Below you find a loosely adapted transcript, computer generated & lightly edited, from the aforementioned Modern Marvels episode- that you can watch on YouTube via
https://youtu.be/az5lkJD_MMA
Mass produced by the billion and handled with the care and attention of fine wine. After water, it's the second most popular drink worldwide. Quenching the world's thirst, tea has raised and wrecked empires. A drink of the ancient past and the trendy future. It's a delicate leaf renowned for its ability to stimulate and soothe.
Little tea leaves have played a significant role in the history of human civilization, initiation revolution, igniting war, all while reshaping ecosystems and landscapes across the world. The phenomenal human thirst for tea results in 1/2 trillion cups of tea consumed annually. Tea a mystery drink full of paradoxical qualities that are the essence of its appeal. If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are warm, tea will cool you. If you are excited, tea will soothe you. If you are lethargic, tea will stimulate you.
The history of tea, and the taste of tea and the vast array of different types of teas, and different manufacturing styles, and flavors, aromas, textures, colors, characteristics of tea are such that it speaks to us. Once you are exposed to tea, you want to learn more about tea. You want to taste more tea. You want to experience more tea.
Tea is a major cash crop in dozens of countries around the world, especially in Indonesia, China, India, Kenya, and Argentina. But if you want to find it in North America, you have to visit the Charleston Tea Plantation on Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina. There exists a 127 acre tea farm including a nursery for developing new bushes and an on-site factory that convert freshly picked tea leaf into black tea sold throughout the South under the American Classic label.
South Carolina and Hawaii are the only places in the US that have the kind of semitropical, high rainfall climate needed for growing tea. The tea plant enjoys high temperature and high humidity. Charleston, SC has that kind of weather during the summer, so the tea plants thrives very well in this location. The Charleston Tea Plantation has a long and noble history. Tea bushes can live hundreds of years. And the thousands of bushes here are all seeded and cloned from Chinese plants that were imported to Charleston over 200 years ago. These plants date back to the first tea plants brought to America back in 1799 by a French botanist by the name of Andre Michaud who brought these plants from the Far East.
The original bushes were planted about an hour's drive from Charleston. These plants produced commercial tea until that plantation went out of business in 1915. The Lipton Tea Company bought the bushes, which it continued to grow on their own, and replanted cuttings here in 1960 as part of a research and development farm. When Lipton decided to shut the farm down in 1987, the Bigelow Tea Company acquired it, a one of a kind gem of a tea plantation that the president of Bigelow though would be impossible to see disappear. The Charleston plantation provides just a fraction of the tea consumed in the US.
Americans drink 50 billion servings of tea a year, which sounds like a lot but is itself just a fraction of what the rest of the world drinks. Tea is only the sixth most popular drink in the US, after water, coffee, soft drinks, alcohol, and bottled water. As the number two drink worldwide, tea is harvested in enormous quantities. Billion of pounds of tea are produced every year. And it takes 5 pounds of tea, raw leaf tea, to make 1 pound of finished tea. That means many more billion of pounds of tea have to be picked throughout the world, mostly by hand.
Commercial tea is usually farmed on vast plantations, like the one owned by Unilever in Kenya, that stretches over 27,000 acres, employing 24,000 people, at numerous factories on site. Tea is also cultivated on thousands of smaller family farms, especially in China where tea farming began millennia ago and where tea processing as well as farming is still frequently done by hand.
There are three major types of tea-- black, green, and oolong. Few people outside the tea business realize that all three types come from the same plant, Camellia Sinensis, which is the only tea plant in the world and is indigenous to China, India, and Thailand. Like wine, there are an estimated 1,500 varietals of tea with endless varying qualities based on soil and climate. And some are more suited to make one kind of tea over another. The real differences between black, green, and oolong are created after the leaf has been picked.
The first step in making any kind of tea is called withering. The leaves are placed on a withering bed where they lie for ~18 hours. Freshly plucked tea is ~80% moisture. That percentage has to come down to exactly 68%. If the moisture were too low, it would not make a fine quality tea because the enzymes have overbuilt inside the leaf. If they're not withered enough, they haven't built to the sufficient amount to give that full bodied flavor people enjoy when they drink a cup of hot tea or iced tea.
At industrial or commercial tea factories, large fans accelerate the drying process and make sure the leaves wither equally. The fans ultimately blow and suck air for an hour at a Tim through hundreds of holes in the withering bed. Without the fans, the leaves in the middle would turn red and spoil. After withering, the leaf is conveyed to a shredding machine, called a rotorvane where the tea will be ripped into pieces small enough to fit into a teabag. Not just a question of size of the tea particles. Shredding is crucial, because it tears open the cell walls of the leaf, which allows the tea to oxidize.There are many ways to break open the cell walls, including a number of traditional rolling methods still popular in China. Traditional tea manufacturing in China also doesn't require fans because it involves much smaller amounts of tea.
Rotorvane and other mechanical device are widely used when working with large amounts of leaf. Inside this rotorvane, stationary fingers, called vanes and rotors that go around pressing the tea against these vanes to rupture that cell wall and expose the tea juices. The objective to have every cell wall broken so those juices are exposed to the air to create the oxidation in the leaf to turn it from green leaves into black tea. The shredded leaves come out of the rotorvane and onto the oxidation bay.
Oxidation is the defining phase in the process of making black or oolong tea, where tea is going to turn from green to a sort of coppery orange color, and this is where the miracle of tea takes place, where all the flavor is built, and where most of the quality comes from. Oxidation is the key to making black, oolong, or green tea. If the tea maker cuts the oxidation time in half, then oolong produced, a lighter tea served in most Chinese restaurants. If no oxidation allowed then green tea, the most popular form of tea in Japan, and familiar to anyone who's ever gone to a sushi bar, is thereby produced. Oxidation is stopped by steaming the fresh leaves as soon as they've been harvested as heat neutralizes the enzyme that allows the tea to oxidize and change color.
After steaming, green tea goes through the same process of withering, shredding, and drying as black and oolong tea. Drying the tea lowers the moisture content from 68% to just 2%, any higher moisture content would promote mould formation. The dry tea then goes through a series of shaker sieves to remove impurities like rocks, soil, dirt, and tiny bits of tea plant stem & leaf fiber released the shredding. Static electricity produced by rotation plastic rollers pressed up against felt are used as a filtering method of fine particles & fibers in commercial large scale tea production while traditional small scale tea manufactures employ scores of people to hand remove impurities by plucking the tea leaves & leaving the other gunk behind.
The process of making tea, mostly the same around the world, with variations in technology, is simple but exacting. Tea is made in the field. The quality is produced in the field. All you can do in the tea factory is ruin it or maintain that tea quality. According to legend, the mythical Chinese emperor Shen Nong discovered tea in 2,737 BC when a couple of leaves fell into his drink. For over 3,000 years, China was the only country in the world that drank tea, and its impact on Chinese culture enormous. In China, tea inspires poetry and paintings. And the art of making tea to Chinese people viewed as making a connection with tea where you are bringing the tea back to life.
From the start, tea was perceived as a remarkably healthy drink. Black tea has about 40 milligrams of caffeine per cup, about half as much as a cup of coffee. Its energizing qualities were duly noted, especially by Buddhist monks who used tea to stay alert during meditation. Tea remained a Chinese secret until a monk brought some tea seeds to Japan in the 9th century. Building on Chinese traditions, the Japanese developed elaborate tea ceremonies that eventually became known as Chado, the way of tea. Think of tea as Buddhist communion. We are more attuned to what we are paying attention to and less attuned to distraction when we drink tea. So it's a question of wakeful tranquility. And that's exactly what Buddhism is trying to teach.
The Portuguese and the Dutch were the first to bring tea to Europe at the beginning of the 17th century. Tea came late to England by 1664, and took off. King Charles' Portuguese wife Catherine had fallen in love with the exotic Chinese tea drink in while traveling Lisbon. English aristocrats followed her lead. For a long time, aristocrats were the only ones who could afford tea. It was so heavily taxed, 119% in 1706, that it spawned an enormous black market. By the 1770s, half of the tea in England, an estimated seven million pounds a year, was illegal. Bootleg tea was heavily adulterated, filled with twigs and leaves as well as toxic lead chromate, and even sheep's dung, both of which were used as colorizers.
Smuggling ended when Prime Minister William Pitt finally slashed taxes in 1784. Legal tea was now affordable to everyone. But before that happened, there was a little matter involving tea in the American colonies. In late November and early December 1773, three ships loaded with 342 chests of tea reached Boston Harbor. Bostonians, increasingly touchy about the issue of taxation without representation, refused to let the ships unload. On the evening of December 16, a group of 30 to 60 colonists disguised as Mohawk Indigenous Peoples, broke open the chests and dumped the tea in the Boston harbor. The Boston Tea Party pushed relation between the British crown and the colonies to a boiling point. In less than three years, the Revolutionary War was underway.
Tea, which had been highly fashionable and popular throughout the colonies, was suddenly stigmatized. Tea becomes the ultimate symbol of British tyranny. So it became the thing that American's despised. There were campaigns in the Eastern United States to stop drinking tea in the drawing rooms. John Adams asked at a tavern, would it be lawful for a weary traveler to have a cup of tea provided it has been honestly smuggled? The barmaid said, no sir, we have renounced tea under this roof. I'll get you a cup of coffee.
In England, however, demand for tea continued to soar. To meet demand, the British would build plantations in India, tea plantations that would be modeled on the slave plantations of the American South. The role of tea in the making and breaking of empires inextricably bound up with one of the world's first and most powerful cartels, the British East India Trading Company. The EIC was founded in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I, who gave it a royal monopoly on all trade with the Far East. The East India Company would become the backbone of the emerging British empire. And tea, which eventually accounted for a third of its profits, would become the backbone of the EIC. By the start of the 19th century, tea was the third most heavily shipped commodity in the world, behind iron ore and cotton.
Britain wasn't the only empire fueled by tea. The Chinese had a global monopoly on selling tea. And they weren't interested in selling it for anything but silver. This led to a trade imbalance with England known as the Silver Sink, which ultimately paved the way for one of the most shameful chapters in British history.
The opium wars are about tea. The opium wars take place because the British start flooding southern China with Indian opium, selling opium to local people in Southern China to pay for the trade imbalance around the tea trade. And that really becomes the base for the two opium wars. In other words, the British went to war with China twice to force the Chinese to buy British opium so that the British and the East India Trading Company would have silver to pay for their tea.
Their entire enterprise rested on a product that went down the drain in Europe, which was purchased with another which went up in smoke in Asia. And that was opium. The trade imbalance with China, and the fact that it lost its royal monopoly on trade with the Orient in 1834, prompted the East India Company and others to try to cultivate tea outside of China. An indigenous tea plant had been found in the Ossam region of India in 1820. And in India, the East India Trading Company could do as it pleased. They could try people and execute the for violation of their own corporate laws. They had standing commercial armies. They had a privately owned navy which was larger than the British Royal Navy. So if you're talking about power, it's a power that's rarely been equaled.
This was their colony. They could move into areas and say this is wasteland. We're going to bring these people into work. A done deal, because it was theirs. With brutal haste, the British hacked an infrastructure through jungles and forests, creating massive plantations, and imported tens of thousands of workers to labor in the tea fields. These are systems of production and models of production that have been used in the United States and the Caribbean for 200 years, the slave plantation system. There is a big house. There is hundreds if not thousands of people who are harnessed to work on these systems with very little if not any pay. They are brought in from other places to do the work and become a trapped, indentured labor force.
Plantation owners even used laws from antebellum slavery in the US to keep its tea workers in line. If you as a worker tried to escape, you were tracked down like a fugitive. And the Fugitive Slave law of America, which was used in slave plantations, was actually applied by the British in tea country. The disconnect in England about what was happening in India around tea was profound. 70% of the plantation workforce was female, and romanticized images of exotic women with nimble fingers became a staple of tea marketing that continues to this day.
Afternoon tea, introduced by the Duchess of Bedford in 1840 to stave off hunger pains, became a national passion. Tea produced by virtual slaves, many of whom died under savage conditions in the field, now emerged as Britain's quintessential symbol of civility. By 1855, Assam was exporting over 500,000 pounds of tea. The numbers shot up to 86 million pounds within 30 years, with British imports surpassing those from China in 1888. Along the way, the economy and the landscape of much of the subcontinent was stunningly altered.
Vast and uniform new tea fields were engineered to make it as easy as possible to harvest tea. Miles and miles and miles of the same height of tea bushes. It looks like a bonsai forest. The kind of technical attention and focus during labor of keeping those bushes absolutely even, extraordinary. When you're looking at a large tea plantation from afar, its like looking at an optical illusion, like a green carpet that just stretches out over vast landscape areas. The geometric tea fields reflected a new regime of industrialized tea production, were every plantation had its own factory to process the massive harvests of raw leaf. The result was a fundamental shift from the Chinese model of tea manufacturing, which featured small scale production of many different kinds of tea. To make things as efficient as possible, the British decided to produce primarily black tea.
British empire tea, which would be produced on similar plantations in Salong, Kenya, and other colonies became synonymous with black tea. Black tea outside of Japan and China became synonymous with tea. It would take more than a century for the hundreds of varieties of handcrafted Chinese teas to once again find their way into the West. During that time, mass produced teas would generate new forms and new technologies. The tea bag didn't arrive until the 20th century, when it quickly established itself as one of the iconic everyday objects of modern life, especially in the United States where 65% of all tea, both iced and hot, is brewed through the bag. The Lipton tea company alone makes some 9 billion tea bags a year just in the US, 90% of them in Lipton's blending and tea bagging plant in Suffolk, Virginia.
The Suffolk facility is one of the largest, if not the largest, tea bag facility in the world. If you can imagine about 15 or 20, 40 foot ocean going containers full of tea going through that plant each week, that's the kind of volumes that put through this facility. Long rows of frenetic machines punch out a million tea bags an hour, 24/7. Each machines make around 200 bags a minute utilizing 2,500 moving parts to whip together the simple pouches. It looks like an expensive mechanical clock with so many moving parts. If you're watching it, it's just fascinating to see all this stop and go movement in the creation of a tea bag. Lipton tea bagging components, paper, labels, string, and staples, fly through the machine with precision and speed. The sides of the bags are not glued together, but folded so neatly that they hold their shape when steeped in boiling water. The center fold is very important. Because if it's not a tight fold, the tea's going to come out into the cup, and that's something no one wants.
Tea bags were an accidental revolution. An American tea seller sent out samples of tea in silk pouches in 1908. Instead of taking the tea out and brewing it loose leaf style, buyers just dropped the pouches in hot water, and the tea bag was born. Eventually, the silk became gauze, and then paper. Commercial production in the 1920s added the string and tag. A big breakthrough in tea bagging technology came in the 1950s, when the tea bagging machines that Lipton still uses were first introduced. Machines were designed to create Lipton signature double sided, or flo-thru, bag.
If you put two tea bags together, you'd get more tea flavor. That's the idea behind the Lipton flo-thru bag. Lipton converted their entire operation to manufacturing that bag, and it vaulted Lipton to the number 1 position in the marketplace. The advantage of this tea bag was that you actually created four sides for the tea to be exposed to water. It created more space in the tea bag for the leaves to expand and to brew properly.
Lipton's newest generation of tea bagging machines is three times as fast as the older models, churning out 600 bags a minute. The technology racing to keep up with the changes in the traditional tea bag, like this single serve stick from the Serengeti Tea Company in Los Angeles and roomier pyramid bags that can hold larger pieces of leaf. Shooting tea into small pouches is the culmination of a long process for mass market tea manufacturers. Tea tasting is at the heart of that process.
That's because most Lipton teas are actually blends made up of dozens of individual teas. Making sure those blends have consistent flavor, color, and mouth feel requires constant changes in the formula, and constant tasting. The reason we have to keep tasting to maintain that taste is every tea garden can make a different type of tea every week. The quality of their teas can change according to weather, according to how well they pluck the leaf and how well it was rolled. So it's almost like a juggling act. A constantly changing formula to keep consistency. Lipton's classic orange pekoe tea is made up of between 40 and 60 teas. Lipton devised a numerical code from one to seven, used to describe different attributes of taste sampled teas. For a mainstream blend, the try and keep the taste score around 4.4, also trying to keep a very high color or hue score around 6.8, a mouth feel or thickness score around 4.8.
Tea tasting is a skill that requires four to five years of intense training. During an apprenticeship in Sri Lanka, tasted as many as 1,200 times a day normal. A bit like learning to play a musical instrument. The more you practice, the better you get at it. And the more you practice, the more you're better to pick out different types of tastes. And in the end, you're able to pick out the best teas that will fit in the blends. When we're tasting, we suck in the tea at around 100 mile per hour. And that's so you can oxidize the tea and break it up into particles, and also spray it around to different parts of your mouth, because you're tasting different things with different parts of your mouth.
Lipton's ever changing blend sheets are programmed at company headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and then downloaded into the computerized blending system in Suffolk. Vast quantities of tea from around the world are processed every day, vigorously sifted to remove impurities, and then funneled into massive silos. A typical silo will hold about 10,000 pounds, an amount proceed every 24 hours. Some silos hold just a single tea, while others hold a pre-blend of three to four teas. The silos themselves initiate Lipton's blending process by swirling the teas together as they fall through the conical end. Conveyor belts carry the teas from the silos to this blending machine, which gently tumbles the day's recipe. The blends are then conveyed to 2,000 pound super sacks that feed the tea bagging machines.
Not all the tea in America is processed into tea bags. About 1/6 of it is converted into powder, which is used to make instant tea, and also as part of fountain and bottled tea blends. Lipton and other major manufacturers produce and sell $400 million worth of tea powder each year. Tea powder is made in processing plants that brew tea in a large vat, then pump it up and spray it into the top of a tower 100 feet tall. High temperatures in the upper part of the tower instantly vaporize the water in the tea, leaving a tea residue which crystallizes as it descends in the cooler air.
Tea powder and tea bags are frownedupon in much of the world, including China and India, where many people still drink tea loose leaf style. Traditional drinkers insist that directly infused leaf puts more flavor in the brew. But sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. At Celestial Seasonings, and the overwhelming power of peppermint dominates. Every year, Celestial Seasonings uses half a million pounds of freshly picked peppermint and spearmint in its popular herb tea blends, stored, in the mint room at the company warehouse and factory in Boulder, Colorado. The mint room is very intense. Volatile oils from the mind leaves go into your sinuses, and your nose will start dripping, and your eyes will start watering. Some people can just stick their head in and then they have to leave. A very popular t-shirt for sale is "I survived the mint room" They had to double seal the walls and the ceilings because the mint oil levels are so high that it would could otherwise leak through and contaminate the rest of the herbs, so everything would be tasting like mint. You may go home smelling like peppermint on your clothes. Mint is just one of over 100 herbs that Celestial Seasonings stocks in mega quantities for its various blends. A dog might go insane wandering these warehouse aisles, stuffed with everything from cinnamon to ginger to vanilla bean to licorice to lemon grass.
The herb team giant revolutionized the American tea industry in the 1970s, with the introduction of feelgood botanical blends like Sleepytime and Red Zinger. Many of the blends were made entirely of herbs. They didn't contain any camellia sinensis, or tea, and they introduced consumers to a medicine chest of plants that could reputedly do everything from prevent a cold and soothe a sore throat, to fire up your sex drive and settle your nerves.
Hibiscus, the herb that puts the zing in Red Zinger, is imported mainly from Thailand and China. Celestial Seasonings uses 1 million pounds of it a year. Before it can be blended with other ingredients, the raw compacted hibiscus, like all the other herbs that Celestial uses, has to be broken down into pieces that will fit into a teabag. The first phase of milling is done by hand. The worker breaking it down into consumable units so that it doesn't back up within the internal mechanisms of the milling machine. That individual is also doing a visual inspection (QAQC) of the ingredients. Any poor material that would be present in the ingredient before it goes through our process, is removed.
The herb is further broken down into smaller but still coarse pieces, and then conveyed to a cutter mill, where the real chopping is done. Here, the hibiscus falls onto a shaft embedded with seven, three inch high and one inch thick blades that rotate at high speed. The shredded hibiscus is then sucked through the system into a gyrating sifter that holds 10 screens, each one with a finer mesh than the one before. They are aiming for a consistent size, because if there are large particles and smaller particles, the infusion rate's going to be different for all of those particles. After milling, the herbs are blended, and then funneled to Celestial's tea bagging machines. Because these teabags don't have strings or tags or staples, these machines are a lot faster than those at Lipton, flinging out upwards of 1,000 teabags a minute.
An intricate web that goes through the machine that will seal the two sides of the tea bag paper boned with adhesive together. The sealing temperature ~150 degrees centigrade, important because a consumer is putting boiling water on top of a tea bag at 100 degrees centigrade, and that high temp adhesive bond is going to stay intact throughout that entire cup of tea. Celestial Seasonings pioneered the herb or hippie tea revolution in the United States in the late 1960s.
The first herbs were picked in the wild from fields and meadows around Boulder. Weeds for needs was one of the company's early slogans. They wild crafted it right here in the Rocky Mountains. And then they had to figure a way to dry it and a place to dry it in so it wouldn't be rained on, so they use somebody's barn and another person's garage.They stuffed it into muslin bags by hand and put little strings around it, and then took it to natural food stores. Early reaction from the tea industry, which revolved almost entirely around traditional black tea, was dismissive.
Herbal and flavored teas now account for over 1/3 of tea bag and loose leaf sales in America. Celestial Seasonings alone sells over $100 million worth of blends a year, most of them entirely herbal. But one botanical with great taste and remarkable medicinal value remains the original Camellia Sinensis, or tea. It's been valued as a healthy potion for millennia. New research indicates that real tea might contain a pharmacological treasure trove of health benefits and cures, which may explain why tea is finally giving its old rival, coffee, a run for the money. It's time to spill the beans. And it's time to pick up a cup of good health, one cup of tea at a time. That's the mantra in trendy places like the Botanical Urban Tea Garden in Beverly Hills.
Tea consumption doubled in the US between 2001 and 2006. And more and more people are making tea their drink of choice. That's largely because of the reputed health benefits of tea. Research suggests that tea plays a role in the prevention of obesity, osteoporosis, gum disease, and heart disease, especially green tea, which was nearly impossible to find in the US 10 years ago and now accounts for 19% of the market. Green tea is packed with antioxidants that many researchers say prevent cell damage and slow down the aging process. But the number one antioxidant in green tea, a single molecule called EGCG, or epigallocatechin-Gallat, which may have other beneficial properties.
Some researchers are exploring chemicals derived from Chinese herbal medicine, asking whether any of these chemicals could attack cancer causing proteins. And sure enough, for one of the cancer targets with growing interest found in green tea, that binds very tightly to this cancer protein and inhibits its activity. EGCG, which makes up about 70% of the dry weight of tea, neutralizes Bcl-xL, otherwise known as the anti-death protein, a gene that doesn't allow cancer cells to die.
The anti-death genes become hyperactive. And this allows a cancer cell to expand, to increase its numbers, because they've forgotten how to die, becoming dangerous immortal cells. This same mechanism explains why it's often very difficult to kill cancer cells even with the best weapons, such as chemotherapy and radiation. Researchers use nuclear magnetic resonance, an advanced version of medicine's MRI, to get a picture of how a single molecule of EGCG interacts with a single molecule of the anti-death protein family. Dr. Maurizio Pellecchia was in charge of the research. This is the protein that when overexpressed in cancer cells, prevent them from dying and allow them to proliferate. In red, we have this small molecule. This is epigallocatechin-gallate, which even being very small compared with the protein, is able to insert itself on this deep crevice on the surface of the molecule and block its activity.
Conclusive research on the cancer killing benefits of green tea remains to be done and it's unclear how much EGCG is actually in the kind of processed green teas on sale in most stores. Still, Dr. Reed is convinced that a little green tea every day can't hurt. DR. JOHN C. REED: You've got antioxidants. You've got the detoxifying effect of the chemicals rubbing up our own detoxifying systems. And then you've got the direct effect against cancer causing proteins. So why not take a chance? Which is exactly what people are doing at places like Dr. Tea's Herb and Tea Garden.
There are over 100 varieties of tea, green as well as black, oolong, and herb, most of them imported from India and China in small batches. Unlike mass produced teas which aim for consistency, the very inconsistency of these teas, the fact that they vary from harvest to harvest depending on climate, soil, and even the style of plucking, is what makes them intriguing to devotees. And pricey. Dr. Tea's menu ranges from $4 to $300 a pot. A tea called taiping from the Fujian province of Southern China, was once reserved for Chinese royalty and was served to Richard Nixon during his historic visit to China in 1972. This plantation produces in its entire year 150 kilos, 300 pounds of tea, and that's it.
Dr. Tea's most prized, however, is it's pu'er, a category of Chinese tea, that like wine, improves with age. That's because of a processing method that's been a Chinese state secret since the 14th century, which enables the leaf to develop a mold as it ages. That mold protects the tea and ripens the flavor. The blue is that bacteria growing on the tea cake. That bacteria, combined with the chemical pH balanceof the tea, that provides this tea cake with the most delicate nose, and the most delicate palate of sweetness. Pu'ers have sold at auction for as much as $40,000 per cake. Dr. Tea's 1952 pu'er sells for nearly $1,000 an ounce.
But tea aficionados may not entirely feel the pain. Because tea, according to Dr. Tea, is the only plant on Earth that has a stimulant, caffeine, and a tranquilizer, something called L-theanine. That makes the tea buzz totally different from that of coffee. The caffeine stimulates the beta brainwaves, the fright flight response. Your body goes into a state of shock with caffeine. It's ready to take care of in a perilous situation. L-theanine secreted into the brain stimulates the alpha brainwaves, relaxed, focused, meditative, energy. Tea has it, coffee does not.
No pleasure is simpler, no luxury cheaper, and no consciousness altering substance more benign than our simple tea. If you want to be ceremonious about tea making, there's certainly tea for you. You want something to quench your thirst, there's tea for you. You want something to keep you up working, there's tea for you. There's nothing else on Earth like tea. This may explain why the 5,000 year old drink of emperors has become the preferred drink of humankind. Not only does tea have a unique ability to wake up and calm, like wine, the best teas have an extraordinary range and subtlety of tastes. Whether tea time represents a moment of tranquility in the stampede of life or an inexpensive epicurean thrill, the human thirst for this benign and inscrutable drink promises to deepen for millennia to come.
Mass produced by the billion and handled with the care and attention of fine wine. After water, it's the second most popular drink worldwide. Quenching the world's thirst, tea has raised and wrecked empires. A drink of the ancient past and the trendy future. It's a delicate leaf renowned for its ability to stimulate and soothe.
Little tea leaves have played a significant role in the history of human civilization, initiation revolution, igniting war, all while reshaping ecosystems and landscapes across the world. The phenomenal human thirst for tea results in 1/2 trillion cups of tea consumed annually. Tea a mystery drink full of paradoxical qualities that are the essence of its appeal. If you are cold, tea will warm you. If you are warm, tea will cool you. If you are excited, tea will soothe you. If you are lethargic, tea will stimulate you.
The history of tea, and the taste of tea and the vast array of different types of teas, and different manufacturing styles, and flavors, aromas, textures, colors, characteristics of tea are such that it speaks to us. Once you are exposed to tea, you want to learn more about tea. You want to taste more tea. You want to experience more tea.
Tea is a major cash crop in dozens of countries around the world, especially in Indonesia, China, India, Kenya, and Argentina. But if you want to find it in North America, you have to visit the Charleston Tea Plantation on Wadmalaw Island, South Carolina. There exists a 127 acre tea farm including a nursery for developing new bushes and an on-site factory that convert freshly picked tea leaf into black tea sold throughout the South under the American Classic label.
South Carolina and Hawaii are the only places in the US that have the kind of semitropical, high rainfall climate needed for growing tea. The tea plant enjoys high temperature and high humidity. Charleston, SC has that kind of weather during the summer, so the tea plants thrives very well in this location. The Charleston Tea Plantation has a long and noble history. Tea bushes can live hundreds of years. And the thousands of bushes here are all seeded and cloned from Chinese plants that were imported to Charleston over 200 years ago. These plants date back to the first tea plants brought to America back in 1799 by a French botanist by the name of Andre Michaud who brought these plants from the Far East.
The original bushes were planted about an hour's drive from Charleston. These plants produced commercial tea until that plantation went out of business in 1915. The Lipton Tea Company bought the bushes, which it continued to grow on their own, and replanted cuttings here in 1960 as part of a research and development farm. When Lipton decided to shut the farm down in 1987, the Bigelow Tea Company acquired it, a one of a kind gem of a tea plantation that the president of Bigelow though would be impossible to see disappear. The Charleston plantation provides just a fraction of the tea consumed in the US.
Americans drink 50 billion servings of tea a year, which sounds like a lot but is itself just a fraction of what the rest of the world drinks. Tea is only the sixth most popular drink in the US, after water, coffee, soft drinks, alcohol, and bottled water. As the number two drink worldwide, tea is harvested in enormous quantities. Billion of pounds of tea are produced every year. And it takes 5 pounds of tea, raw leaf tea, to make 1 pound of finished tea. That means many more billion of pounds of tea have to be picked throughout the world, mostly by hand.
Commercial tea is usually farmed on vast plantations, like the one owned by Unilever in Kenya, that stretches over 27,000 acres, employing 24,000 people, at numerous factories on site. Tea is also cultivated on thousands of smaller family farms, especially in China where tea farming began millennia ago and where tea processing as well as farming is still frequently done by hand.
There are three major types of tea-- black, green, and oolong. Few people outside the tea business realize that all three types come from the same plant, Camellia Sinensis, which is the only tea plant in the world and is indigenous to China, India, and Thailand. Like wine, there are an estimated 1,500 varietals of tea with endless varying qualities based on soil and climate. And some are more suited to make one kind of tea over another. The real differences between black, green, and oolong are created after the leaf has been picked.
The first step in making any kind of tea is called withering. The leaves are placed on a withering bed where they lie for ~18 hours. Freshly plucked tea is ~80% moisture. That percentage has to come down to exactly 68%. If the moisture were too low, it would not make a fine quality tea because the enzymes have overbuilt inside the leaf. If they're not withered enough, they haven't built to the sufficient amount to give that full bodied flavor people enjoy when they drink a cup of hot tea or iced tea.
At industrial or commercial tea factories, large fans accelerate the drying process and make sure the leaves wither equally. The fans ultimately blow and suck air for an hour at a Tim through hundreds of holes in the withering bed. Without the fans, the leaves in the middle would turn red and spoil. After withering, the leaf is conveyed to a shredding machine, called a rotorvane where the tea will be ripped into pieces small enough to fit into a teabag. Not just a question of size of the tea particles. Shredding is crucial, because it tears open the cell walls of the leaf, which allows the tea to oxidize.There are many ways to break open the cell walls, including a number of traditional rolling methods still popular in China. Traditional tea manufacturing in China also doesn't require fans because it involves much smaller amounts of tea.
Rotorvane and other mechanical device are widely used when working with large amounts of leaf. Inside this rotorvane, stationary fingers, called vanes and rotors that go around pressing the tea against these vanes to rupture that cell wall and expose the tea juices. The objective to have every cell wall broken so those juices are exposed to the air to create the oxidation in the leaf to turn it from green leaves into black tea. The shredded leaves come out of the rotorvane and onto the oxidation bay.
Oxidation is the defining phase in the process of making black or oolong tea, where tea is going to turn from green to a sort of coppery orange color, and this is where the miracle of tea takes place, where all the flavor is built, and where most of the quality comes from. Oxidation is the key to making black, oolong, or green tea. If the tea maker cuts the oxidation time in half, then oolong produced, a lighter tea served in most Chinese restaurants. If no oxidation allowed then green tea, the most popular form of tea in Japan, and familiar to anyone who's ever gone to a sushi bar, is thereby produced. Oxidation is stopped by steaming the fresh leaves as soon as they've been harvested as heat neutralizes the enzyme that allows the tea to oxidize and change color.
After steaming, green tea goes through the same process of withering, shredding, and drying as black and oolong tea. Drying the tea lowers the moisture content from 68% to just 2%, any higher moisture content would promote mould formation. The dry tea then goes through a series of shaker sieves to remove impurities like rocks, soil, dirt, and tiny bits of tea plant stem & leaf fiber released the shredding. Static electricity produced by rotation plastic rollers pressed up against felt are used as a filtering method of fine particles & fibers in commercial large scale tea production while traditional small scale tea manufactures employ scores of people to hand remove impurities by plucking the tea leaves & leaving the other gunk behind.
The process of making tea, mostly the same around the world, with variations in technology, is simple but exacting. Tea is made in the field. The quality is produced in the field. All you can do in the tea factory is ruin it or maintain that tea quality. According to legend, the mythical Chinese emperor Shen Nong discovered tea in 2,737 BC when a couple of leaves fell into his drink. For over 3,000 years, China was the only country in the world that drank tea, and its impact on Chinese culture enormous. In China, tea inspires poetry and paintings. And the art of making tea to Chinese people viewed as making a connection with tea where you are bringing the tea back to life.
From the start, tea was perceived as a remarkably healthy drink. Black tea has about 40 milligrams of caffeine per cup, about half as much as a cup of coffee. Its energizing qualities were duly noted, especially by Buddhist monks who used tea to stay alert during meditation. Tea remained a Chinese secret until a monk brought some tea seeds to Japan in the 9th century. Building on Chinese traditions, the Japanese developed elaborate tea ceremonies that eventually became known as Chado, the way of tea. Think of tea as Buddhist communion. We are more attuned to what we are paying attention to and less attuned to distraction when we drink tea. So it's a question of wakeful tranquility. And that's exactly what Buddhism is trying to teach.
The Portuguese and the Dutch were the first to bring tea to Europe at the beginning of the 17th century. Tea came late to England by 1664, and took off. King Charles' Portuguese wife Catherine had fallen in love with the exotic Chinese tea drink in while traveling Lisbon. English aristocrats followed her lead. For a long time, aristocrats were the only ones who could afford tea. It was so heavily taxed, 119% in 1706, that it spawned an enormous black market. By the 1770s, half of the tea in England, an estimated seven million pounds a year, was illegal. Bootleg tea was heavily adulterated, filled with twigs and leaves as well as toxic lead chromate, and even sheep's dung, both of which were used as colorizers.
Smuggling ended when Prime Minister William Pitt finally slashed taxes in 1784. Legal tea was now affordable to everyone. But before that happened, there was a little matter involving tea in the American colonies. In late November and early December 1773, three ships loaded with 342 chests of tea reached Boston Harbor. Bostonians, increasingly touchy about the issue of taxation without representation, refused to let the ships unload. On the evening of December 16, a group of 30 to 60 colonists disguised as Mohawk Indigenous Peoples, broke open the chests and dumped the tea in the Boston harbor. The Boston Tea Party pushed relation between the British crown and the colonies to a boiling point. In less than three years, the Revolutionary War was underway.
Tea, which had been highly fashionable and popular throughout the colonies, was suddenly stigmatized. Tea becomes the ultimate symbol of British tyranny. So it became the thing that American's despised. There were campaigns in the Eastern United States to stop drinking tea in the drawing rooms. John Adams asked at a tavern, would it be lawful for a weary traveler to have a cup of tea provided it has been honestly smuggled? The barmaid said, no sir, we have renounced tea under this roof. I'll get you a cup of coffee.
In England, however, demand for tea continued to soar. To meet demand, the British would build plantations in India, tea plantations that would be modeled on the slave plantations of the American South. The role of tea in the making and breaking of empires inextricably bound up with one of the world's first and most powerful cartels, the British East India Trading Company. The EIC was founded in 1600 by Queen Elizabeth I, who gave it a royal monopoly on all trade with the Far East. The East India Company would become the backbone of the emerging British empire. And tea, which eventually accounted for a third of its profits, would become the backbone of the EIC. By the start of the 19th century, tea was the third most heavily shipped commodity in the world, behind iron ore and cotton.
Britain wasn't the only empire fueled by tea. The Chinese had a global monopoly on selling tea. And they weren't interested in selling it for anything but silver. This led to a trade imbalance with England known as the Silver Sink, which ultimately paved the way for one of the most shameful chapters in British history.
The opium wars are about tea. The opium wars take place because the British start flooding southern China with Indian opium, selling opium to local people in Southern China to pay for the trade imbalance around the tea trade. And that really becomes the base for the two opium wars. In other words, the British went to war with China twice to force the Chinese to buy British opium so that the British and the East India Trading Company would have silver to pay for their tea.
Their entire enterprise rested on a product that went down the drain in Europe, which was purchased with another which went up in smoke in Asia. And that was opium. The trade imbalance with China, and the fact that it lost its royal monopoly on trade with the Orient in 1834, prompted the East India Company and others to try to cultivate tea outside of China. An indigenous tea plant had been found in the Ossam region of India in 1820. And in India, the East India Trading Company could do as it pleased. They could try people and execute the for violation of their own corporate laws. They had standing commercial armies. They had a privately owned navy which was larger than the British Royal Navy. So if you're talking about power, it's a power that's rarely been equaled.
This was their colony. They could move into areas and say this is wasteland. We're going to bring these people into work. A done deal, because it was theirs. With brutal haste, the British hacked an infrastructure through jungles and forests, creating massive plantations, and imported tens of thousands of workers to labor in the tea fields. These are systems of production and models of production that have been used in the United States and the Caribbean for 200 years, the slave plantation system. There is a big house. There is hundreds if not thousands of people who are harnessed to work on these systems with very little if not any pay. They are brought in from other places to do the work and become a trapped, indentured labor force.
Plantation owners even used laws from antebellum slavery in the US to keep its tea workers in line. If you as a worker tried to escape, you were tracked down like a fugitive. And the Fugitive Slave law of America, which was used in slave plantations, was actually applied by the British in tea country. The disconnect in England about what was happening in India around tea was profound. 70% of the plantation workforce was female, and romanticized images of exotic women with nimble fingers became a staple of tea marketing that continues to this day.
Afternoon tea, introduced by the Duchess of Bedford in 1840 to stave off hunger pains, became a national passion. Tea produced by virtual slaves, many of whom died under savage conditions in the field, now emerged as Britain's quintessential symbol of civility. By 1855, Assam was exporting over 500,000 pounds of tea. The numbers shot up to 86 million pounds within 30 years, with British imports surpassing those from China in 1888. Along the way, the economy and the landscape of much of the subcontinent was stunningly altered.
Vast and uniform new tea fields were engineered to make it as easy as possible to harvest tea. Miles and miles and miles of the same height of tea bushes. It looks like a bonsai forest. The kind of technical attention and focus during labor of keeping those bushes absolutely even, extraordinary. When you're looking at a large tea plantation from afar, its like looking at an optical illusion, like a green carpet that just stretches out over vast landscape areas. The geometric tea fields reflected a new regime of industrialized tea production, were every plantation had its own factory to process the massive harvests of raw leaf. The result was a fundamental shift from the Chinese model of tea manufacturing, which featured small scale production of many different kinds of tea. To make things as efficient as possible, the British decided to produce primarily black tea.
British empire tea, which would be produced on similar plantations in Salong, Kenya, and other colonies became synonymous with black tea. Black tea outside of Japan and China became synonymous with tea. It would take more than a century for the hundreds of varieties of handcrafted Chinese teas to once again find their way into the West. During that time, mass produced teas would generate new forms and new technologies. The tea bag didn't arrive until the 20th century, when it quickly established itself as one of the iconic everyday objects of modern life, especially in the United States where 65% of all tea, both iced and hot, is brewed through the bag. The Lipton tea company alone makes some 9 billion tea bags a year just in the US, 90% of them in Lipton's blending and tea bagging plant in Suffolk, Virginia.
The Suffolk facility is one of the largest, if not the largest, tea bag facility in the world. If you can imagine about 15 or 20, 40 foot ocean going containers full of tea going through that plant each week, that's the kind of volumes that put through this facility. Long rows of frenetic machines punch out a million tea bags an hour, 24/7. Each machines make around 200 bags a minute utilizing 2,500 moving parts to whip together the simple pouches. It looks like an expensive mechanical clock with so many moving parts. If you're watching it, it's just fascinating to see all this stop and go movement in the creation of a tea bag. Lipton tea bagging components, paper, labels, string, and staples, fly through the machine with precision and speed. The sides of the bags are not glued together, but folded so neatly that they hold their shape when steeped in boiling water. The center fold is very important. Because if it's not a tight fold, the tea's going to come out into the cup, and that's something no one wants.
Tea bags were an accidental revolution. An American tea seller sent out samples of tea in silk pouches in 1908. Instead of taking the tea out and brewing it loose leaf style, buyers just dropped the pouches in hot water, and the tea bag was born. Eventually, the silk became gauze, and then paper. Commercial production in the 1920s added the string and tag. A big breakthrough in tea bagging technology came in the 1950s, when the tea bagging machines that Lipton still uses were first introduced. Machines were designed to create Lipton signature double sided, or flo-thru, bag.
If you put two tea bags together, you'd get more tea flavor. That's the idea behind the Lipton flo-thru bag. Lipton converted their entire operation to manufacturing that bag, and it vaulted Lipton to the number 1 position in the marketplace. The advantage of this tea bag was that you actually created four sides for the tea to be exposed to water. It created more space in the tea bag for the leaves to expand and to brew properly.
Lipton's newest generation of tea bagging machines is three times as fast as the older models, churning out 600 bags a minute. The technology racing to keep up with the changes in the traditional tea bag, like this single serve stick from the Serengeti Tea Company in Los Angeles and roomier pyramid bags that can hold larger pieces of leaf. Shooting tea into small pouches is the culmination of a long process for mass market tea manufacturers. Tea tasting is at the heart of that process.
That's because most Lipton teas are actually blends made up of dozens of individual teas. Making sure those blends have consistent flavor, color, and mouth feel requires constant changes in the formula, and constant tasting. The reason we have to keep tasting to maintain that taste is every tea garden can make a different type of tea every week. The quality of their teas can change according to weather, according to how well they pluck the leaf and how well it was rolled. So it's almost like a juggling act. A constantly changing formula to keep consistency. Lipton's classic orange pekoe tea is made up of between 40 and 60 teas. Lipton devised a numerical code from one to seven, used to describe different attributes of taste sampled teas. For a mainstream blend, the try and keep the taste score around 4.4, also trying to keep a very high color or hue score around 6.8, a mouth feel or thickness score around 4.8.
Tea tasting is a skill that requires four to five years of intense training. During an apprenticeship in Sri Lanka, tasted as many as 1,200 times a day normal. A bit like learning to play a musical instrument. The more you practice, the better you get at it. And the more you practice, the more you're better to pick out different types of tastes. And in the end, you're able to pick out the best teas that will fit in the blends. When we're tasting, we suck in the tea at around 100 mile per hour. And that's so you can oxidize the tea and break it up into particles, and also spray it around to different parts of your mouth, because you're tasting different things with different parts of your mouth.
Lipton's ever changing blend sheets are programmed at company headquarters in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey and then downloaded into the computerized blending system in Suffolk. Vast quantities of tea from around the world are processed every day, vigorously sifted to remove impurities, and then funneled into massive silos. A typical silo will hold about 10,000 pounds, an amount proceed every 24 hours. Some silos hold just a single tea, while others hold a pre-blend of three to four teas. The silos themselves initiate Lipton's blending process by swirling the teas together as they fall through the conical end. Conveyor belts carry the teas from the silos to this blending machine, which gently tumbles the day's recipe. The blends are then conveyed to 2,000 pound super sacks that feed the tea bagging machines.
Not all the tea in America is processed into tea bags. About 1/6 of it is converted into powder, which is used to make instant tea, and also as part of fountain and bottled tea blends. Lipton and other major manufacturers produce and sell $400 million worth of tea powder each year. Tea powder is made in processing plants that brew tea in a large vat, then pump it up and spray it into the top of a tower 100 feet tall. High temperatures in the upper part of the tower instantly vaporize the water in the tea, leaving a tea residue which crystallizes as it descends in the cooler air.
Tea powder and tea bags are frownedupon in much of the world, including China and India, where many people still drink tea loose leaf style. Traditional drinkers insist that directly infused leaf puts more flavor in the brew. But sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. At Celestial Seasonings, and the overwhelming power of peppermint dominates. Every year, Celestial Seasonings uses half a million pounds of freshly picked peppermint and spearmint in its popular herb tea blends, stored, in the mint room at the company warehouse and factory in Boulder, Colorado. The mint room is very intense. Volatile oils from the mind leaves go into your sinuses, and your nose will start dripping, and your eyes will start watering. Some people can just stick their head in and then they have to leave. A very popular t-shirt for sale is "I survived the mint room" They had to double seal the walls and the ceilings because the mint oil levels are so high that it would could otherwise leak through and contaminate the rest of the herbs, so everything would be tasting like mint. You may go home smelling like peppermint on your clothes. Mint is just one of over 100 herbs that Celestial Seasonings stocks in mega quantities for its various blends. A dog might go insane wandering these warehouse aisles, stuffed with everything from cinnamon to ginger to vanilla bean to licorice to lemon grass.
The herb team giant revolutionized the American tea industry in the 1970s, with the introduction of feelgood botanical blends like Sleepytime and Red Zinger. Many of the blends were made entirely of herbs. They didn't contain any camellia sinensis, or tea, and they introduced consumers to a medicine chest of plants that could reputedly do everything from prevent a cold and soothe a sore throat, to fire up your sex drive and settle your nerves.
Hibiscus, the herb that puts the zing in Red Zinger, is imported mainly from Thailand and China. Celestial Seasonings uses 1 million pounds of it a year. Before it can be blended with other ingredients, the raw compacted hibiscus, like all the other herbs that Celestial uses, has to be broken down into pieces that will fit into a teabag. The first phase of milling is done by hand. The worker breaking it down into consumable units so that it doesn't back up within the internal mechanisms of the milling machine. That individual is also doing a visual inspection (QAQC) of the ingredients. Any poor material that would be present in the ingredient before it goes through our process, is removed.
The herb is further broken down into smaller but still coarse pieces, and then conveyed to a cutter mill, where the real chopping is done. Here, the hibiscus falls onto a shaft embedded with seven, three inch high and one inch thick blades that rotate at high speed. The shredded hibiscus is then sucked through the system into a gyrating sifter that holds 10 screens, each one with a finer mesh than the one before. They are aiming for a consistent size, because if there are large particles and smaller particles, the infusion rate's going to be different for all of those particles. After milling, the herbs are blended, and then funneled to Celestial's tea bagging machines. Because these teabags don't have strings or tags or staples, these machines are a lot faster than those at Lipton, flinging out upwards of 1,000 teabags a minute.
An intricate web that goes through the machine that will seal the two sides of the tea bag paper boned with adhesive together. The sealing temperature ~150 degrees centigrade, important because a consumer is putting boiling water on top of a tea bag at 100 degrees centigrade, and that high temp adhesive bond is going to stay intact throughout that entire cup of tea. Celestial Seasonings pioneered the herb or hippie tea revolution in the United States in the late 1960s.
The first herbs were picked in the wild from fields and meadows around Boulder. Weeds for needs was one of the company's early slogans. They wild crafted it right here in the Rocky Mountains. And then they had to figure a way to dry it and a place to dry it in so it wouldn't be rained on, so they use somebody's barn and another person's garage.They stuffed it into muslin bags by hand and put little strings around it, and then took it to natural food stores. Early reaction from the tea industry, which revolved almost entirely around traditional black tea, was dismissive.
Herbal and flavored teas now account for over 1/3 of tea bag and loose leaf sales in America. Celestial Seasonings alone sells over $100 million worth of blends a year, most of them entirely herbal. But one botanical with great taste and remarkable medicinal value remains the original Camellia Sinensis, or tea. It's been valued as a healthy potion for millennia. New research indicates that real tea might contain a pharmacological treasure trove of health benefits and cures, which may explain why tea is finally giving its old rival, coffee, a run for the money. It's time to spill the beans. And it's time to pick up a cup of good health, one cup of tea at a time. That's the mantra in trendy places like the Botanical Urban Tea Garden in Beverly Hills.
Tea consumption doubled in the US between 2001 and 2006. And more and more people are making tea their drink of choice. That's largely because of the reputed health benefits of tea. Research suggests that tea plays a role in the prevention of obesity, osteoporosis, gum disease, and heart disease, especially green tea, which was nearly impossible to find in the US 10 years ago and now accounts for 19% of the market. Green tea is packed with antioxidants that many researchers say prevent cell damage and slow down the aging process. But the number one antioxidant in green tea, a single molecule called EGCG, or epigallocatechin-Gallat, which may have other beneficial properties.
Some researchers are exploring chemicals derived from Chinese herbal medicine, asking whether any of these chemicals could attack cancer causing proteins. And sure enough, for one of the cancer targets with growing interest found in green tea, that binds very tightly to this cancer protein and inhibits its activity. EGCG, which makes up about 70% of the dry weight of tea, neutralizes Bcl-xL, otherwise known as the anti-death protein, a gene that doesn't allow cancer cells to die.
The anti-death genes become hyperactive. And this allows a cancer cell to expand, to increase its numbers, because they've forgotten how to die, becoming dangerous immortal cells. This same mechanism explains why it's often very difficult to kill cancer cells even with the best weapons, such as chemotherapy and radiation. Researchers use nuclear magnetic resonance, an advanced version of medicine's MRI, to get a picture of how a single molecule of EGCG interacts with a single molecule of the anti-death protein family. Dr. Maurizio Pellecchia was in charge of the research. This is the protein that when overexpressed in cancer cells, prevent them from dying and allow them to proliferate. In red, we have this small molecule. This is epigallocatechin-gallate, which even being very small compared with the protein, is able to insert itself on this deep crevice on the surface of the molecule and block its activity.
Conclusive research on the cancer killing benefits of green tea remains to be done and it's unclear how much EGCG is actually in the kind of processed green teas on sale in most stores. Still, Dr. Reed is convinced that a little green tea every day can't hurt. DR. JOHN C. REED: You've got antioxidants. You've got the detoxifying effect of the chemicals rubbing up our own detoxifying systems. And then you've got the direct effect against cancer causing proteins. So why not take a chance? Which is exactly what people are doing at places like Dr. Tea's Herb and Tea Garden.
There are over 100 varieties of tea, green as well as black, oolong, and herb, most of them imported from India and China in small batches. Unlike mass produced teas which aim for consistency, the very inconsistency of these teas, the fact that they vary from harvest to harvest depending on climate, soil, and even the style of plucking, is what makes them intriguing to devotees. And pricey. Dr. Tea's menu ranges from $4 to $300 a pot. A tea called taiping from the Fujian province of Southern China, was once reserved for Chinese royalty and was served to Richard Nixon during his historic visit to China in 1972. This plantation produces in its entire year 150 kilos, 300 pounds of tea, and that's it.
Dr. Tea's most prized, however, is it's pu'er, a category of Chinese tea, that like wine, improves with age. That's because of a processing method that's been a Chinese state secret since the 14th century, which enables the leaf to develop a mold as it ages. That mold protects the tea and ripens the flavor. The blue is that bacteria growing on the tea cake. That bacteria, combined with the chemical pH balanceof the tea, that provides this tea cake with the most delicate nose, and the most delicate palate of sweetness. Pu'ers have sold at auction for as much as $40,000 per cake. Dr. Tea's 1952 pu'er sells for nearly $1,000 an ounce.
But tea aficionados may not entirely feel the pain. Because tea, according to Dr. Tea, is the only plant on Earth that has a stimulant, caffeine, and a tranquilizer, something called L-theanine. That makes the tea buzz totally different from that of coffee. The caffeine stimulates the beta brainwaves, the fright flight response. Your body goes into a state of shock with caffeine. It's ready to take care of in a perilous situation. L-theanine secreted into the brain stimulates the alpha brainwaves, relaxed, focused, meditative, energy. Tea has it, coffee does not.
No pleasure is simpler, no luxury cheaper, and no consciousness altering substance more benign than our simple tea. If you want to be ceremonious about tea making, there's certainly tea for you. You want something to quench your thirst, there's tea for you. You want something to keep you up working, there's tea for you. There's nothing else on Earth like tea. This may explain why the 5,000 year old drink of emperors has become the preferred drink of humankind. Not only does tea have a unique ability to wake up and calm, like wine, the best teas have an extraordinary range and subtlety of tastes. Whether tea time represents a moment of tranquility in the stampede of life or an inexpensive epicurean thrill, the human thirst for this benign and inscrutable drink promises to deepen for millennia to come.
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