Tea Time: Ceylon, Oolong, and Assam

delicately plucked leaves are then impact. It's very difficult to sort of have a missionary to pluck t robo cannot think and certain things. On top of all, the fact is the most important thing is the human touch is very very important teeth process, especially in tea. Tea is one of the world's most ancient beverages and today remains

the most consumed beverage in the world after water. Too many of us we know tea in its most modern form, which is that we steep the tea in our mugs by unwrapping those little paper envelopes that hold string tea bags from dried and crushed leaves. However, that's not how much of the world drinks tea, and the history of tea is complex and its practice spans across multiple Asian cultures.

Earliest record state drinking tea to the third century a d in the u Non Province of China, when indigenous tea plants in the wild were harvested and used for medicinal purposes. Soon thereafter, it was brewed as the precursor

to the tea that we know today. And today's show, we're going to explore global expressions of tea, the rituals and ceremonies that accompany tea, and we will learn how the leaves harvested from this shiny leaved, shrub like plant produces one of the beverages that is the most consumed around the world today. On point of origin, it's teatime.

One of my absolute favorite parts of visiting New York is when I have an opportunity to come to the West Village, find a little corner in your tea shop and move through the menu methodically drinking all the oulong's. It's one of my absolute favorite places on earth. So thank you so much. That's very kind. We're lucky to have the audience that we have in the neighborhood that

we have. So all the cheese that we know, you know, in the supermarket, that's from anything from Lupton to you know the recent trend just match um green cheese, oolongs, black cheese, white cheese. Everything that we see that's not an herb or a flower, they're all on the same plant. This plant is called Camelia sinenses. So this is Elena Law who is the owner of ta company in the West Village of New York. Elena is a first generation

immigrant who grew up in New York City. She didn't have any direct connections to the world of tea, but she was born in Taiwan, which is sort of the next best thing. Yes, I actually didn't come from a tea family. I didn't come from a key business or either in production or trade by any stretch of the imagination. But I did grow up in Taiwan, where every family drinks tea. It's ingrained in the Chinese culture or any Chinese heritage countries where like tea drinking as tea gifting.

You know, it's a very much part of your life and you don't think twice about it, sort of like New Yorkers and pizza, you don't really think about the dough all the time or the where the sauce comes from. You just have it in your life. So she started sourcing teas on her trips to Taiwan and across Asia,

which was just the starting point. I remember only getting teas from Taiwan when my mom would mail them or when I go home and I would get that, And any time I've run out, I literally have nowhere to go in, you know, sort of the only thing that's

available to me is a grocery store. It really is sort of like a living historical artifact of like what culture and civilization had developed this beverage from plants, the different styles of it sort of went to different parts of the world, so that became interesting for me, and then ultimately I start sourcing them, start of visiting, you know, when I go to Taiwan, I would visit families, friends and people who understand really good quality food, really good

quality wine, really good quality coffee can really absolutely relate to really good quality tea, and sort of over time figure it out that I need a little tea room to really showcase them and have a place for people to come in. You can't sell this stuff on the internet. You can't sell smell, you can't convince someone you know the craft that went behind these products. So let's take a step back to understand more out what te actually is.

It comes from the leaves of a plant called Camilla senesis. It's a fairly nondescript looking shrub that originates in East Asia, and a simple way to think about tea is really the same way that you would think about wine. So wine comes from grapes and teas come from leaves. The grape variety that's used in wine production is called Vitas vinifera and the name of the plant used in tea

production is the aforementioned Camilla sinensis. So while there are many different types of teas, most of the variances that you'll experience and flavor, aroma, and taste are based on the variety of Camilla sinensis, plus how it's grown, harvested, processed, and stored. So how we process the tea plant after it's harvested is what define them to be green teas, ulan's white and black. What is long tea and what makes it so special? The main difference between them is

oxidation levels. Um, So you imagine when you pick the tea plant off the stem. You know, if you leave it on the table after a few hours, it will brown, the same way as if you cut open apple, it'll brown. Cut up an avocado, it brown's it's the plant's natural way of decaying by interacting with the oxygen in the air um and that simple process. I'm sure if physicists will explain this better than I can, but it's called oxidation. Green tea by definition is non oxidized, and black teat

by definition, it's fully oxidized. So what that means is when you harvest the tea plant, if your intention is to make green tea, you will heat the tea leaves up right away when you harvest them. It's the endomatic reaction to kill the enzyme, so then it doesn't exodized with the oxygen in the air and therefore keep it bright green. For black tea, you would let it oxidize, so let it naturally decay fully brown naturally. Therefore, black teeze is much darker or much more coppery brown, the

same way as your apple browns, if you will. Along. By definition, is partially oxidized, so that means it's anywhere

between green and black, so you can have oxydized. So this feels like a good time to once again say that other than the so called herbal teas which are made with hot water being poured directly over herbs, spices or other plant materials, all of the teas that you see in the wild, from grocery store shelves to a trendy maucha cafe, they all come from the same plant and the thing that makes them different primarily is the way in which their exposure to oxygen is either encouraged

or disrupted. And this is what we mean when we talk about the processing of the team is extremely wide. Therefore, you know, so many flavor profiles can all be called ulan team. So that's really the main sort of categorically how we define what mulan te is. But what are some of the variations that you see in an ulan te from Taiwan that makes it particularly prized. So Ulans are sort of a later stage development in the Chinese

tea cultivation. Like the Chinese didn't wake up one day and created like fifteen different kinds of g and like call it a day, like it was you know, through a long thousands of years in fact of development and change, trial and error that they gave you different styles of teammaking, and ulan being sort of the later style. By the time of the Shang dynasty from seventeen sixty six to ten fifty BC, tea was being consumed in the yu

Non province for its medicinal properties. UM. I think the earliest records of tea production is like two thousand years BC versus I think long To you came around I don't know, year seven hundred eight, so like it's it's a few thousand years if when I think the monks sort of figured it out how to make it in between process two and so through thousands of years. China obviously has you know, a beautiful list um of ulan

to that's available. There was specifically made mainly you know in Fujin area and we mountain and over time because of the close proximity of Fujin to Taiwan, literally like it's a tiny ocean way away. Um, there's not a lot of natural migration that went to Taiwan, and that includes some of these long to may have been there for generations. From eight to the end of World War Two, Taiwan was seated by China to Japan as a result

of the First Sino Japanese War. Because of its geography, Japanese occupation was deemed a strategic necessity for military ambitions. During this period, most of the social, economic and cultural changes and occupy Taiwan were driven by technocrats living in the colonial government. It was during this period that Japan became invested in Taiwanese tea and in nineteen o three developed a governmental agency specifically for t R and D

for research and development. Taiwan has really quite a unique historical reference that influence I would say heavily as to what the product begets, you know, what becomes in the sense that it went through Japanese occupation for about fifty years. It bypassed the cultural revolution that happened in China. It sort of was its own independent, ruling democratic society, which you know, people having to be able to pay for things that they like sort of you know, encourage economic

consumption as well. So you have those influences in Taiwan that really makes the t quite different from where I came from. Very early on NTO through the Japanese some looked at the taiwan These teason was like these are wonderful product that we should really invest in. And so they had started a research center called t Research Extension Stations.

It's run by a bunch of chemists and engineers and all they do is study the tea plants and create new tea plants and facilitate the education of farmers that they've run local competitions and they'll go out and teach you what they're looking for so then you can win. And if you win the competition, then you have your your teas are auctioned off and um, it's heavily financially rewardous.

So it created a very healthy circular loop for the farmers to elevate their skill sets for a lot of the technologies from you know that Japanese was known for that was sort of influenced into the production of the tea. This agency is still very active and alive today and it's sort of facilitated a lot of the development of either varieties or types of teas or method of making. So that is something that is extremely unique to Taiwan the island alone, that differentiate the products that came from

out of a Chinese heritage in Lugian. How are these teas actually grown, you know, go into the mountains to side indigenous tea plants. Of course, um that's by how it started from the very beginning, but over times nowadays for commercial cultivation, you really see them sort of you know, trimmed about waist tie. They're usually about three feet tall.

And for ease of harvesting, because when we harvest the tea plan, we really harvest just the young shoot of the tea plant, so to make it easier and you don't have to climb trees because you know, if you let it tea plant grow, they can for some of them can grow to like two or three story hie um, and we only use the baby button maybe like the young shoots sit for tea production. And this is true for very fancy tea and looked at right, so consistent

and to make that easier commercially. Nowadays, pretty much everywhere that you go in the world that produces tea, you'll see most to the tea plant sort of like around three feet tall. When the tea blood comes out, you just grazed the top of the plant and this is done by hand, depending on where you are, I think sort of for Taiwan, and the one thing actually I forgot to mention about you know what makes out too unique? It is an island has a ton of moisture from

the ocean. It also has it's on the traffic of cancer, which is literally like, we're probably the very ideal if you will, for tea cultivations that has a very good you know what, we're familiar as the term tail are for the tea plant to be to time one in addition to having all these culture heritage actually has a very good and it provides a very good environment for t cultivation. As for ceylon and Oolong tea, much of the tea around the world is still picked and processed

by hand. That's because during harvesting, workers are solely picking the bud or the tip of the plant where the newest growth lies. The flush is the mostly newly sprouted leaves, and the flesh harvest can contain up to five leaves, but the most valuable is what's called the golden flush, which is only the first two and three leaves that

are harvested and made into tea. Because farmers don't harvest all the leaves on the plant and are just picking the newest, youngest growth, there are specific seasons for harvesting the tea plant. And the warmest regions where tea grows, like Sri Lanka where Ceylon tea is cultivated, harvesting seasons are long, while in most of the northern regions tea is harvested only a few times during April and September.

In Taiwan, Alanis farmers have developed a balance between hand harvesting ooh long in technology, so another way of like human interaction. As far as hand harvesting or machine harvesting, you know, you could have it both ways. Obviously, hand harvesting much more precise. Um you can get exactly the part of the plant that you want, and certain keys calls were just a bud. Or if you have bad weather and sometimes or you have you know, fifty acres of land that you need to harvest in a few hours,

you need the machine. So really depends on scale, depends on the terrain of the land. Um parts of Taiwan hasts really really high elevation tea gardens which are two thousand meters above sea elevation, and these are a mountainous terrain. They're not easy to run a machine through. So most of those lands you have to hand harvest um, and obviously that drives up the price. It drives up the

cost of the actual harvest. But certainly it's worth that, you know, extend, probably because they're so precise um well made to bees that are picked one by one by are humans. If we want to be better drinkers of these fine oolongs, how do we prepare the tea so that we can drink it at its peak? If you want to start drinking better tea, the first thing to do is when you get to either whatever what's available to whether it's a tea store locally or in a

grocery store, look for tea that doesn't have flavorings. So meaning, you know, sometimes when you smell some teas and it smells like peach, or it smells like raspberries, who sounds like, I don't know. Sometimes chocolate chip, I don't think everything is you know, I don't know. Strawberry sounds unfortunate. Chocolate

chip tea. I've seen banana bread cheese, and so I would say stay away from Notice that is step one because what happens in those cheese, and we know nature doesn't give you a chocolate chip, it's from cook cow beans, it's not from commits sensis, So it's usually any the smells extrawberries, peaches and what have you that's not a

tea plant. And so I usually highly encourage people to smell the dry leaves if this smells like these additives, and don't get those, because what happens is if you use fragrancy, you don't really need the tea to be very well made. You will cover it anyway with peach fragrance. Generally, look for pure teas, and that's either of pure green of your like at your lum or your block. So try different categories and you're narrowed down to a category

that you like. So either um, it's something that's grassy or or something that's not malti or something that toasty. Um. And don't feel like there is a right or wrong way to assumed tea if it's too strong at some hot water, if it's too weak, could have back in the tea pot grow a little longer. So that's where I just want to set this stage because some people

feel like it's something really precious and it's not. It's it's like I tell people that kool aid, you just add water if it's too strong to you know, casual. Every t is different, everyone palid is a little different, so it never feel like you're going to ruin something. You're never gonna nothing bad happens. And then the other one is not restraining the tea leaves so nice. Their tea leaves generally are rolled in a certain way that

they really need room to expand and full. These teeth, particularly, their rolled really tightly, so any room to expand, So don't put them in a you know, a really small tea ball that were physically they are unable to open um. We generally recommend putting the tea leaves in an open vessel, like in a whether it's your tea pot or in a picture where it's not considering biophysical space, or a tea bag or a sachet, and that way you sort of let the teas have the most room to expand,

and therefore you get the most flavor. And it's the most productive way I would say, of extracting tea as far as brewing. So you really want those leaves to unfurl freely, that's right, that's right. And then the brewing temperature the generally generically the group Neery style, the teeth. The lower the temperature pretty much regardless of what type of teeth is, because otherwise, if the temperature is not hot enough, it won't open and you can't actually extract

all the flavors. Tea leaves can be possessed by drying the leaves out in the sun. These withering techniques reduce the water content and make the leaves pliable enough to move on to the next step, which is called rolling. Traditionally done by hand. Rolling tea leaves into compact balls helps to break down the leaf cell structure. This releases the juices and the oils from the leaves and encourages a more uniform oxidation. Just like the take companies oolong tea.

There is a reason for historical advancement to roll cheese into the tightly rolled pearls. One of the reasons for transit um. We're able to transport a lot more tea with the smaller physical space, so they're densely rolled um a safe space the seconds. It protects the integrity of the shape of the leaves, so when you brew them you don't have to break them there for it you keep the shape of the leaves which has less broken surface area. Which will give you a less tannin extraction

will give you a better mouth feel. And now I really sound like a nerve right there. And one of my favorite things about tease in this style is that I find the drinking of them to be so pleasurable in the ways in which the flavor profile changes with each steep. Yeah, I would say really good quality tees. They're made with the idea in mind that you will repeatedly steep the leaves like we tell people generally as three steepings and us to feel free at home to

do up to five and tent. But basically what's happening is different molecules are moving in fragrance, oils, mall it doos, it's in the tea. Leaves are moving at a different speed when you brew them. So, for instance, caffeine as an as a particle, it's the first thing it extracts, is caffeine. Um. If you're brewing with really hot water, and usually the first two infusion and the most caffeineated, and then the third and the fourth are less so.

So if you imagine that the same principle applies to I don't know, the chemical that makes the tea smells like flowers. It has a different traveling speed than some of the other ones. So as you're brewing different infusions um, you're extracting sort of different particles um every time, and that sort it gives you the slight variation in you know,

in the multiple infusion, different steepings, if you will. So that's something that is really fun for someone like kind of what you're saying that you're sitting with the tea and you sort of enjoy it's like a little journey or a little tea vacation that youk and it take and it's really just like between you and the tea and your friend, you're shot. So this is a poem

called a te song. Dan't You was an immortal who cared nothing for rich foods, But after picking some tea and drinking it, he sprouted wings and flew to the abode of the immortals to escape life's emptiness. Now he lives among the clouds in a palace unknown to humans. His tea is brewed in a golden teapot by a young immortal who lives upon a peak amidst the clouds. How worthless is lou U's classic of tea when compared to this that is Cheeo Jin of the Ting Dynasty's

Tea song. I grew up, you know, seeing tea in my in my family and in my culture as the thing that I was brought people together. Warrist Alla Walia is our next guest. Born in Amristo, Northern India and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Alla Walia is a designer best known for his House of Wars fashion and jewelry line, but he's also an avid tea connoisseur. For Wars, tea is a social connector, one that he learned about from his mother's traditional hospitality. It was the first thing you

offered when someone someone came over. You would invite people over for tea. And you know when I wouldn't when I would go to India with the family, you know, it was it was there. It was the first thing. It was, it was the last thing. It was just a part of living right. It was integrated, It was woven into existence. And so it was something I was very familiar with as as an idea and what kind of tea were as being served in your home. It

was traditional tea. My mom would take regular black tea and then and then add cardamom and clothes and spices to it. You know what, she what she grew up with. Indian tea leaves are not prepared separately by being steeped. Instead, tea leaves are boiled along with additions like spices, and then boiled again after the addition of milk and sugar. And many parts of the country the most special cup of tea is one in which the tea leaves are boiled separately in milk. If you had people over, you

have tea with them. Or it wasn't a big thing, it was just always present. Tea has draught people together. He has been about community. He has been about layers and layers of stories of gathering. You know. And she used to be its original purpose with a medicinal That was how it started and grew from there. Um and even you know, used for social gathering for warriors. He

played an omnipresent role in his childhood home. It's importance in Indian homes is tied to the fact that it is the second largest producer of tea, just after China. It's most famous ritals are a psalm, which is a bright tea with a multicolor, and are jailing, which is a delicate and fruity tea. A psalm, Darjiling, and other varieties like the doers, Terai, Massala, and sick Hum are all named after the regions that they're produced in, so

each of the teas is influenced by their environment. A psalm, for instance, needs low altitudes and rich loamy soil and ample rainfall in order to thrive, while Darjeeling, on the other hand, grows in the Himalayan Mountains, which is the highest altitude tea growing region in the entire world. The high altitudes forced a jailing to grow a little more slowly, increasing its chlorophyll content, which results in rich and slightly apricot and peach like flavors that you taste in the tea.

Beyond commensality and terroir, Indian tea has had another significant function. It's used as medicine. The Indian system of Ayurveda has a long standing tradition of herbal teas. Traditionally, these teas have been used for centuries to treat conditions like digestion, stress, inflammation, and improving memory. The use of milk and sugar and chai is an intentional addition to disguise the stronger, more bitter flavors and medicinal properties of cardamom, clove, and ginger,

Drawing on his culture's understanding of health and medicine. Wars relied on Tea's wisdom when dealing with his own physical stress and anxiety. Right, there were days I felt like I couldn't even breathe. I was suffering physically, I was. It was just it's terrible. And then when I went through that experience, I realized that I wasn't alone in

my suffering. Everyone goes through this stress, right, Everyone goes through it every day, right, like not being able to pay bills, or or relationship stress or or loss of life or bad health, whatever it is. We constantly, we constantly are faced with it. And and not everyone has access to that kind of what's called alternative treatment or

know how to get to those people. Right. And so then I went back to my herbalists, and I put a team of herbalists together and we started making blends that that we helped deal with every day building blocks. We need to sleep better, so we made a sleep when we need to improve our digestion. So we need a digestion when there are moments where you might overdo it,

you know, you know in life. And so we made you know, like a detox len and but just spent years on making these blends and making these finding the right ingredients and trying to Warris found that t relieved the symptoms, which ultimately became his inspiration for his own line of teas called Wars Botanical. And now we're you know,

we're launching Council Wars Botanicals. And it is it's like a multi multi, multi faceted enterprise that uses tea as its starting point in the conversation, that uses tea as a gateway as at first and of course step towards talking about much larger issues to have much needed conversation. And when you look at it, historically, in all these ancient cultures, he has brought people together. It had an

anchor in people's lives every day. To end our podcast today, we traveled to Tianjian, China, where a family friend Goofu or uncle, explains how he brews his favorite cup of white tea. Hold, there's just some poors, huh. Today the tea we're drinking is a puerity. This song poor is a type of black tea that is a variety of fermented tea from the yu Non province in southern China, Subani in the leisure. This type of tea has over four hundred years of history. It's one of the most

well known teas. Have you done? As it was bestowed as a gift to the emperor of the shan Long dynasty. To start, we will put our leaves into a large teacup. Will begin our first steep, which is called a un cha, where we pour our water at a hundred degrees celsius into our cup. Cha serves the purpose of both allowing the leaves to unravel and also serves to wash away impurities. Change change oil, one body. Pour these into your small

individual drinking glasses. These are small ceramic glasses that are about the size of a double shot glass. Give the liquid a quick swirl to warm your glass, and pour away into the tea stand reservoir. Once we've poured our glasses out, we will pour our one degrees celsius water into our large tea cup with leaves. We'll leave it to steep for sixty seconds. Once we finished our steep, we will serve the tea in each of our individual ceramic glasses. This is an anonymous poem inscribed on an

old sing teapot. Willow branches graze the grass. As I sit in the shade drinking tea. A note from the flute blows, clearly mingling with the sound of rain. I could sit here alone forever, and still I'd never feel lonely. H h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h h. That's all for this episode of Point of Origin. Thanks for listening and supporting the wet Stone podcast, where we travel the world to champion food

as a means of expanding human empathy. Please, if you like what you've just heard, rate us, review us, give us five stars so that we can continue to make these podcasts just for you. To keep abreast with all things wet Stone, follow us on I G at wet Stone Magazine or online at wet Stone magazine dot com. That's w h E T S T O in E magazine dot com, where you will find the latest on all things wet Stone, including the details from today's show

and information about purchasing our print magazine special. Thanks to Selene Glacier, our lead producer, to Cat Hong our editor, Quentin lebou, our production intern, and to my business partner who makes all things that wet Stone possible, are co founder Melissa She Thanks mel and thanks to our friends at I Heart Radio for helping us bring you this podcast. To Gabrielle Collins, our supervising producer, and to Christopher Hasiota's

our executive producer. I'm your host, the Origin Forager, Steven Saderfield, and we'll be back here next week with more from wet Stone Magazine's Point of Origin podcast. H