Excerpt. © Reprinted by
permission of Ten Speed Press. All rights reserved.
Introduction:
The Glorious World of Tea
How times have changed! Premium tea is enjoying the
spotlight today in ways unimagined just a few short
years ago. Until the 1990s, retail purveyors of
premium tea in the United States could be counted on
one hand, and specialty food stores stocked just a
tame selection of humdrum black tea blends. At best,
these selections were marked by country of origin,
with perhaps a simple attribution to style of tea or
country of production. Unlike today, little detailed
information was available to tea drinkers, and most
people did not even know what questions to ask. For
many, tea was, well, not very exciting, but something
that you could count on Grandma to have on hand.
Today, we are learning how enticing and pleasingly
distinctive premium tea really is. Tea can be subtle
and alluring, bold and bracing, sweet and fresh, young
and full of vigor, or rich and matured. It is always
fragrant and welcoming at all times. Premium teas once
unknown in the West are now becoming familiar, and new
tea shops and tea houses are opening for business
across the country. For tea enthusiasts, this offers a
superb opportunity to travel the world of tea one
delicious cup at a time.
Crafting fine tea requires a highly developed sense of
perception for touch, sight, and sound that no machine
can replicate. And every tea—from Taiwan’s Ali Shan
High Mountain gao shan oolong to a brisk and bright
Ceylon black tea from the Nuwara Eliya region of Sri
Lanka—tells a story in the cup about the soil and air
that nurtured it and the tea-making skills that
transformed and shaped it.
So get ready to explore the world of premium tea, with
information to decipher tea lists, tea labels, and tea
menus and to purchase a varied selection of wonderful
and delicious tea with assurance.
About Our Book
In our thirty-five years as retailers of premium tea,
we have been asked just about every possible question
regarding tea, tea steeping, and tea storage. We have
kept these questions in mind as we approached the
topics in our book.
Right up front, let us say that we define tea in the
classic, historic sense as a caffeinated beverage
brewed from the leaf of the Camellia sinensis bush.
While it is commonplace today to refer to
noncaffeinated, herbal beverages such as peppermint,
chamomile, and lavender as “tea,” we believe that such
beverages should be called by other, more appropriate
names, such as herbal teas, herbal infusions, or
tisanes. Many of these beverages are delicious and
refreshing, but they lie outside the scope of our
book, and we leave discussion of them to others.
The world’s best teas comprise a tiny percentage of
the yearly worldwide production of tea. Yet to us,
these teas are the most significant. Therefore, our
book focuses its attention on pure, unblended, premium
teas from the tea-producing countries that have made
the greatest contributions to the art and science of
tea cultivation and manufacture: China, Japan, India,
Sri Lanka, and Taiwan. As a result of learning,
observing the results, and perfecting their techniques
in the tea factories, generations of tea masters in
these countries have created the most stunning teas
imaginable.
We believe that learning as much as possible about tea
and the process of artisan tea manufacture will
heighten your enjoyment of each cup you steep. We hope
you take delight in our journey through the vibrant
world of tea.
A Simple Cup of Tea Is No Simple Matter
Tea is an essential beverage that quenches the
collective thirst of millions of people every day.
Whereas tea was once grown only in China, today tea is
cultivated in forty-one (and counting!) countries of
the world, and new tea industries are developing as
worldwide demand increases for more various types of
tea.
Tea drinking has never gone out of fashion—it has
simply changed course and usage with each new
generation of tea drinkers. Tea, the most widely
consumed beverage on the planet after water, still
proudly maintains its title as the world’s oldest
beverage. Tea is a wonderfully intricate and complex
commodity. There are said to be approximately twenty
thousand different distinctions of tea made in the
world, a vast number by anybody’s count. Yet, no two
teas ever taste exactly alike, and every great tea has
a distinctive, trademark flavor. You might even say
that tea has a cultural identity.
Yet, all tea is made from the fresh leaf of the
Camellia sinensis bush, and its three major varieties:
Camellia sinensis var. sinensis (small-leaf China
bush)
Camellia sinensis var. assamica (large-leaf Assam
bush)
Camellia sinensis var. cambodi (medium-leaf Java bush)
Additionally, in parts of Burma (known today as
Myanmar), China, India, Laos (officially Lao People’s
Democratic Republic), Thailand, and Vietnam, strains
of indigenous tea bushes and old tea trees coexist
with hundreds of local cultivars that have been
developed to better meet the needs of tea growers in
their specific environments. Since all tea starts as
freshly plucked leaf, it is theoretically possible to
turn any fresh tea leaf into any of the six classes of
tea: green, yellow, white, oolong, black, and Pu-erh.
But tea manufacture is a precise, controlled, and
predictable process, and in most tea-producing
countries, tea producers focus on only one or two
classes of tea. Japan, for instance, produces
primarily green teas, but they are very distinctive
and taste like no other green teas in Asia. On the
other hand, China, the country that unlocked the
secrets of tea making and established the
manufacturing process for each of the six classes of
tea, is the only country that produces all six classes
of tea.
What explains the seemingly endless selection of tea
available for sale in grocery stores and tea shops?
The answer is terroir, or place. Terroir
is the culmination of all the reasons why, for
example, Chinese green teas are so different from
Japanese green teas. The same forces that work to
create all of the wonderful wines and cheese that are
so distinctive and appealing are also at work in every
tea garden around the world. Terroir is not
just about the place where a plant grows, but also
includes numerous other influences that are
responsible for the variation in tea. Let’s take a
look at all of them.
Terroir: Why Tea Is Unique
This word terroir has meaning that can fill volumes.
By its most simple definition, terroir refers to the
place where the roots of a bush or tree or plant
nestle into the ground, and the effects that a
distinctive environment, including geography, climate,
and weather, contributes to the unique character and
taste of a food.
However, our visits to tea-producing countries have
shown us that other unique particulars also contribute
to the overall effects of terroir and the
distinctive differences among teas. These include the
subvariety or cultivar of tea bush (generally,
subvarieties are naturally occuring and cultivars are
the result of human intervention), cultivation
practices, the season of the pluck, the method of leaf
manufacture, and the craft of tea making.
Tea that is grown in the high, thin air of the
Himalaya in eastern Nepal will invariably taste
different than tea that is grown in the low-lying,
hot, and humid river valley region of Assam, India.
What is it like where the particular tea bushes grow?
Do the bushes go dormant over the winter or produce
new leaf year-round? Are there weather conditions such
as monsoon seasons or frost that affect the leaf and
subsequently the taste of the tea?
Terroir can have a large connotation, such as tea from
India or tea from China, or it can refer to a small,
specific geographic connotation, such as tea from the
Huang Shan in Anhui Province, China. Terroir
distinguishes between locations within the same
country as well as between countries.
When we look at all of the tea produced in the regions
of any one tea-producing country, we see a composite
of teas from north and south, coastal areas, and
inland regions. Each terroir has specific tea bush
cultivars that contribute leaf of a particular
character and style to the teas made in that region.
When the elements of place are distinctive and strong,
they conspire to keep a particular tea from being able
to be duplicated in exactly the same way in other
places. The sum total of all of the unique places and
teas in any one tea-producing country combines to
create the collective regional or national character.
Tea Bush Subvarieties and Cultivars
Three main varieties of Camellia sinensis (and
thousands of subvarieties and cultivars) flourish in
tea gardens around the world. It is important that a
tea bush variety is planted in a place where that bush
will thrive. The foibles of the English in the
nineteenth century when they first attempted to
cultivate tea in India are a perfect example of what
happens when the wrong tea bush variety is chosen for
a given location. What many may not realize is that
the tea bush variety works with terroir to
provide the backbone style and to influence the flavor
of the tea.
In China, several tea-producing regions in the
provinces of Fujian, Guangdong, and Yunnan have native
strains of tea bushes and tea trees (some are
centuries old) that are not found elsewhere on earth.
The fresh leaf from these indigenous varieties is
responsible for much of the unique character of the
tea from these regions. If you compare tea that is
made from old tea tree leaf with one made from the
leaf of a modern tea bush cultivar planted nearby, the
difference in taste and aroma is quite noticeable.
Tea bush varieties and cultivars look different from
one another, too, which means that they act
differently during manufacture. Some bu...
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Mary
Lou Heiss and Robert J. Heiss, authors of the James Beard
and IACP-nominated The Story of Tea, announce the
publication of their second book on tea: The Tea
Enthusiast’s Handbook: A Guide to Enjoying the World’s
Best Teas. 
