Caffeine and... Not Tea

A while back, I was doing some research on caffeine and tea. I happened upon a blog about caffeine obsession called Energy Fiend. It had a particularly funny entry on the lack of information on the caffeine contents of various energy drinks. It made me wonder (once again) when more tea companies will start providing (accurate) information on their teas caffeine contents. (Few do at present.) I've heard horror stories of tearoom and tea shop employees telling customers that white tea and yerba mate have no caffeine and that black tea has "a whole lot" of caffeine. On a less extreme level, I've also heard people say that black tea always has more caffeine than green (not true), that tea always has less caffeine than coffee (also untrue), and that no tisanes have caffeine (yerba mate and tisanes with cocoa content both do). It's things like this that make me glad I'm a tea educator. Perhaps someday people can go to tearooms without fear of getting the wrong story altogether! Ah, what a nice dream...

Darjeeling

Today I visited Happy Valley Tea Estate and The Mayfair Hotel, and I learned a lot about tea politics.

After a breakfast of momos, I walked down the mountain a bit to Happy Valley Tea Estate. Happy Valley is not particularly known for its tea, but the estate itself is in most of the India guidebooks because it is so convenient to Darjeeling proper and because (until recently) it offered tours of the field and factory. I navigated winding roads, narrow paths between houses and sharp drops, slippery stone stairs, and a rocky trail through the estate grounds to find a group of men milling about outside the factory. I asked them if I could take a tour and (after some discussion amongst them in Nepali) a young man stepped forward, eyes darting about. Halfway through the "tour," I discovered that the tours had been discontinued and that I wasn't supposed to be there without permission from the manager. "May I see the manager and ask him?" "No. He has seen you with me already. He'll be angry." So, I didn't get to see the factory and the information on the fields was limited. However, I did learn Lesson One: Always ask who is in charge.

After the "tour," I stopped by the "cafe," which is actually a tiny house with a snack stand operating out of the kitchen and a "tearoom" in the bedroom. I drank Happy Valley tea, which is "the world's best tea" ... or so I'm told by the woman selling it. Her reasoning? "It brews in only five seconds." I know what you're thinking, right? "No way." Well, let me tell you this: It DID brew in only five seconds. Maybe even less. And it tasted pretty good. How is that possible? She used about 1/2 cup of FTGFOP1S (Special Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe Top Grade) tealeaves per cup of water. ... Yes, really. The other tourists in the room with me were eating it up. Lesson Two: Don't believe everything you're told, especially if you're a tourist.

Over the course of my visit to Happy Valley, I spoke with several employees. Each one told me, in no uncertain terms, that Happy Valley is, well, not so happy these days. They USED to be, but a recent change in management has caused a lot of strife. Complaints ranged from bureaucracy and hipocracy to cuts in sick days (from 14 days per year to 3 days per year if I remember correctly). Lesson Three: "Our names are labels, plainly printed on the bottled essence of our PAST behavior." (Empahsis added.) I hope things get better soon.

After the trek to (Un)Happy Valley, I walked back up the big hill to The Mayfair Hotel for afternoon tea. Just as I was starting to feel very cynical about tea in Darjeeling, by luck, I was recognized and caught by Nalin Modha, a tea professional who was the youngest estate manager in the entire Indian tea industry. Over tea (with freshly baked butter cookies and cucumber sandwiches) and (later on) dinner (which was delicious and enormous), I learned Lessons Four through Four-Hundred from Nalin. We talked about tea education, workers' health, the tea market, the ecosystem, and numerous other things related to tea and (generally) to politics. He's very knowledgable and I am glad to have run into him here. Tomorrow, I'll be meeting him to see some of the surrounding area. Exciting!

Samples: My Green Tea

No, it's not MY green tea. It's a sample from the Expo called "My Green Tea." (It's like "Leggo my Eggo!" and "Nut 'n Honey" commercials wrapped into one magic little name. To bad it's not a breakfast food aimed at obese suburban children.) Let me tell you up front: My Green Tea is fancy for a bagged tea. It comes in a hemishperically-sealed (I don't even know what that means) laminated foil pouch that has been filled with a shot of nitrogen to remove any active gases. That way it's extra fresh when you open it. The bag is decent-sized and made of polyester mesh and the tag is pH neutral and ulrasonically welded to a polyester thread. All that for one little bag of genmai-matcha. Wait, did I just say "genmai-matcha?" That's what the package says, but . . . that's not what I just drank. Genmai-matcha would be toasted rice with matcha (fine, powdered, shade-grown green tea). What I drank was toasted rice with broken-, dust-, and fanning-grade green tea (perhaps shade-grown, perhaps not). So . . . basically it's a cheap tea pretending to be a good tea and overcompensating for the fact that it ISN'T by having absurdly teched-out packaging.

I will give it this. It said, "enjoy our tea with your soul," and that made me laugh. A lot. Not only is it a mediocre tea at best, packaged in a way that is (dare I say) soulless, but you just said that it's MY mediocre, soulless tea and mow you're trying to say it's YOURS. Unh-unh, I don't think so! (OK, OK, you can have it back. I don't REALLY care that much.)

Yeah. That laugh was the best part about it. It came from My Soul. Er, I mean, my soul.

Samples: Tzu The T-Bag

Tzu The sells a type of bagged tea that is labeled as "100% Natural Full Leaf Green Tea." I got a sample of it at the World Tea Expo. The packaging looks good, until you actually read it. It touts the EGCG content of the "green tea" (What kind??? I don't know!!!) and includes brewing instructions that call for boiling water (learn about appropriate water temperatures for brewing tea) and suggest steeping for 10-15 minutes (Why would you want to do that? Too bad they didn't read How to Brew Tea.). The tea itself isn't bad. It comes in a pyramid-shaped silk mesh bag and it is (as the packaging says) full leaf. It wasn't gross, but I wouldn't serve it to anyone.

I hope that this kind of marketing and misinformation isn't as common as I fear it may be.

PS--OMG. As I went to post this, I decided to check out their website. I realized that NOT ONLY is it printed incorrectly on their packaging (they left out a dash between "Tzu" and "The"), but they sell energy bars with green tea and "beer" (actually just brewer's yeast, but they say "beer"). They also provide information like this, "The secret of green tea lies in the fact it is rich in catechin polyphenols, particularly epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). EGCG is a powerful natural anti-oxidant only found in Green Tea. Green tea contains more catechins and vitamins than other fermented tea, such as oolong tea and black tea." The secret? I thought it was the thing that was discussed the most about green tea on AM talk shows. When will people realize that EGCG is not the only good thing about tea? I wish people would stop with this fad diet junk. Besides, white tea probably has more of it than green tea*, "fermented" is not the correct word (it should say "oxidized"), and, anyway, Oolong is only semi-oxidized. I am so afraid.

*There are more health claims about green tea than white tea because it has been popular for a longer period of time. For this reason, scientists do more research on green tea than white tea. We'll have to wait and see for sure if white tea has more EGCG than green, but white tea is higher in most other catechins, so I wouldn't be at all surprised.