thing, but didn’t know enough to realise that the middlemen were offloading old tea that was otherwise unsaleable and undrinkable. I felt really sorry for them: their shop was filled with pounds and pounds of tea, all beautifully packaged and all utterly worthless and undrinkable. Similar thing with a stall I found at Borough Market in London. The Chinese middlemen who do this believe they can get away with it, because the Englishmen buying the tea cannot tell the difference. Unless you seriously know what you are doing, don’t try trading high quality Chinese tea. A love for tea is not sufficient qualification. If against all advice, you decide to start selling tea, then start with one. Or two. And don’t try selling anything else until you have got that one exactly right.

So what is a tea lover in England to do?

Selfridges and Harrods in London both do good Chinese tea, but be prepared to pay three or four times what the tea is actually worth. One English supplier that seems to have got it right is teapigs, who seem to have managed to penetrate a lot of the high street supermarkets (at least in London). Very wisely, they bring in only tiny amounts of one or two types of high quality Chinese tea and make sure that they get it right (they also stock Kenyan and Indian teas, but that is outside my area of expertise). I can recommend their Tung Ting Oolong as being what it says on the tin, and the price is roughly what you would expect to pay if you had bought the same tea in Taiwan. What I must say is, please, please, ignore the instructions on the label. Firstly, they claim that the tea will keep for three years: this, of course, is nonsense. As with any oolong, you should not keep it longer than a year after harvesting, and ideally not longer than six months. The tea is whole leaf and comes in the pyramidal-shaped plastic mesh tea bags that Tetley’s made popular (give the leaves room to expand and avoids imparting the taste of paper to your tea). The instructions on the packets are to use one bag per cup, pour in boiling water, and steep for three minutes. This is, unfortunately, completely wrong for their Tung Ting Oolong, which is quite green and cannot tolerate this kind of abuse. My opinion is that there is too little tea in each bag for this to be sufficient for a standard English teacup. I recommend you use two teabags per cup (maybe even three); use water that is around 90 deg C (let the kettle boil, then wait two or three minutes before pouring the water into the cup). The first infusion should be around thirty to forty seconds and each subsequent infusion increased by ten to fifteen seconds. The tea will comfortably last five to six infusions if prepared in this fashion.

Another alternative is to use a reputable company such as Ten Ren, who do international mail order. It costs a bit more to ship tea from Taiwan, but you should think of them as the MacDonald’s of tea: their tea may not be utterly fantastic, but you know you are going to get tea of decent quality.

teapigs is at http://www.teapigs.co.uk/
Ten Ren is at http://www.tenren.com/

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