Expand this to the British, Irish, & Australians are not judges of good tea, right up to the present day.
It continually amazes me that British tea drinking culture is held up as some sort of epitome to aspire to (usually by US Americans). As this article details well, the great majority of tea consumed in the UK was and continues to be at the very lowest levels of quality (even if it is not widely adulterated as it was in the past). The only places with good tea drinking cultures and where people are judges of good tea are where tea is grown and has been grown for centuries. That is China, Japan and Taiwan. (And to a much lesser degree, India and Sri Lanka).
Familiarity counts for a lot. I'm English, and I enjoy a variety of "fine" teas. I used to be a frequent shopper at this place [0] when I lived in the area. But none of it gives me the enjoyment I get from a strong cup of cheap black tea (PG Tips) with milk and two sugars. It's the familiarity, associations with my childhood, drinking tea on a Sunday afternoon at my grandparents, and so on.
I suppose it's similar to how I sometimes crave a cold cheap lager on a hot day rather the red wine or "fine" beer I usually go for. Cheap lager is what I drank when I was a student and it has positive associations for me. It has very little to do with my capacity for discriminating between good quality beer and low quality rubbish — just that sometimes a pint of gnat's piss really hits the spot.
People's tastes vary. There’s no definitive measure of quality better or worse way to enjoy something like tea. British tea tastes may be different to what you appreciate, but that’s nobody’s problem but yours.
This is a good point - there's very little objectivity in "quality" when it comes to flavour, as theoretically some group of individuals could prefer a bitterer/sweeter/sharper tea than others. It's often cited that the taste of chocolate favoured throughout the world is very regional e.g., but clearly in some places this could be due to the quantity of some cheap ingredient such as sugar. Quality of inputs, or the method of growing etc. are probably more quantifiable.
There is some considerable precedent for it though.
This was an age when many things at average and cheaper prices were adulterated. There were assorted ways of reusing tea and coffee by adding spices and chemicals to once used remains, not just the example discussed. Even expensive was no guarantee of purity as few could tell when something had been adulterated, or often what pure and fresh was meant to taste like. Things aged and changed taste considerably in the weeks or months on ship - there's a few coffees and teas that still try and simulate this effect - Monsooned Malabar is one well known one.
Bread used to contain alum, chalk and other things to bulk and colour it. So did sugar, flour, pepper, well, you name it. Adulteration remained endemic, both sides of the Atlantic until food legislation and associated testing started to arrive in the later 19th century.
Yet tea drinking - almost exclusively black tea from India when it arrived in quantity - which became a huge part of Indian trade, took off. At the better end this developed into a culture was more than had existed in India or China. Emphatically not better, more and different - it was a combination of British and tea drinking from China or India. Rather like Chicken Tikka has almost become the staple British dish - that is a combination of British and Indian today. Like the cliche obsession with making the perfect espresso today, a couple of decades ago every Brit had an opinion on how to make a decent cup of tea. Clearly this has to start with ignoring tea bags entirely, or you will get what you deserve. :)
I will very quietly note that getting a decent cup of tea in any of my US visits proved possible, but damn it was hard work. :)
American cans of 'grated parmesan cheese' often contain up to 4% sawdust, presumably to prevent clumping. They sometimes don't contain parmesan cheese either. Its a big scandal.
In China, the most luxurious tea is grown from 6 very trees named Da Hong Pao[0].
> Da Hong Pao can sell for up to US$1,025,000 per kilogram
And those 6 trees were bought insurance by the local government for 100 million RMB (~=15 million USD).
The name of Da Hong Pao means the emperor's red robe. In the most productive year, those trees only grow hundreds of o grams of tea.
There's also an interesting section in the Chinese version Wikipedia:
When Nixon visited China in the 1970s, Mao gave him 200g Da Hong Pao as present. Actually, that's half of the annual production.
Turkey grows lovely tea too, especially around the Rize area on the Black Sea and has a long culture of tea preparation and drinking. In fact Turkey has one of the highest per capita tea consumption in the world (allegedly the highest before the UK)
Yes, I read a little about Turkey's tea production after I made that comment. Knew that it had a big tea drinking culture but didn't know before today that the country also grew tea. Now I learn that it is one of the world's major producers (but almost all for domestic consumption, not export).
I can imagine that those mountains that rise sharply behind the Black Sea coast could produce a good tea growing micro-climate.
p.s. It occurred to me after writing the above comment that it should be possible to grow tea in the British Isles and I now learn that there is a plantation in Cornwall which has been producing since 2005. [1] It's a wonder that tea cultivation wasn't attempted in Georgian England when prices were so high, seeing as they went to so much trouble establishing plantations in far-away Assam. Anyway, it's good to know that tea is now being grown in Britain.
I'm not familiar with the history of tea cultivation in Indonesia, or its tea culture. If you know of a good overview I'd be interested in reading it.
One country I neglected to reference and which should be listed ahead of India and Sri Lanka is Vietnam. Here is a good overview of that country's history of tea cultivation and its present state:
It's not that amazing if you think about it: a culture fostered around anything doesn't mean that something has to be particularly and objectively good. Consider Pop music for example. Also with modern technology and distribution channels, there's nothing to stop brits from getting good at critiquing tea. Full disclosure: I'm a British expat, but I know a logical fallacy when I see one!
The poor in the article though had it very different. They couldn't order a new tea online, nor trivially discuss tasting notes with people in China, Japan or Taiwan for example; I think that's worth noting.
The amazing part isn't that British tea is bad, but that it nonetheless is upheld as a great tea culture by some other countries, as the parent points out.
I once read about the introduction of chai tea to India by the British, they had to convince the native population to acquire a new habit. Generally they used to drink spiced coffee rather than tea.
"gaol". On this side we write "jail" but we pronounce it much the same.
It wasn't long ago that Celestial Seasonings was caught adulterating their concoctions (technically, "tisanes") with toxic ingredients. A reference to the incident may be heard in Scott Pilgrim vs The World, when Mona Flowers lists off what kinds of tea (and tisanes) she has. Listen carefully, enough times, and you will hear "liver damage" listed among the choices.
You rarely see gaol anywhere but in old books and articles on this side of the pond either. Perhaps that's why it's mispelled "goal" in this article — the spellchecker "fixed" it wrong.
Expand this to the British, Irish, & Australians are not judges of good tea, right up to the present day.
It continually amazes me that British tea drinking culture is held up as some sort of epitome to aspire to (usually by US Americans). As this article details well, the great majority of tea consumed in the UK was and continues to be at the very lowest levels of quality (even if it is not widely adulterated as it was in the past). The only places with good tea drinking cultures and where people are judges of good tea are where tea is grown and has been grown for centuries. That is China, Japan and Taiwan. (And to a much lesser degree, India and Sri Lanka).