❤ LOVE LOCAL ❤
A cup of tea solves EVERYTHING
EVERYBODY LOVES A CUPPA, BUT WHERE DOES IT COME FROM? AND CAN IT REALLY SOLVE EVERYTHING?
T
ea was created more than 5000 years ago in China when, legend has it, the Chinese emperor Shen Nung sampled an accidental
concoction created when some leaves blew into his boiled water. Whether that is true or not, we will probably never know, but what we do know for certain is that fast forward to today, and Britain is head over heels in love with tea. In fact, we love it so much that we drink 165 million cups of the stuff every day – that’s the equivalent of 60.2 billion each year! While tea made its way over here in the mid 1600s it is still grown across the world in China, Japan, India and Africa where the warm, and humid climate helps it to grow. We spoke to John Halls, director of
West Country tea merchants DJ Miles, to fi nd out how they go about selecting tea from all over the world for their blends.
How do you select the tea that goes into your blends?
We always taste the tea. Samples are sent in through tea brokers from around the world who know the sort of tea we like to buy. We have a tea tasting room here in Somerset and we make sure that every single one is tasted. We will taste many, many teas each week, looking for the occasional one that we think has added value for us.
How does the tasting process work? We use a tea tasting set, which consists of a pot, a lid and a bowl. We lay the sets out in a row – we might have 12 or more at a time. Each tea sample is accurately weighed using scales and we use our special copper kettle to pour in boiling water to the very top of each pot and place the lids on with the hole facing away from the handle.
We then time the tea brewing for six minutes before draining the pots into the bowls leaving the infused leaf behind in the pot. We look at the colour of the tea before tasting. We taste using a spoon and slurping the tea into the mouth. We are mostly looking for strength if tasting an Assam tea and fl avour if the tea is from Africa. We would not have just a single tea on our batch because we like to compare one tea to another. We will usually mix new teas that we are tasting with standards that we have seen or bought in the past.
What happens next? If we fi nd that we like a tea on the batch we will make an offer to buy it from our broker. The tea is still in its country of origin at this time, and so it will be a few months before it is with us in England.
30 | THE WEST COUNTRY FOODLOVER
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