Tie Guan Yin, Modern Green Style, Everyday Tea

Recently, one of my friends gave me a canister of tea that he brought back from China. He told me that he isn't sure exactly what it is, but that he's pretty sure it's a low-end modern-style green Tie Guan Yin. I can barely read any Chinese, but I did not recognize any of the characters on the canister...not tea, not oolong, not Tie Guan Yin...I'm pretty sure this is one of those generic canisters that doesn't contain any useful information about the tea:



Everyday tea?

I am interested in learning about many different facets of tea culture. While I naturally seek out higher-quality teas, teas that offer outstanding value, and teas whose aroma and flavor I most prefer, I also like being exposed to the teas that people most commonly drink. There is a pretty big disconnect between the tea culture in the U.S. and Western Europe, and that in China and other countries in Asia. Most people in the U.S. who are seriously into Chinese and Japanese teas focus on the artisan teas, the best teas to come out of these countries.

I was particularly interested in this tea because, at least from what I've heard from people who have travelled in China, and from Chinese people I've met in America, these modern green-style oolongs are extremely popular nowadays, and much of what people consume would be considered low-quality by connoisseurs. It can be hard to find teas in America that correspond to everyday teas that people would drink in China, as in western countries, the low-end of things is dominated by British-style teas, the standard black breakfast tea. When low-end oolongs are available, they tend to be darker roast, as the American palate is not particularly accustomed to greener oolongs.

Here is a photo of the tea itself, with a nickel for size comparison:



Note the large size of the rolled leaves...although it's not true as a strict rule, higher-quality oolong teas often have more tightly rolled leaves. These leaves are very loosely rolled, more so than any other oolongs in my cabinet right now.

The Review:

The dry leaf, upon opening the canister, has almost no aroma. This is usually a pretty bad sign. What aroma there is is pleasant though: weakly herbaceous and weakly woody.

I brewed the tea using a generous amount of leaf and a long steeping time (5 minutes). I have since experimented with brewing and found that this tea is not particulary picky about brewing temperature, but being mild in aroma, does require longer infusions or generous amounts of leaf to extract good flavor.

The resulting cup is mild in aroma, but more aromatic than the dry leaf, and surprisingly rich in flavor. This tea is more flavorful than aromatic, which is rather unusual among teas, and the flavor was actually very pleasant.

The tea's aroma is mostly herbaceous tones, with a hint of woody qualities. There are tones of celery and fresh leaves. There is no floral aroma, unlike most green oolongs. This tea, brewed on the first infusion, tastes a lot like the later infusions of a higher-quality greener oolong (of any varietal). Often, some greener oolongs, when you steep them multiple times, will eventually lose their floral tones and become more herbaceous, with tones that I like to describe as resembling celery or parsley. This tea is very similar.

The flavor however is richer than these later infusions of other oolongs. It is fairly bitter, and pleasingly so, and with a moderate astringency, but not too much. Not particularly sour, which I like, and not at all sweet.

Could I drink this tea every day?

Actually, yes. It's really not bad. Although the aroma was a bit flat, there was little unpleasant about it, and I found it brewed a flavorful cup. I also liked how I felt after drinking it. I'm not sure how accurately this tea represents the everyday teas consumed in China, but I can definitely see how people would be content drinking this style of tea every day. Compared to low-quality darker oolongs and green teas, I would take this one any day. And it's really not that low-quality, it is still a mostly-whole-leaf tea.

So please tell me...is my impression of this tea and its relationship to everyday teas in China at all accurate, or am I way off here?

World Tea East - I Will Be There

Happy labor day!

I am pleased to announce that I will be attending World Tea East, the new, Philadelphia-centered event run by the organization that is behind the World Tea Expo, where I will be representing RateTea.


Since I created RateTea and started blogging about tea, about two years ago, I have read two rounds of excited posts about the World Tea Expo. I have thought seriously about attending the World Tea Expo both years, but did not. With this new event so close to home for me, there's no reason not to attend.

I am excited to meet lots of new people involved in the tea industry, but I think one of the things I am most eagerly looking forward to at this event is the opportunity to meet tea bloggers, and employees and owners of tea companies, and others in the tea industry that I already interact with online, through blogs, twitter, or RateTea. If you are someone who I regularly interact with, and you are coming to this event, please let me know so that I can be sure to meet up with you.

I also want to say that I am excited about the fact that there has been enough interest in the World Tea Expo to spark the spinning off of this second event in a new location. I think this bodes well for the specialty tea industry, which, following up on the slow tea / slow food connection in my last post, also bodes well for a more sustainable and diverse culture of food and drink in society as a whole.

More information:

For more information on this event, you can read the official press release about World Tea East.

Tea as Slow Food: Fast Tea vs Slow Tea

Today I want to write about a social movement that, in my opinion, is directly related to the world of tea. This is the slow food movement. Slow food is a broad and far-reaching concept; it can be seen as an opposite or alternative to "fast food". The idea of slow food is to preserve and create new traditional local and regional cuisines, to enjoy food together with people, and to become more aware of where our food comes from. By promoting local food cultures, the movement encourages diversity, and by promoting local foods and raising awareness of how food is produced, the movement promotes sustainability. The huge number of tags I've classified this post with demonstrates that this movement is related to many different facets of the things I care about.

The logo of this movement is a snail, cutely symbolic of slowness:



Wikipedia has a great article about slow food, which I would recommend at least glancing at. If you want official information from the movement itself, you can visit the websites of Slow Food International or Slow Food USA. The slow food movement is something I strongly support, so I would urge you to check it out, and give some thought to what it advocates, beyond just reading this post.

How does slow food relate to tea?

Tea, like any food or beverage, can be viewed (and produced/consumed) in any number of different ways. Virtually everything about the slow food movement can be applied to tea, except possibly the "buy local" part (although one can still buy or grow local herbs for use in herbal teas, and one can certainly support local tea shops and tea houses). Using the concept of "fast food vs. slow food" as a continuum, we have two different "ends of the spectrum" so to speak.

Tea as fast food: "fast tea":

The ultimate manifestation of tea as fast food is ready-to-drink tea, which includes both bottled tea and tea in cans and other types of containers. This tea is brewed in a factory, packaged, and sold as-is. Ready-to-drink tea is fast food, in that it is quick and easy to purchase and then immediately drink, and that it is primarily an industrial product, produced in a factory, with minimal preparation on behalf of the person consuming it.

Tea as slow food: "slow tea":

At the opposing, "slowest" end of the spectrum, would be single-estate, single-harvest whole-leaf teas, processed by traditional methods, and brewed traditionally in loose-leaf form. Tea traditions are diverse, so I will not claim that "slow tea" needs to be brewed gong fu style in a gaiwan or Yixing tea pot. There are rich tea traditions in eastern and western Europe, in the middle east, and all across the globe, and they each have different practices of enjoying tea. But in order for it to be slow tea, it needs to be brewed at the point of drinking, and it needs to be brewed and drunk with care and thought.

Slow tea, like slow food, encompasses not just the production of the tea, but also the enjoyment of it. Slow tea is not just about the tea originating in a specific garden, but it is about the person drinking the tea knowing which garden it is from, and knowing when it was harvested, and knowing a bit about what makes this tea special. And slow tea involves paying attention to how the tea tastes, and enjoying the setting and process of drinking tea, whether it's a calm, meditative tea session alone, or sharing tea with friends or family.

Most tea is somewhere in the middle:

Relative to loose-leaf tea, tea bags certainly move much farther in the direction of "fast tea", but from the vantage point of bottled or ready-to-drink teas, they are more "slow".

In summary:

The slow food movement is a social movement which promotes greater awareness of and enjoyment of food, including awareness of where food comes from, enjoyment of food, and preservation and promotion of local food cultures. Slow food can easily be applied to tea, and pushes one in the direction of single-estate, single-harvest, loose-leaf teas, brewed with care and enjoyed mindfully either in a private reflective state, or shared with friends or family.

Slow tea and RateTea:

Personally, I want to support the slow food movement and what it advocates for. One of the main motivating factors behind creating RateTea is to get people to think more about tea, in the same sort of framework that the slow food movement works. I want people to rate teas not to discover which tea is "best" in some absolute sense, but just because I want them to start thinking about how their tea tastes...a key idea with RateTea is that the ratings and reviews are tied into a database that classifies each tea by style and by region, and in one click, a person can go from a page of a specific review, or a specific tea, to an article about that style of tea, or that tea-producing region. The idea is to draw casual tea drinkers in and open the world of high-quality loose tea to them, and in doing so, get them to think more about food and drink as a whole, and hopefully, move our society in the direction of greater sustainability in the process, so that we are all healthier, happier, and more able to appreciate all our food and drink, and where it comes from.

How about you?

Were you aware of the slow food movement before reading this post? Where do you think your own tea habits fall on the fast food / slow food spectrum? Does your interest in awareness of tea's production and enjoyment of artisan teas carry forward into your appreciation and awareness of food in general? Were you aware of my intentions of promoting "slow food" through RateTea or do you think this is something it would be good for me to emphasize more on the site?

Under-Appreciated Pages on RateTea

I put a tremendous amount of effort into RateTea, and, while the site has been growing rapidly and getting a large number of pageviews, there are a lot of articles on the site that have gone under-appreciated, perhaps because they are buried deep within the site, or in some cases, just because people don't know about them. This post is my attempt to draw attention to some pages I've written that I think a number of people might find very interesting, but that so far have attracted few views.

While I founded RateTea primarily as an interactive site where people can rate and review teas, I want it to be the most accurate and comprehensive informational tea resource on the web. Over time, I have added a great deal of carefully researched material, mostly written by myself, but a few written by others, and every article revised with help from a number of others, on topics relating to tea and herbal teas, including both the teas, their production, and related health topics. Many of these articles would not be possible without the wealth of information provided by bloggers, tea companies, and scientific researchers' whose work I cite on many of the pages.

I want to highlight a few of these carefully researched articles on the site; this selection covers the articles that I think are more interesting, but unfortunately have been less visible:

• Organic Tea - This article explores the topic of organic-certified tea from as neutral a perspective as I was able to take. As someone who is strongly committed to sustainability, I find organic agriculture appealing, both in tea and for other food crops. However, as this article explores, organic certification is not without its downsides, and the organic label certainly does not address all the problems it sets out to. This is a good article if you want a more critical take on organic tea, but still coming from someone who thinks organics are a good idea.


• Rooibos or South African Red Tea - This article covers a lot of different topics relating to rooibos, including both economic and environmental issues with its production as well as some of the fascinating health properties of this herb; there is also a sub-page on green rooibos. Rooibos may be of particular interest to people with asthma or breathing problems; check out the page for more explanation.


• Antioxidants in Tea - Antioxidants are a topic on which it can be hard to find impartial, science-backed information, mainly because the topic of antioxidants has been so heavily hyped up in the natural health media. Contrary to popular belief, antioxidants are not always good for you. This article explores some of the tougher questions relating to the antioxidants in tea, again attempting to adopt as neutral and science-based a perspective as possible. You may be surprised by some of the studies cited in this article.


• Pu-erh tea - If you are a serious Pu-erh enthusiast or connoisseur, you will probably not find much on this page. But RateTea appeals to a broad audience, including a large number of people who have never even heard of this tea. If you know only a little bit about Pu-erh and want to learn more about what it is, how and where it is produced, and what is known about its health effects, this page will give you a good overview of the topic.


• Storing Tea - I find this page and the whole topic of storing tea to be a lot more interesting than I thought I would. It seems rather cut-and-dry, right? Yet there is a surprising amount of controversy on the topic of storing tea, particularly, in terms of how long it can stay fresh if stored properly. This page starts with the basics but dives into much more depth than you might realize.

Please let me know what you think of these pages! And please, if you run a website or blog and think that there are under-appreciated pages on your site, do share them as well in your own blog post. I always want to read what people consider to be their best work or posts on topics they personally find interesting or thought-provoking!

Price and Sustainability: What is Overpriced Tea?

One of the recent blog posts that I greatly appreciated was Lainie's post about The Price of Tea, which references a great post on the Tea Geek Blog, Whose Tea Is That?, discussing how different companies will sell the same batches of tea (often for different prices). Price is one of my favorite topics, and I think I would like to write about it more than I do, so here goes:



I also think that in the end, being price-conscious as a shopper, not just for tea, but for everything, is crucial to achieving sustainability. Our financial decisions, which include all purchases, shape the organization of labor and distribution of resources in society. When we buy goods for a fair price, we are participating in a normal, healthy economic activity. When we buy undervalued goods, we are often helping to dispose of excess goods or helping a company to regain losses if they have an overabundance of something. But when we buy overpriced goods, we are giving money (and thus power) to someone who has not provided a proportional amount of value. Buying overpriced goods thus is bad for the economy as a whole--that is my philosophy, which I know does not agree with some economists' theories. Economists who would argue otherwise probably argue that consumerism is a good thing, and spending money for the sake of spending it is somehow desirable. Who believes in that? I sure don't.

What is overpriced?

The notion of something being overpriced is necessarily subjective. There are different ways of looking at price and value, and I will outline two of them. In either way, however, the core idea is value. It does not matter so much what the price of something is. For example, with tea you might examine price per ounce, per pound, per tea bag, or even per cup. However, these prices are distinct from value, which is the more subtle and elusive concept of what you're getting for your money.

It's often worth paying more money if the product is better tasting. You might even save money if you are able to make more infusions from a set of tea leaves, or get by with using less tea leaf because the tea is so intensely flavorful.

Value as assessing the quality of good itself:

Arguably the most important aspect, or at least most immediately evident aspect of value is the quality of the good itself. In the case of tea, the quality encompasses the flavor, aroma, and to some degree, appearance and ease of brewing of the tea leaf.

However, value does not exist in a vacuum, and there are other things besides the innate qualities of the good, and its price, which influence value.

Value as relative:

If tea were a very scarce commodity, it would probably command a high price. On the other hand, if it were easy to grow and process in a temperate climate, like mint, it would probably not be as expensive in countries like the U.S. or U.K. Value also depends on possible substitute goods.

The value of a specific type or batch of tea is also dependent on the price and value of similar teas. If you can buy an identical or nearly indistinguishable tea from a different company, you will probably see the higher-priced of the two offerings as overpriced. And if you can buy a similar, but slightly different tea for a much lower price, you are also likely to see the one tea as overpriced as well. For example, the existence of inexpensive but high-quality se chung oolongs often makes me a little pickier about the quality of Tie Guan Yin, and more likely to perceive Tie Guan Yin as overpriced unless it is absolutely top-notch.

Value as holistic economic concept:

There is one more way to look at value, and that is to look at the whole supply chain from the tea growers and harvesters through all intermediate parties to the sale, purchase, and brewed cup. In this paradigm, the value depends not only on the quality of the good itself, and possible substitute goods, but also on the amount of profit taken out of various points in the supply chain, and the effect that the production of the product has on the various communities, people, and businesses along the way.

This way of thinking about value is relatively new, in part because in the past, most if not all of this information was hidden from people buying tea. But with the information age, there is greater transparency, and this holistic view of value is becoming much more popular and widespread, and I actually believe it will eventually become widely accepted in the mainstream. It is this holistic view of value that is the underpinning of the philosophy of fair trade.

The teas that one might classify as "overpriced" can differ hugely if one uses this holistic sense of value, vs. if one uses the conventional sense of value. For example, one might be comfortable paying a modest premium for a tea produced by sustainable methods by a small farmer-owned cooperative. On the other hand, one might be more likely to label a tea as overpriced if one knew that it had a high markup at the point of sale, with only a negligible portion of the sales price reaching the original producers.

What does overpriced mean to you?

How do you personally think about value, when it comes to tea? Do you look at the quality of the tea alone, or do you consider where the tea came from, and the markup involved at various steps of the sale and distribution of the tea?

Shade Grown Tea vs. Shade Grown Coffee

I recently read a post by Sir William of the Leaf about Shade Grown Tie Guan Yin. This post also references Japanese teas, such as Gyokuro, which are grown in shade for part of their timespan. The shade results in a higher concentration of chlorophyll in the leaf, as the plant tries to adapt to lower-light conditions, giving the leaf a more intense green appearance.

I want to write this article to talk a little bit about the concept of "shade grown", as this concept exists and is frequently used by connoisseurs to refer to both coffee and tea. But these concepts are used rather differently, and it can be misleading to think that they refer to the same thing.

Shade-grown coffee:

Coffee is a relatively shade-tolerant plant; it naturally grows beneath a forest canopy in rainforests. In fact, it is so shade-tolerant that is able to be grown indoors as a houseplant, in northern climates without much sun. Here is my coffee plant:



Even though the coffee plant itself can grow in low-light conditions, it grows faster and produces a greater yield of coffee beans when grown in full sun. In most commercial coffee cultivation, the coffee is grown in a monoculture, in full sun, with just coffee, and nothing else. This practice results in a greater yield of coffee, but there is an ecological cost associated with this practice. Besides the perils associated with monoculture, which I have written about in an earlier post on monoculture, there is another problem, the total yield, in terms of the total biomass, the total productivity of the ecosystem as a whole, is much lower. Another recent post which ties into this is the one on the value of diversity, in which I explain that as a general trend, ecosystems become more productive as a whole, the more biodiversity they have. A monoculture may yield the most coffee, but there is a tremendous loss.

Shade-grown coffee is based around the idea of protecting this biodiversity. The growing of coffee can take many forms. In some cases, the coffee is grown beneath a canopy of trees which produce food crops, such as nuts or fruits. In other cases, the coffee is grown beneath a canopy of wild rainforest trees which are not harvested, and are instead just left to preserve biodiversity and ecological value. This value can be immense. As one small example, many migratory birds use coffee plantations as wintering grounds, and the value of shade-grown coffee plantations as habitat for these birds can be immense, in terms of protecting the population of vulnerable or threatened species. There's a great article about shade grown coffee and migratory birds on the website of the Smithsonian National Zoo. Wikipedia also has an interesting article on shade-grown coffee. Shade-grown agriculture in general, when carried out under a forest canopy, is one of the most sustainable forms of agriculture.

Shade-grown tea is not the same:

If you are like me in your love of nature, you probably got excited reading about shade-grown coffee. Unfortunately, shade-grown tea is not as exciting. When producing "shade-grown" Tie Guan Yin or gyokuro, there is no forest canopy. The tea is grown out in the open in a monoculture, and is grown in full sun for most of the time, and then at a certain point, a screen is put in place to filter out some of the light. While this produces a similar shading effect, in terms of producing biological changes in the plant, resulting in changes in flavor, it provides no additional ecological value, and there is nothing more sustainable about it; if anything, it may even be less sustainable as it raises the cost of production, and the additional sunlight is blocked rather than captured by other plants.

Shade-grown coffee rightfully carries a strong positive connotation of being sustainably produced and protecting ecosystems. Unfortunately, shade-grown tea does not deserve this same connotation. For this reason, I hesitate to call gyokuro or other teas that have been shaded by screens or meshes "shade-grown". I think a more accurate description would be "shaded". "Shade-grown" crops, in common use (everywhere except the tea industry) is associated with the protection of ecosystems and biodiversity by growing a crop under the natural shade of a forest canopy.

Other people are sticklers about terminology, when it comes to things like "herbal tea" vs. "tisane". I find that debate unimportant. The use of the term "shade tolerant" is more important to me because it has real ecological implications. I know that for some time, I was personally misled about gyokuro because I knew so much about shade-grown coffee, and when I saw the "shade-grown" label, I assumed that it meant the same thing, and I was sorely disappointed when I later learned that it did not.

Why can't tea be shade-grown under a forest canopy?

The short answer is that it can, and it already is. The tea plant is a remarkably shade-tolerant plant. Like coffee, the tea plant grows naturally as an understory plant, often under a closed canopy of other trees. Tea grows wild in forests, both naturally, and in areas where forests have been allowed to grow up over former tea plantations. I have had wild harvested tea, harvested from these forests, courtesy of Life in Teacup, and it is delicious!

Can tea be commercially grown under the shade of other plants? I don't know. It is possible that the tea plant is not as shade-tolerant as the coffee plant, but some gardening sources I've read have listed Camellia sinensis as having "excellent" shade tolerance. The source I trust most, Sunset, lists Camellia sinensis as tolerating "partial" shade, but Sunset is particularly conservative on its shade tolerance scale, and is oriented toward U.S. gardeners and many tropical areas have much higher total light levels (It also lists sugar maples as tolerating "partial" shade, and this is one of the most shade-tolerant of U.S. hardwoods). I'm not sure of the degree to which it is carried out, but I know that Makaibari Estate in Darjeeling, as well as numerous other tea gardens, plant trees in their tea crops to provide cover, nitrogen fixing, or protect against pests. However, pictures of these areas seem to suggest that the area is still mostly open and sunny.

Who would buy shade-grown tea, grown under a forest canopy?

Will truly shade-grown tea, grown under a forest canopy, ever become widely available? I have no idea, but I will personally say, I would love to see this happen, and I would gladly pay a steep premium for such a product. And, if it tastes anything like the wild-harvest tea from forests that I tried, I do not think we are going to be disappointed with its flavor either!

Teavana IPO

Marlena of Tea for Today, in her recent post keeping cool, mentioned something about Teavana selling stock, and I looked it up and sure enough, I found that Teavana is planning about an IPO. Another earlier article shows that this has been in the works for a while, although I just learned of it now. (Unfortunately, the Wall Street Journal has taken both of these articles down, so you can only view the headline and a brief excerpt on archive.org now) For those who are not familiar with the world of finance and investing, what this means is that Teavana is going to move from being a privately-held corporation to a publicly-traded one, like most of the world's biggest corporations, with a stock that trades on the stock exchange. It is doing this primarily to raise more money.

This would be the first publicly-traded corporation in contemporary times which is in the business primarily of loose-leaf specialty tea. I say in contemporary times because there is a long history of tea companies in the U.S., UK, and other countries. There are big companies like Unilever, which own numerous brands like Lipton, but there is no way to trade these tea companies or brands on their own. There are also publicly-traded companies, like Peet's, which sells both coffee and tea, or Starbucks, which owns Tazo tea but, similarly, is more in the business of coffee. In today's world, Teavana becoming a publicly traded corporation would make it a first of sorts.

How do you feel about this?

I have complex and mixed feelings about large corporations. They're not all good but not all bad either. I don't like the idea of a single large player dominating the market for specialty tea, but somehow, I don't think there's a very big risk of this happening.

One good thing I can hope for coming out of this is greater transparency. Teavana hasn't exactly been the most transparent organization. Being a publicly traded corporation comes with regulations and responsibilities. It will become more difficult for them to carry out sneaky deals out of the view of the public, like their relationship with SpecialTeas, which has since closed.