A very popular beverage made of plant leaves of (Camellia Senescence) the botanical name for the tea plant. Brewed worldwide by placing these leaves or a filter bag with some of them into a near boiling cup of water to make an infusion. Stimulating because Tea contains caffeine, the main difference between green, white, black & oolong comes down to how oxidized they are from fermentation or the heated drying method.
After water, tea is the most consumed beverage in the world. Green tea is barely fermented while black tea is greatly fermented, oolong somewhere in between, semi oxidized. The taste aroma & color vary according to how they are processed. Some have rich smooth roasted flavors, others have subtle bread like flavors & other still have citrus like flavors or mint like or other flavor profiles that I am not good at describing.
Solar weathering start with spreading them out inside a glass greenhouse, where sunlight & heat helps to break down the chlorophyll as oxidation reactions start. Then into a rotating drum to break down the cells & allow more oxygen to oxidize them further until the tea master stops the process. A fixation state occurs inside a rotating heated dryer where the reactions stop. This last step determines the quality of the tea brewed. Workers then shake the tea on a sieve to shake out small particles. Then rolled & needing the leaves inside a bag rolls the little tea leaves up & this processed repeated up to 35 times. At 210 F they are then dried 3x inside a firing oven that helps to bring out the fragrance. 2 teaspoons of tea per cup & you can brew the leaves up to 5 times.
In Chinese, oolong means black dragon, a type of semi-oxidized tea somewhere between green & black styles. This ancient drink goes back thousand of years into the History of China. Trade with other countries to a very limited extent brought tea to other parts of Asia, specifically India where it then spread to Europe & then America.
For many years I have been brewing & drinking green tea & love it! Unlike coffee, the tea not as strong in terms of caffeine & has a less intense more subtle & lovely flavor & aroma. Tea also contains other biochemicals that help to create relaxation that helps to moderate the stimulating effect of the caffeine content.
Tea an aromatic beverage created by pouring hot or boiling water over cured or fresh leaves of the evergreen shrub native to China & other East Asian countries. Known to have cooling, bitter & astringent flavors, tea can also have sweet, nutty, floral or grassy notes. Tea a stimulating beverage because of its caffeine content.
The borderlands between southwestern China & north Burma are suspected to be the real authentic origin place of the parent species of all modern tea cultivars, strains & different kind of tea plants. During the Tang Dynasty tea drinking spread throughout Eastern Asia where Portuguese priests & traders brought Tea back to Europe in the 1500's. In England it became fashionable amongst the elite of the time to drink tea & because of their trade & empire reach into India, many Tea plantations were setup in India.
Not all Tea made with Tea plant leaves. I was just drinking a cup of mint tea. Rosehips, camomile, rooibos & other non tea plant tea's are common alternatives & many are caffeine free & safe to drink at night. I drink Tension Tamer & Sleepy Time tea & camomile tea at night to help me sleep sometimes. These are known as herbal infusions or herbal tea & may but often do not contain any actual tea plant leaves.
Reported to have numerous health benefits, too much tea consumption can cause sleep disorders because of the caffeine contents negative effect on sleep quality or sleep architecture. See adenosine antagonism in biochemistry to understand why. Essentially caffeine a wakefulness promoting agent by blocking the adenosine receptor sites in the CNS. Thats a crude summary & to call Tea or Coffee caffeine misses the much broader picture of the culture & flavor & experiential joy of enjoying these warm beverage early in the morning, a huge part of a shared human experience of live on Earth worldwide & something that gives a thread of something that many people have in common.
Word origin for tea reflective of how tea plants were transferred across the world via trade with China. Three broad groups of words define the "Tea" origin, te, cha & chai (English tea, cha, char, chai) "Cha" was the first word transferred via Portuguese Priests trading in Macao who derived the Cantonese pronunciation of "Cha". Later in history the Dutch indirectly absorbed Malay "teh" & or from the Min Chinese word "te" the later "chai" word meant "spiced tea" originated from the Northern Chinese pronunciation of of "Cha", which was transmitted across central Asia into what is now Iran in then the Persian Empire where the ending sound "yi" was added giving us Tea with a long e sound like "teeee" on the end in English today :)
Native to Eastern Asia in the borderlands of north Burma & southwestern China. Small-leaf types C. sinensis var. sinensis came from southern China where it hybridized with other cultivars that grew wild, producing many strains of Tea plants today. The history regarding the proliferation of tea cultivars still clouded in history due to a lack of written records documenting with biologically specific naming from this era & time, or a lack of surviving evidence if any records did exist.
Genetic analysis of distinctive clade of Tea show that Assamica derives from southern Yunnan (Xishuangbanna, Pu'er City" & from western Yunnan (Lincang, Baoshan). A great variety of tea varieties were hybrids with Camilla Taliensis & Assam. Other versions of tea plants came from Indo-Burna & Tibet, though the independent genomes of tea from India shows no common parent species from China & probably resulted from cross breeding Assam with Pubicosta strains. A single generation of Tea takes more than 10 years. Thus small leaf Chinese tea probably became genetically distinctive from Assam around 20,000 years ago, corresponding with the last glacial maximum (ice age)
An evergreen shrub that mainly grow in tropical & subtropical areas, some are tolerant of growing in marine climate as far north as Cornwall in England, Perthshire in Scotland, Washington in the USA, & Vancouver Island in Canada. Tea is cultivated as far south at Hobart in Tasmania & Waikato in New Zealand. Propagated from both seeds & cuttings, the Tea plant requires between 4 & 12 years to bear seeds & once a new plant established about 3 years before leaf harvesting can begin. Tea plants quires 50 in (127 cm) annual rainfall & grow better in acidic soils. Most of the best Tea grown at high elevations above sea level in mountainous stepped hill sides, where they grow slower buy with better flavors produced thereby.
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