New York Times Promotional Article for Teabox.com

notes: some interesting ideas in marketing.

DARJEELING, India — The tea plantations here in the shadow of the cloud-shrouded valleys of the Himalayan mountains may be the last place to find technological innovation. Many of the colonial-era practices involved in tea-growing and processing still follow the time-honored manual labor and handwritten bookkeeping.

But as global consumers increasingly become connoisseurs of high-quality products, one entrepreneur is seeking to give the industry a Silicon Valley makeover.

India is the world’s second-largest tea grower after China. Yet, even as the country produces quality specialty varietals that are as highly regarded as wines from France and whisky from Scotland, its industry is antiquated.

With the backing of one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms, Accel Partners, Kaushal Dugar, a Singapore-trained financial analyst, is among those slowly bringing the sector into the modern era via his online tea retailing start-up, Teabox.

The bulk of India’s production — about one billion of the total 1.2 billion kilograms (2.6 billion pounds) — is consumed by the domestic market, where mass-market brands from the Indian conglomerate Tata and the multinational Unilever hold sway. But the remaining 200 million kilograms is a market ripe for shake-up.

“We grow some of the best teas in the world, but our processes are archaic and marketing is nonexistent,” said Arun Kumar Gomden, a tea industry consultant who managed tea estates for 35 years.

Teas lined up for tasting at the Goomtee tea estate, a supplier to Teabox.
Saritha Rai
Teas lined up for tasting at the Goomtee tea estate, a supplier to Teabox.
As is the case with other successful e-commerce sites, technology forms the core of Teabox’s online operations. Algorithms predict demand based on such factors as past sales, internal ranking of tea varieties and pricing. Information about a tea’s picking date, season and origins is made available to online customers.

Taking a cue from the successful wine industry, Teabox is bringing in wine tasters to provide engaging online descriptions for its products. Gone are the flowery but opaque descriptions like “distinctly high-grown character” and “surprising malty nuance.” They have been replaced by more consumer-friendly taster phrases like “light-bodied tea with a slight woodiness in its flavor,” along with detailed steeping instructions.

Teabox, which started in mid-2012, is introducing a subscription model offering personalized tea selections, replicating similar successes of online sites selling wine, razor blades, cosmetics and organic products.

All of these steps aim to hook a new generation of customers in countries such as Russia and the United States. As consumers on a quest for the latest niche food products veer toward drinking the brew in upscale salons and tea bars, Indian tea could tap into the large addressable global tea market, estimated to be $90 billion in size.

“Tea is a time-sensitive product, but the industry’s supply chain is quite broken and has many intermediaries,” said Prashanth Prakash, a partner at Accel India, which along with Singapore’s Horizon Ventures has provided some $1 million in early-stage funding to Teabox. “The business is ripe for disruption, both in terms of price and quality,” he said.

The venture capital approach is helping Teabox change operations. It was Accel Partners that suggested the wine industry method to “product discovery” — industry jargon for helping shoppers discern and select products online.

“By employing tactics used by the wine industry, we want to demystify tea and present it in a more accessible manner along with how-to brewing directions so that buyers can explore varieties, regions and flavors,” said Mr. Dugar, 31, founder and chief executive of Teabox, which is based in Siliguri, Darjeeling, the heart of India’s tea-growing region.

His family’s trade connections go back four decades and give Mr. Dugar access to high-quality teas from the estates of Assam and Darjeeling. From his childhood summers spent on plantations, he recalls the tea pluckers picking two leaves and a bud that was transformed into brewed tea within hours. “I imagined that the workers in tea plantations were magicians.”

Kaushal Dugar, chief of Teabox.
Saritha Rai
Kaushal Dugar, chief of Teabox.
Mr. Dugar had worked for a few years as a corporate finance analyst at consultancy firm KPMG in Singapore, but he then returned to India to become an entrepreneur. He and his backers quickly discovered that the industry first organized by British colonizers about 200 years ago has not changed at all. Many plantations are controlled by third- or fourth-generation owners, using machines dating back a half-century or more.

“Traditional processes such as withering, rolling, drying are all manually monitored just like it was when the tea industry was first established in this region centuries ago,” said Amar Nath Jha, a senior manager of the 162-year old Steinthal Tea Estate in Darjeeling, a supplier to Teabox.

Because of the lengthy auction and distribution process, it can take up to six months for the tea to reach a consumer overseas.

“The lack of modern infrastructure leads to tea quality deteriorating and losing aroma along the way,” said Mr. Gomden, the tea consultant.

To change that, Teabox set up sourcing centers in Darjeeling and Assam, within a few hours from the gardens where the leaves are plucked and processed. (Other buyers have also begun to bypass the auction system and buy premium teas directly from producers).

Almost as soon as the teas are procured fresh from the production centers, Teabox stores them in temperature- and humidity-controlled warehouses. Then, within 48 hours, the teas are checked, vacuum-packed and dispatched to fulfillment centers in major markets such as Russia, the United States and Australia.

Data analytics also help. When they log into the website, buyers are served personalized recommendations according to one of Teabox’s 53 tea profiles.

Customer feedback goes quickly back to the producers. For example, Teabox now sells tea only in 100-gram vacuum packs after complaints that tea in larger packs lost aroma.

The company tries to win over customer share its audience by offering high-end teas at a discount to established brands like Twinings and upscale European, Asian and American tea salons, all of which sell online (Teabox’s products can sell for as much as $1,099 per kilogram).

For instance, a French tea salon called Palais des Thés sells the Mission Hill tea at $340 per kilogram, but Teabox sells the same product about 60 percent less at $126 per kilogram. TWG, a high-end tea bar in Singapore, sells the Okayti at $390 per kilogram while Teabox sells it as $180, less than half the price.

Teabox is still a small player in the industry: It has shipped 10 million cups’ worth of tea to customers in 65 countries so far. The challenges are many. Traditional distributors have blocked access to plantations and Teabox has had to counter rumors from rivals that it is an unreliable buyer.

Mohan Chirimar, 53, of Raghunath Exports, a bulk supplier to Starbucks as well as retail chains and supermarkets in 30 countries, said Teabox was chasing a big opportunity that had room for other entrepreneurs.

Raghunath Exports is itself gearing up to compete online as Mr. Chirimar’s 23-year old son, Aditya, a recent graduate from Cornell University, has returned this month to join the business. “He is going to expand our business online; it offers more opportunities and will speed up our growth,” Mr. Chirimar said.

Teabox does have an early-mover advantage but must now build its name. Regular access to financing will help Teabox ramp up its brand in crucial markets like the United States where tea drinking growth rates are overtaking coffee. The start-up aims to grow 300 to 500 percent in the coming year and cross $1 million in annual revenue.

“With cash in the bank and support from investors, we can dream about quickly building a billion-dollar tea brand from India, something that has never been attempted before,” Mr. Dugar said.

Indian Tea Distributor Recommended by Kavita Kapoor

I have been ordering some amazing Darjeeling teas from Golden Tips www.goldentipstea.com for the last 4 years here in LA. Surprisingly they are not mentioned here but I believe they are the one who started selling single estate darjeelings.(Madhav Sarda I believe is the owner) I know a lot of people who order from them and their prices are much lesser than even Teabox.com

Indian Teas Recommended by Gordon Ackerman Albany, NY

two of the world's finest teas, "Assam Greenwood" and "Darjeeling Margaret's Hope", but my favorites (notably, the exquisite and rare "Kenilworth") come from Sri Lanka. I would direct tea-fancier to "The Book of Tea," a great classic.

White Tea in Fuding 2014

The domain of Fuding stretches from the sea shore across a coastal plane and up into mountains reaching 2000 meters in altitude. Spanning marshes and tangled forests, the defining characteristic of Fuding's terroir are the streaks of vibrant orange clay produced by lichens consuming the underlying igneous stone.

This year's wet weather allows us take a break from picking tea buds to explore the range of Fuding's environs. Usually higher altitudes produce better teas, but Fuding's coastal white teas can be excellent as well, especially when aged. Here, by a cove where seaweed is farmed, we find sixty year old bushes on the steep hillside opposite a temple. While this year's tea was dried too slow, the briny wind leaves an exciting component to its flavor. We look forward to returning next year when we can purchase green leaves ourselves and dry them gently in our hotel room.

A few hours drive inland Fuding's white mountain tea has also been plagued by sporadic storms. The weather this spring has been unusually cold, with snow over the new year and frosting until two weeks ago. This means the tea buds are smaller, which itself is not so worrisome. A dearth of sunny days, however, has been a deal breaker for early white tea: all is either oven dried or reddened due to prolonged drying.

While we remain in the mountains it mists and rains five of the week's seven days.

With a day's picking farmers gathers at nearby crossroads to sell on into the supply chains of factories large and small who have the ovens required to dry the tea. While oven temperatures are kept below 50 degrees centigrade, this still flattens the brightness that we look for in the best fresh bai hao yin zhen (white hair silver needle). Locals say on years like this there is only hong hao yin zhen (red hair silver needle).

Shade dried too slow or heated in walk-in and specialty coal-fired ovens, none of the teas have the almost citrus splash of vibrance that makes Fuding's white tea China's best.

Both make infusions which exhibit flaws. Shade dried tea steeps (L) darker and harder tasting - erring into the red tea spectrum. Oven dried tea steeps (R) greener and buttery tasting - erring into the green tea spectrum.

A proper white tea, dried in the shade, consistently, over four days, will be lighter in color still, white even, and its taste is almost no taste at all, but something that just falls away, effervescent, light behind the eyes, flirting, with an after-breath of sea and pine.

One Picking of One Cháwáng by One Woman

Puer Jǐngmaì Cháwáng

So much affects the flavor a tea infuses into water: each year's weather; where a tea grows; who fixes it; who prepares it; how it is stored; even who sips it. Over the years we have worked to decrease these variables so we might learn the taste of one earth and one tree.



We found one solution to this problem in western Yúnnán at a village that has been largely unimproved for sixty years. Shown here, the village leader's house in the foreground and the temple beyond, they flank a tightly woven, almost cosmopolitan network of alleyways in this dimple of hilly woodlands at 1500m.

The grandmother is taking care of her child's child's child's child, and very happy to see us. She says it is the first time a foreigner has come to her home.

The village's tea grove is splattered with tea trees of all ages. As with most of the old tea groves in Yúnnán the oldest trees were planted by the Bùlǎng tribe long ago. Because tea trees germinate only with difficulty new trees have sprouted slowly over the centuries creating a dappled tapestry with younger trees populating the fringes and older trees within.

We pass men picking tea above us on the path to grandmother's tree. They balance precariously on surprisingly lithe branches that bend and sway beneath them.

Grandmother's tree is not only the oldest in her village's grove, it also is of special renown because it has what locals call "eyes". While a century ago all the tribes performed detailed rituals and sacrifices for their tea trees, now Jingmai is one of the only areas where the tribes still perform yearly public and personal offerings to many of the tea trees.

In half a day this tree's spring shoots, two leaves and a bud, are picked clean, yielding two kilograms of dry tea when, in another day, they are fried and rolled and sun dried. We are lucky there is no rain!

For fun the granddaughter, done picking tea, puts on her ethnic festival costume and bounces on the limb of one of her family trees. (In this case both grandmother and granddaughter are ethnic Bùlǎng.) We are happy, too, continuing to build our collection of a Jingmai dark tea, picked at first blush from one tree by one woman who herself fries, rolls, and sundries it just for us! That's pretty special. And we can drink it anytime at home, comparing it with years past and forward, and even against the other famous tea mountains of Yúnnán and further afield.

Spring 2014 Puer Survives Coldest Winter in Memory

Sorry to be so long gone. All this technology... It's a fast business, and the act of posting is very different from actually getting things done. Now there are more than five internet platforms on which I try to start representing tea. Frankly it makes sense, what the scientists say, that this social division of our efforts is making us less aware and more stupid. So here's to slowing down and focusing on what's important, with a cup of tea.

Liubao Old and Authentic

2013’s first tea hunt brought our tea society into the villages around the legendary site of the "sixth tea mountain", Liubao. Located in Guangxi province (map), east of Yunnan, this town was likely a location for taxation, just like the namesake village of what was formerly known as Puer. Old people have told us no one knows where the best liubao tea came from because today's maps have adopted new names. If anyone has any idea where we might find old maps of Guangxi province, please let us know!

The quality of tea grown on the hills here aside, Liubao was likely the location that gave this tea its legal name. After falling out of favor in concert with the construction of dams, which made continued transportation of tea from here prohibitive, the town struggled and today looks a bit like an industrial wasteland. We don’t find a single restaurant from which we wanted to eat in Liubao town, but luckily locals treat us to their hospitality. Unlike other tea regions in China, in this region the smallest villages often have dedicated tea stores prospering on the local economy. The number of different liubao teas astounds. Young and old leaves, even branches, flowers, and seeds are steeped into tea.



The favorite liubao found this year was a ten year old lao people tea, called, “little chick” because the balls of tea are the size of a baby chicken. Some have suggested it was the Lao people, whose migrations through this region, first brought tea culture/economy/history here. Guangxi tea culture goes back a long way, and many locals claim this was where the “shou puer process” was created and perfected hundreds of years ago.



Different styles of Yao tribal tea very in appearance. The basic idea however is to barbeque the leaves a little and then roll them into balls in the palm of the hand. This had a nice, clear, betel nut flavor.



This wild tree liubao is made in a similar fashion. Here are two teas from the same farmer, one six years old, one from last year. The mountain - indicated by a wave of the arm - over there – has old tea trees in the forest. The mountain belongs to a village, and some of those villagers climb the mountain each spring to pick tea and sell it to him. Customers rarely buy it, and he is happy to sell us all he has. A little smoky, after the years a cooling betel nut flavor emerges. That some teas picked in this region develop the flavor and some do not, he is insistent on, but he also admits he does not know the reason.



What looks like a block of wood from a sunken ship catches our attention in one shop. What some have called mud tea, the original tea from liubao, Guangxi largely stopped producing a half century before. We are told dams on the rivers made the transport of it south to Guangzhou nearly impossible. Chips from this log so far have been the most popular among subscribers of this spring’s Guangxi tea find. The proprietor did not know the age of the tea shown above. Indeed he didn’t know anything about Guangxi’s history of making south-east asia’s most popular dark tea. He found this tea in the home of a farmer who himself did not know the provenance or age.



Pondering whether this infusion tastes like roots or the skin of grapes, we all agree it has a surprisingly unique flavor, undoubtedly old.

Spring’s first dark tea arrived from a nearby village while we were in this store.



Sharing it with our Beijing tea friends, one told us it is a hybrid green and dark tea. Because it was wok fried on coals resulting in little green bubbles on the dried leaves’ surface it has a buttery flavor in the mouth. Our dear tea teacher Xiao Liu explained that the coals were in contact with the steel of the wok in which the tea was fixed. In singular places the heat was high enough to heat the tea leaf buds into green tea.




Notice the light green blisters on the tea. This results in an uncharacteristically soft taste to this tea, mixing the depth of a sheng dark tea with the smooth buttery taste of green tea. It will be interesting to see how this tea ages, and whether the moments of green tea on these buds do just fade, as Xiao Liu says they will.

A Woman Developed A Rare Bone Disease From Drinking Too Much Tea
Rachael Rettner, MyHealthNewsDaily | Mar. 21, 2013, 7:47 PM | 5,863 | 10

A 47-year-old U.S. woman developed a bone disease rarely seen in the U.S. after consuming an excessive amount of tea. An x-ray showed calcifications on ligaments (left) and areas of dense bone on the spinal vertebrae (right).

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A 47-year-old Michigan woman developed a bone disease rarely seen in the U.S. after she drank a pitcher of tea made from at least 100 tea bags daily, for 17 years, researchers report.

The Detroit woman visited the doctor after experiencing pain in her lower back, arms, legs and hips for five years.

X-rays revealed areas of very dense bone on the spinal vertebrae and calcifications of ligaments in her arm, said study researcher Dr. Sudhaker D. Rao, a physician at Henry Ford Hospital who specializes in endocrinology and bone and mineral metabolism.

The researchers suspected the woman had skeletal fluorosis, a bone disease caused by consuming too much fluoride (a mineral found in tea as well as drinking water).

The patient's blood levels of fluoride were four times higher than what would be considered normal, the researchers said.

Skeletal fluorosis is endemic in regions of the world with naturally high levels of fluoride in drinking water, including some parts of India and China, but is rare in Europe and North America. (Low levels of fluoride are added to drinking water in the United States to prevent cavities, but aren't high enough to cause fluorosis.)

Rao said the patient was originally referred to him because her doctors suspected she had cancer, which can also show up on an X-ray as areas of dense bone. But because Rao had seen cases of skeletal fluorosis in his native India, "I was able to recognize it immediately," he said.

Excess fluoride is typically eliminated from the body by the kidneys, Rao said. But if one consumes a lot of it, as this patient did through tea drinking, over time, the fluoride forms crystal deposits on bone, Rao said.

A few other cases of skeletal fluorosis caused by tea drinking have been reported in the United States. In these cases, patients typically drank a gallon of tea a day, Rao said. Rao and colleagues instructed their patient to stop drinking tea, after which she experienced an improvement in symptoms. The fluoride deposits will gradually go away as the bone remodels (or repairs) itself, a process that occurs frequently in the body, Rao said.

A description of the case will be published (March 21) in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Hot Red Tea Dangerous?

Steaming hot tea linked to cancer: "A regular habit of eating and drinking very hot foods and drinks could increase your risk of developing cancer of the oesophagus"
Oliver Childs,
Cancer Research UK
FROM THE BBC WORLD SERVICE


The risk is linked to regularly consuming very hot drinks
Drinking steaming hot tea has been linked with an increased risk of oesophageal (food tube) cancer, Iranian scientists have found.
The British Medical Journal study found that drinking black tea at temperatures of 70C or higher increased the risk.
Experts said the finding could explain the increased oesophageal cancer risk in some non-Western populations.
Adding milk, as most tea drinkers in Western countries do, cools the drink enough to eliminate the risk.
The oesophagus is the muscular tube that carries food from the throat to the stomach.
Oesophagus cancers kill more than 500,000 people worldwide each year and oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (OSCC) is the most common type.

Tobacco and alcohol are the main factors linked to the development of oesophageal cancers in Europe and America.
But it has not been clear why other populations around the world have high rates of the disease although there has been a theory that regularly drinking very hot drinks damages the lining of the gullet.

A litre a day

Golestan Province in northern Iran has one of the highest rates of OSCC in the world, but rates of smoking and alcohol consumption are low and women are as likely to have a diagnosis as men. Tea drinking, however, is widespread.
The University of Tehran researchers studied tea drinking habits among 300 people diagnosed with OSCC and compared them with a group of 570 people from the same area.
Nearly all participants drank black tea regularly, on average drinking over a litre a day.

Compared with drinking warm or lukewarm tea (65C or less), drinking hot tea (65-69C) was associated with twice the risk of oesophageal cancer, and drinking very hot tea (70C or more) was associated with an eight-fold increased risk.
The speed with which people drank their tea was also important.
Drinking a cup of tea in under two minutes straight after it was poured was associated with a five-fold higher risk of cancer compared with drinking tea four or more minutes after being poured.

There was no association between the amount of tea consumed and risk of cancer.
Because the researchers had relied on study participants to say how hot their tea was, they then went on to measure the temperature of tea drunk by nearly 50,000 residents of the same area.

This ranged from under 60C to more than 70C, and reported tea drinking temperature and actual temperature was found to be similar.

Hilltop Fuding White Tea

In the little mountain village where everyone shares the name Zhang there are more children than usual, everyone having come home for the fall festival, up from the low lying cities along Fuding's coastal shelf. The old couple we call grandma and grandpa (nainai and yeye) are with their younger son, a construction worker in the nearest city. He leaves soon after we arrive, catching a ride on a passing motorcycle. We have brought a crate of peanuts from Hunan for him, but he cannot take them. Tomorrow we will visit him in his city while fixing Nainai's gas stove in which the magneto has stopped working.

Tea season is over but we decide to make a little dark maocha out of fall tea because the earth at a farm we visited in Hunan looked surprisingly similar to that here, with orange rocks and soil. The tea variety used there also had tough large leaves not unlike the fuding dabaihao variety here. It is an experiment, but with so many of this village's tea trees left to go wild, we wonder if we might not be able to source dark tea from this town which we could use to make qianliang or even fuzhuan. Nainai doesn't like dark tea, but neither does she bat an eye. She has nothing better to do, she says, grabbing a basket and leading us up the hill to an expanse of tea bushes lined by pines to the south and deserted tea trees west. She quickly fills her hands with pickings of the fine green leaves growing from the tabletop. This they will prune off anyway, she tells us. When we say we want the lower leaves, she shakes her head. She tells us not to pick the leaves from where the stem is red because that will hurt the tea tree. We compromise picking an assortment from a terrace of bushes gone wild, while she runs like a lawn mower up and down the tabletopped bushes. We return home with about a kilogram of leaves, which she says would make us two yuan if we sold them to the local tea buyer, who is a family member of the mayor (no wonder everyone is leaving). We start a fire under Nainai's wok and fry the leaves about five minutes. We take turns flipping the crackling green pile while trying not to burn ourselves on the hot iron. The steam that rises from them smells wonderful, but too little time frying and these leaves will become red tea. Too long frying and they will be green. At one point there is a change in the wonderful fragrance, and we shift the pile out onto a flat woven bamboo platter. We again take turns leaning into the steaming pile to roll the leaves until they look like noodles. This wet mass is then pressed into a heavy ziplock freezer bag, and the air squeezed out. The bag is then set on the stove top to keep it warm while sitting until two pm tomorrow. It is bright and sunny then and the tea can be spread out to dry in the sunlight. By nightfall it isn't completely dry but the smell that rises from the wide flat basket is neither red nor green. Leaving it under the porch until morning, we can finish the drying tomorrow.

We take a walk up and around the hills looking for the Ye Zhu Hua, wild chrysanthemums in bloom now, but Nainai tells us the fallow fields where it grew have been plowed under in order to plant a new cash crop used in Chinese medicine and alcohol production. The flowers that once grew here made the sweetest flower tea we have ever tried. Chrysanthemum tea is the most popular flower tea in China, and we liked drinking those before we tried the flowers Nainai collects in the fall. Hers are truly wild, and she would wander the abandoned terraces to pick them where they grew among the grasses. Their taste was not just full and sweet when steeped in boiling water, it was so much better than any other chrysanthemum tea that we have since stopped drinking it. She gathered so little each year, that one of our goals on this trip was to gather and dry the seeds so that they could be spread to other hills in the area. It was partly this flower tea and partly the bursting hot peppers (which Nainai and Yeye also refuse to eat) that made us think anything grown here might just taste incredible. Over the years we have discussed trying to grow various cash crops in this magical soil and pristine environment, and the near poverty that Nainai and Yeye live in would make any additional income welcome. We settled on perennials such as exotic hot peppers and Italian herbs. However, there is a downside to the pristine remoteness of this village. In the spring we had planted not just the South American peppers and Italian perennial spices, but basil, tomatoes, carrots and other vegetables, however wild pigs savaged most of these, and because we asked for no pesticides to be used the unusually diverse insect pests decimated the rest. We will have to return to the drawing board when considering our dream as to how to make this edenic paradise solvent. Where the patches of wild chrysanthemums had taken root, now grow some Chinese medicine which the pigs and pests do not destroy. Tea trees and food crops too are being replaced by this plant.

Hiking in these hills we do find more and more abandoned groves of the large leaved, dabaihao, white tea trees. Seen here is a "textbook" perfect miniature canyon shaded most of the day, gathering all the erosion and forest decay, and filled with dabaihao tea trees over two meters in height. This would be a treasure to any teamaker in Wuyi, the heart of intellectual tea. Could there be something to make of it being abandoned here?

Fujian October Festival

All day we head east across Jiangxi, past its white buildings with their red roofs. As night falls a full autumn moon catapults into the sky above the highway before us. Fireworks strobe our journey throughout the night. The moon will not be larger than this at any other time of the year, the first day of the autumn festival, the night that the moon is closest to the earth. We are going to visit Nainai and Yeye, the old couple that makes some of the sweetest, brightest, white tea in China. Their bubbling voices give us the kind of emotion usually reserved for close family, but as Nainai says, we are family now because of the number of holidays we have spent together.

Was it four months ago we helped them pick the last of their spring tea? At that time we also planted Italian perennial spices, carrots for Nainai’s ailing eyes, and we tried various experimental methods for arresting erosion where a road has just been cut through one of their tea fields. We’ll arrive exhausted but with an added plan this time for making dark tea with their fall tea leaves!

140 Year Old Tea

A Jingyang fuzhuan brick made 140 years ago. While we did not try it, we do now await the day that we can try such an old a fu tea from the city that made fu tea famous. As with so many things the quality of the product has decreased with time. Before 1953 the best fuzhuan tea was harvested and rough processed into a dark maocha in Hunan after which it was transported to Jingyang Shaanxi, just north of Xian, where a strange fungus grew on the tea. This tea became wildly popular on the Tibetan plateau where arguably the first tea connoisseurs emerged. Not unlike the making of special teas, after 1953 the process for propagating the "jin hua" microbiology was "perfected" and the center for Fuzhuan production was relocated closer to where the tea used was grown. While this made sense in that logical, narrow-minded scientific sort of way, of course a cheddar produced in Wisconsin does not taste the same as one produced in Maine or Scotland. We learned this when we met the fourteenth descendant of a lineage of fu tea makers in Jingyang and we tried the tea that he and his father had continued to make in secret. Here he is pictured below.

These days only the cheapest throwaway tea leaves are used to make fu tea, and while we have designs to make our own with the best tea leaves we can find, it will be a long slow road back to whatever once made fu tea the name brand of its time.

As seen in this photo the apex of a tea tree's shoots have what is called "hong geng" and "lu geng", "red stalk" and "green stalk". The color of the stalk from which the leaves sprout indicates its age, and usually in Anhua the green-stalk leaves are used to make (higher priced) red or green tea, while only the red stalk leaves are used for dark tea. There are many reasons proffered for why the best leaves are not used to make qianliang logs. The most popular of these is that younger leaves have too much caffeine and other high-energy polyphenols within them, which will combust under the incredible pressure exerted on the leaves when squeezing them into a qianliang logs. This process takes about seven men with large levers pulling on bamboo cords.

That a qianliang is made with summer tea leaves known to be less flavorful has always struck us as unfortunate, to say the least. So when we met a surprisingly candid tea maker with forty years experience (far right), we asked if it was truly impossible for young spring tea leaves to withstand the pressure of the qianliang process. He said that such qianliangs can and have been made. It is true that when using young leaves a qianliang must be compressed more carefully and by a skilled team, but using high-energy spring leaves is not really a problem. The problem is that this is too expensive for current market conditions. In the past these were made and they likely will be made again in the future. For now profit maximization forbids it.

Qianliang's are massive amounts of tea, which while expensive (ranging from 2000-4000 yuan per log or US$ 400-600) when this is divided by their weight of 37 kilograms the price is still quite cheap when compared to that of puer and other teas.

Qianliang logs are an example of the kind of innovation that has happened in China's teas over the course of generations. The consistent demand for this regions teas not only brought tea traders to settle their families here, but it also lead to experiments as to how to fit the largest amount of tea into the smallest possible space to increase the profitability of the long trip to market.

Qianliang

The crown jewel of Hunan's dark tea is the massive qianliang log, the tightest pressed dark tea in the world. With a saw it is made into discs the outside of which look distinctly like bark.

Below is an excellent 1997 qianliang and above it is a slice from a log produced in 2008. Both are made from tea grown in the hills around Meicheng City, what was the capital of Anhua county before it was moved to Dongping. Unlike sheng puer, older qianliang discs become more fragrant even as the contrast between the individual leaves in that disc fade. Here the older disc has a powdery, undefined look to it, but the smell of the dry disk, the infusion itself, and the wet tea are surprisingly identical - an aroma of distant cinnamon, desert trees, and fertile earth. We will head into the hills where these leaves grew tomorrow.

Yiyang's Old Dark Teas

It is windy in Anhua, Hunan, this fall, the wind blowing for days across this lesser known yet among the earliest famous domains for dark tea. It was first revered by Tibetans, who themselves were perhaps the first connoisseurs of dark tea. They even sold the tea grown and produced in this area onward to kingdoms so far away as what is now Russia and Europe. We speculate that the earth here had something to do with that, but regardless, there was likely some reason why Tibetans paid extra for this tea to be transported across all of Sichuan when Sichuan itself produced a dark tea of similar appearance.

We drove here from Beijing, and driving south for two days we watched the haze of Beijing thicken first when passing through Henan, and then gradually thin. It rose to hover above the highway as we entered Hubei only to thin into the humidity of Hunan's capital, Changsha city. After stumbling upon a very interesting tasting "fu" tea here we continued into Yiyang prefecture, west and south of the capital. The skies cleared as we drew near what is today one of the earth’s largest known deposits of rare earth metals - those precious commodities required for the production of fine micro-electronics. These are mined in Anhua county where there are a number of other unique geological formations. We would like to perform comparative chemical analysis of both Anhua's dark tea and the composition of the soil it is grown in, focusing specifically on the aged tea which takes on such special qualities. There is a lot to say about how the minerals in tea slowly form sugar complexes as the teas age, but we'll just leave that hint for now.

On September 24th and 25th there was a tea expo in Yiyang City, the capital of Yiyang Prefecture, which contains Anhua county. This is and became the centralized seat of dark tea production in Hunan after 1949. Production of the ubiquitous tea of Qinghai and Xingjiang Province, "fu zhuan", was practically monopolized by a few factories here, and their traditional teas have become a hot commodity of late. In the last few years we have gotten many a phone call and proposition offering such teas gathered from the farm folk of these regions, but after learning of the potential for fraud in this market we have shied away from purchases. However in Yiyang there is a museum of dark tea (opened by a Korean) which we thought to visit, and walking toward it we discovered a friend from the north of China's old capital, Xian. In that uniquely central Chinese way, after bellowing across a square and demanding our attention like thunder might, he introduced us to some friends with whom we drank and dined. We shared many old dark teas across a table, debating and appreciating, and this was undoubtedly the gem of our visit to Yiyang this time.

We drank old Yiyang Tea Factory fuzhuan from 1980; we compared it to an old Sichuan tea from 1970. We also tried an unknown dark loose tea which we collectively decided was likely from Yunnan after ruling out the other provinces. A dealer in old Yiyang Tea Factory bricks had an interesting manual produced by the Yiyang Factory itself. Here we are photos of factory authorized samples kept from each year since 1958 to 2004. The omissions of some annual production runs are intriguing. 1996 is also mislabeled 1986.








This guide is certainly not the definitive indicator for a genuine Yiyang Tea Factory vintage. Not three months ago we sat watching as a friend assisted his colleague in separating the fakes from the genuine Yiyang Tea Factory bricks of dark tea from the 1980's and 1990's in a shipment of hundreds of pounds of such tea. Fake teas have been produced so long as tea has - though the oldest of such fakes are themselves valuable. Fu tea is one of those teas categories for which fakes are neither valuable nor healthy to drink. This can often be tasted, however fake fu teas do get people sick. Tea taste, like all tastes, is a uniquely personal experience. The names of flavors we apply to real and fake fu teas are not necessarily useful. More often such names of flavors get repeated in ways that obscure the act of tasting, of feeling a tea in ones stomach, of noticing if the tea is in fact pleasing. Sometimes taste is the only way to tell a fake tea from a real tea, but in the case of Yiyang Tea Factory fu tea there are also indicators within the tea bricks themselves. The number of twigs increases in the Yiyang Tea Factory bricks over time, and the tea leaves themselves vary in quality from year to year. Yiyang Tea Factory also had special limited production teas which produced exceptional teas, which were copied even in the 1960's, such as this (below), named aptly, "the highest instruction"...

Fine Foam on Old Sheng Puer

After the seventh steeping of a smooth tasting loose sheng puer from the 1980's there was still a thin foam that rose in the spout of the teapot with every steeping. This was a Lancang tea, stored until now in Lancang, Yunnan. Some have suggested it was a dirty teapot or a doctored tea, but the teapot was ours and the tea tasted tight and clean, dense without much aroma as other old sheng puers have before it.

Anyone have a thought as to why this would happen?

Old Shou Puer

A dealer at the Yiyang Tea Expo was peddling a shou puer from 1980 which he had acquired from America where it had been in storage in Texas for an unknown number of years. The taste was clear - if lacking in complexity - though he identified succinctly a taste in it as that of almonds...

Anhui Dark Tea Production Begins

To understand Anhui’s tea we could think about its cuisine. Anhui’s cuisine is famous for its use of subtle spicing, often discovering a new niche of flavor between existing dishes that were already famous. The way in which its food is cooked, often by steaming or slow roasting, is known for being precise and unhurried. Anhui's people are also famous for their business prowess (as the people of Shanxi, who we’ve seen pioneered early dark tea production in Hunan and Sichuan). But where Shanxi’s tea entrepreneurs settled widely, Anhui’s citizens built their economies close to home. The peak of Anhui’s business fame is said to have been from the Ming into the Qing Dynasties, when many of its most famous teas were invented. Today as China’s third largest tea producer, Anhui Province’s tea history isn’t the oldest in China, but many of its teas have survived a chaotic time, and we wonder if there isn’t a reason. We are refreshed to hear those we meet here talk directly without trying to aggrandize Anhui’s teas. Where we disagree with local vendors, we do so on a basis of personal taste, not history. We hope Anhui can export this attitude along with its teas to the tea enthusiasts of the world.

Anhui is a prodigious producer of tea. Liuan guapian green tea, qimen red tea, and huangshan maofeng green tea were all on the official list of China’s ten best teas in 1959. That’s almost one third of the list. Anhui also produces taiping houkui, another of our favorite green teas. Huoshan huangya was the only yellow tea we had tried before our journey began (though we will soon learn that it is no longer produced as a yellow tea and many foreigners mislabel it). There is also a dark tea made in Anhui, called by some in the south of China and Hong Kong liuan dark tea. This is one of the few teas that is finished in the fall. Even now it is being steamed and packed into beautiful little baskets. Though the tea leaves used are picked in spring and prepared into maocha the same as with dark teas everywhere, Anhui’s tea makers wait until fall to package and sell their dark tea.

Autumn is here and the moon is full. The foliage is dense and the terrain steep. There is a relic of a bridge which we are slightly nervous driving across. Below and beside the bridge is a beautiful stairway of white stone that widens like a fan where it reaches the river. A public work of stone seems out of place in this backwater, one so finely built it must be a relic of the Qing Dynasty. Perhaps once boats were loaded here. There is a hoary yet robust feeling of land reclaimed from nature in the hamlet that has grown up on either side of the river. Swells of earth are held back by rough granite walls. Across the road from the few large wooden buildings are wide trunked trees and stones for sitting in patches of noon shade. Fields open where a shallow valley climbs into the hills, and farmers make their way off them to gather and sit under one of the trees to share their lunch. Something about this setting reminds us of New England.

We find an old man with a cart on the road. He must have come down off one of the logging trails. On the cart is an enormous woven plastic bag, the kind village people sometimes keep tea in. He greets us without stopping, and we pace him on the flat turn leading up to the factory, half watching for oncoming traffic, half watching that we don’t push him off the road as we talk. We pass the farmers under the tree. He crosses the road and runs up one of the driveways. His muscles bulge but he doesn’t loose momentum and vanishes quickly over the lip. We wait a moment and then follow and emerge onto a small yard. He is the father of the factory foreman and on his cart is indeed tea.

He leads us into a large building with brushed concrete floors. The first room is full of the small baskets that ancha always comes packed inside. Next is a narrow passage between thick blankets. The old man pulls one back to let us see inside. Heavy and bulging, these ancha baskets are full, and there is a slight aroma of baking. We have smelled this aroma in Wuyi where Master Gu bakes his teas. They are smoking the tea. They keep the tea warm with charcoal under this blanket for about a month, he says, to dry it. Then we emerge into a cavernous open room with only the first quarter of it being used. Seven workers are busy here. Three big pots are steaming on the left, and behind them a man stuffs logs into a concrete oven below. There is the red glow of coals on his face. Steam rises from the pots. Women arrange empty baskets on a large table before them. Two are sewing green bamboo leaves together to look like stars.

In the spring they pick tea leaves, one bud and two leaves. They fry them and roll them and dry them in the sun. This is maocha. But then they store it throughout the summer at the far end of this hall, which strikes us as strange. We know fall tea is often misrepresented as spring tea, because spring tea is usually more expensive. Why would they still be using spring tea now? Why not have two production runs? They never harvest tea in the fall, he says. They’re too busy with their other crops. But they couldn't make this tea in the spring, either. Only when the weather starts to get cold can they put the tea out under the stars and let it collect the dew that falls. Their tea lies uncovered overnight up on the mountain. Only in the fall does the temperature change enough so that dew falls heavily. It wets the tea and softens it, creating a special taste.

Just now we met the old man bringing the tea back from the mountain where it had laid out all night on a platform. They leave it out until mid morning and then collect it and bring it home. This has to be the most bizarre step in curing a dark tea that we have encountered. There is something beautiful, enchanting even, in the idea of tea leaves left out among pines under the autumn night sky, but we wonder what taste this could really add.

We try first his older teas, and they are better than those of the other factories in the area. He makes only a few styles and then special orders, some piled longer, some piled less. He makes us a new tea, produced only this year from wild trees. It’s flavor already has definition, roots. It is astringent, but expands and falls nectary over the tongue, a little like a raw puer. The liquor looks redder and smells of unsweetened chocolate. It is also a little bitter, but there is something in it that gets us talking. It tastes of loamy wood. There are levels to the taste. With our second tasting there are earth flavors, like humus, ripe soil, tingling on the tongue. It maintains a floral woody aroma mixed with the chalk of baker’s chocolate. The third steeping balances. It isn’t sweet, but it isn’t sour. Sipping this brings our eyes together. We really like this one. We tell him his teas every year get better! It feels full like it could become very complex as it ages. He says a Taiwanese customer ordered this specially made with wild leaves. He doesn’t have much extra, but he is pleased we like how he prepared this batch. He is still learning, he says.

Ancha went out of production for many years, and only really began again in 1988. When he started making it he had to ask all the old people in town. Everyone only remembered a little. He combined what they told him, and then kept trying. At first the tea he made didn’t taste good at all. He changed the method and tried again and again. Finally he and his father came up with the process that they use today. He adds, no one is completely sure how ancha was originally made, but now their tea tastes pretty good.

Listening to him talk about his attempts at making ancha we realize the tea we are drinking may taste very different from the ancha made seventy years ago. Key steps might have been left out. Extra steps may have been added. No wonder the different anchas we have tried over the years have tasted so different.

In the old times they sold this tea out of Guangdong Province. Mostly the customers were from Southeast Asia, especially from Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. He has a book, he says and brings out a magazine without a cover. We can’t see the name or when it was published. It is printed on rough paper and designed in an old Chinese style, but it doesn’t look that old. The binding is on the right, but what would today be the first page of a magazine is the last. Characters read from top to bottom and from right to left, also the opposite of printed materials now in China. Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore still print characters this way, so it is probably from one of those places. It has an article introducing ancha, about ten pages long. It also refers to the tea as “liuan lan cha”. “Lan” means basket. So yet another name for it!

He asks how we came to know of ancha, and we tell him we found it in Hong Kong. We were in one of the city's many large malls, and there was a tea retailer with jars of loose teas from all over the world. One of them was labeled, liuan dark tea. The people in the store didn’t know how old it was, and we bought a small bag. It tasted really nice. The flavor had qualities unlike any dark tea we had tried. Dense, not unlike a cooked puer, but silky, smoother. Since then we have found a store selling it in Beijing, but their tea is too bitter and sour. They also called their tea liuan, and so we went first to Liuan city looking for this tea.

He tells us a little about why some people mistakenly call ancha by the name liuan dark tea. There actually was a dark tea made near Liuan city, but a long time ago. It gets mentioned during the Ming Dynasty, in the book called, Golden Lotus, for example, and later in the novel, Dream of the Red Mansion. There is no description of how liuan dark tea was made. However during the Qing Dynasty tea makers from this man's town copied them. There are some records of this, he says, and his people called this dark tea “ruan zhi cha” in the local dialect but they sold it as ancha to invoke the Liuan dark tea they were imitating. The first character of the word “an-cha” is the same character “an” as in the name of the city “Liu-an”.

(a sketch my mom made of an ancha basket we bought)

Baking Beidou Rock Tea, part 2

We had perfect weather for sorting our wuyi rock tea, but we took longer than anticipated separating the ten kilograms we bought last June. Friends came who are interested in opening a tea shop in Dubai, and we enjoyed introducing them to the great diversity of China's teas. Fu tea one found smooth and delicious, while liuan guapian green tea he thought tasted like fatty meat! They both liked jasmine green tea and got some for their wives. Green tea is becoming popular as a dieting "digestif" in the Middle East, they said, but by green tea they mean the chalky infusion made with dry Lipton brand bags. The idea that green tea needs to be refrigerated to maintain not just its antioxidants but its flavor is something they were not familiar with. They add sugar to this green tea, not so much as they add to regular Lipton red (or black) tea. Another popular belief is that some teas tea ameliorate diabetes, something we have heard before from an Iranian customer.


Our friends left Beijing just as the rain came. Today it is clear again and the humidity has started to fall. It has reached 57%, still too humid for baking. So we will wait to bake our tea. While freezing green tea helps it last longer just like baking wuyi rock tea helps it maintain its clear clean taste, we have no worries about our wuyi rock tea spoiling because we wait to bake it. Wuyi oolong, or rock tea, is one of the driest oolong teas, and it quickly absorbs water if exposed to the air. Oolong tea, however, is not fixed at as high a temperature as green tea, so it maintains many of its natural antibiotic qualities and will not spoil so easily as green tea. Oolong tea does thin with time, and if it is not baked every one to two years it may also develop unpleasant bitter and astringent flavors. These can usually be baked out of the tea, creating ever more subtle layers of taste. Indeed a wuyi rock tea that does not taste good one year is bagged and put away to be sampled and baked again the following year, after which it may taste wonderful. The best wuyi rock teas are aged, but these are rarely found for sale on the open market. Unlike old dark tea which can be left on a high shelf and forgotten, old rock oolongs need to be periodically rebaked, and this makes them fabulously expensive.

Baking a wuyi rock tea for aging is different than preparing it for a near-term sale. There is an art to choosing the fuel, heat and duration of baking when aging wuyi rock teas. Baking slower a leaf will retain more subtlety. Baking with charcoal adds heavier flavors to the tea. There must be depth already inside the leaf if baking is to reveal more taste. Tea leaves picked in early spring have more sap so they provide more to work with. Tea leaves picked from older trees grown in rock in areas with greater biodiversity are also often fuller. The process has been compared to adding floors of taste by peeling off lesser layers. This is done through baking, and it is assuming one starts with a leaf amply fortified with minerals and sap. Wuyi rock tea from the best and oldest trees in Fujian will still loose its flavor and smell (especially in dry climates). To help seal the flavor inside requires baking. There is disagreement as to whether using charcoal is necessary. Some say the charcoal helps preserve the tea's flavor. Others say that the taste of the charcoal adds definition to a good tea. A man who sells us tea from a three hundred year old shuixian tree tells us he only uses charcoal with his young generic trees. Old trees and trees in unique locations have their own distinctive taste and so he bakes those electrically because he doesn't want to distort the natural taste of the tea. Every year we go early and watch him bake our tea before taking it back to keep in metal tins in Beijing. Because the tea we have acquired this year is from a textbook-perfect domain, we don't want to add any taste to it. Instead we will follow his methodology to electrically desiccate our leaves.

Again and again our tea teachers tell us neither to listen to others pontificate nor to read about tea but instead to drink tea alone and with friends, and to cure tea ourselves. By performing the relatively simple process of sorting and baking this year's rock tea we could buy more of the real stuff while paying less. Here we are going to log the process in as much detail as possible for comparison in future years. Perhaps sorting and baking the tea will also teach us some of tea's many secrets. The beidou no.1 tea leaves are not so unique in flavor as our shuixian because they are not from three hundred year old beidou trees. This beidou is over thirty years old and from an excellent location deep in the park, growing in the mist right out of the crumbling red rock. The location was chosen and the trees were planted by the man who knew dahongpao best. We infuse some of the unsorted maocha and find just a touch of hardness (which was not there when we tried the tea in June). This is from moisture that the leaves have sucked up from the air. The taste is still golden, a ghostly orange peel that immediately enters the head as is characteristic of beidou. Soft bitters rise slowly behind, overshadowing the first few infusions. It is this cloud we will look to transform, perhaps into a sourness, perhaps into a ring which will give form to the spacial qualities of the taste, adding to our tea's flavor what is called a level or floor. Each year we will then add a little more dimension through our baking regime.