Review Tea

In China, India, and other East Asian countries, tea has been around for thousands of years, inspiring various legends, rituals, and symbolism about its origins and properties.

In the West, it wasn’t imported until the early 1600s. Familiar to all of Europe by 1700, tea became particularly popular in Britain, spawning a tea ritual nearly as entrenched in British society as the famous tea ceremonies of Japan. The drink spread to the American colonies at around the same time, and became indirectly responsible for the American Revolution when taxation of tea became a focal point for American resentments of British legislation. Though it’s been supplanted to some extent by coffee, tea still does a brisk business in both West and East, with more than 2.5 million tons produced yearly.

All teas come from the same plant

Camellia sinensis, to be exact. There are different varieties in different regions, but green, black, white, and oolong teas could all be produced from a single bush (theoretically, anyhow). Essentially, the difference is in the number of steps involved in the drying process. All types of tea begin with a period of sun-drying, or “withering,” that gets rid of about 60% of the moisture in the fresh leaves. Here the procedure stops for white tea, the most expensive and least processed variety. Leaves destined to become black, green, or oolong tea are rolled mechanically, which damages the leaves slightly and brings out the finer touches of flavor.

Next, oxidation occurs as the rolled leaves are exposed to warm humid air, allowing oxygen to react with various chemicals in the leaf. This darkens the color, strengthens the taste, and produces caffeine, but it also increases the tannin content, giving oxidized tea a more bitter cast. The chemical reaction is stopped by “firing” the tea, or roasting it in a pan; green tea is fired almost immediately after rolling, leaving it only a very short time to oxidize. Black tea is allowed to oxidize fully, making it the strongest and most caffeinated tea, and oolong tea is oxidized somewhere between green and black tea, with the exact stopping point dependent on the manufacturer.

Herbal tea is not tea, really

As you just learned, all tea comes from Camellia sinensis – but what about the tea that doesn’t? What about mint tea, chamomile tea, that gross berry-tea you love and everything else?

A simple answer is that these beverages should more properly be called “tisanes” or herbal infusions, to distinguish them from the products of the tea plant. They are quite possibly older than agriculture itself, and certainly existed in Europe long before the importation of Asian tea. To further the confusion, herbs and dried fruit are also often blended with green and black teas to make a nice flavored tea.

Teabags tend to make bad tea

According to Wissotzky Tea, the teabag was inadvertently invented by one Thomas Sullivan, a New York merchant who used to send tea samples to his customers in white silk bags. The ability to brew tea without special apparatus opened up a whole new market and made mass consumption of tea possible.

However, tea makers soon figured out a way to take advantage of this new custom. The paper filters meant that tea dust and fannings, waste normally discarded as part of the manufacturing process, could now be used in teabags. The leaves didn’t taste as good, but they made a strong and quick cup of tea, thanks to the increased surface area provided by the tiny broken leaves. And so teabags became a haven for low-quality leaves.

Today, the tea that goes into teabags is produced via an entirely mechanical process known as CTC (Crush, Tear, Curl), which dries the leaves and shreds them into minute pieces. This method is a good way for tea manufacturers to get the most taste out of a lower quality leaf, but it destroys the flavor.

Better is cheaper

The good stuff is loose, whole-leaf tea, which is processed by hand in the manner described in the second section. Be careful, though – once you try good loose tea, it’s hard to go back to supermarket teabags. The good news is that high-quality tea doesn’t necessarily mean a high-quality drain on your wallet.

Let’s compare. Twinings, a reputable supermarket brand, sells its basic green tea on Amazon in packs of six boxes of 50 teabags for $30.37. This translates to $5.06 per box and $1.43 per ounce. Not bad, in the grand scheme of things, though you’d probably pay a bit more in-store. However, Adagio.com, a popular web-based tea merchant, sells a whole-leaf Japanese green tea called Kukicha for $1.19 per ounce! Admittedly, Kukicha is one of Adagio’s cheapest green teas; on the high side they go up to 5.56 per ounce. But this cheap loose green is still worlds away from the average bagged tea, and (no lie) you’ll be able to tell the difference from the very first sip.

I haven’t been able to determine how high-quality loose tea could be cheaper than low-quality bagged tea, but I suspect it has something to do with two factors: the amount of manufacturing necessary to make commercial teabags, and the lower demand for loose tea. Whatever the reason, I like it. Plus, the rain forest likes the fact I don’t use and discard paper teabags.

The health benefits are overrated

Various media sources have been touting tea, and green tea in particular, as a cure-all for maladies from obesity to cancer. I won’t cite any sources, since there seems to be a new study every week, but there does seem to be a definite association between tea consumption and lower rates of certain diseases.

However, what the media reports often neglect to mention is how much tea one has to drink to get even these relatively mild benefits. One 2006 study that found significantly lower rates of cardiovascular disease in tea-drinkers had its participants drink five or more cups of tea per day. Some other studies had the subjects take a tea extract in pill form instead of drinking actual tea. Now, I enjoy my tea, but on a good day my little Western self doesn’t get above three cups; feel free to draw your own conclusions. And taking tea extract would surely just extract all the fun right out of it.

So, in other words, don’t drink cup after cup of bitter supermarket bagged tea in order to chase after a highly speculative miracle cure. Instead, drink one or two cups of light, sweet, delicious loose-leaf tea, and enjoy it every sip of the way.

“Tea.” on Wikipedia.

“The History of Tea.” Wissotzky Tea.

Kuriyama, et al. “Green Tea Consumption and Mortality Due to Cardiovascular Disease, Cancer, and All Causes in Japan.” Journal of the American Medical Association.