I completely fell in love with tea. And it was in China where I fell in love. Because I grew up like most English people, drinking an industrial tea bag and think, that's tea. I thought that was what it was. I just put a bag in a mug, pour boiling water over it.

put some milk in. And it's not that that isn't a lovely thing. It just, there's more to the world of tea. And I didn't really love it. I just liked it. It was just normal. It was very habitual. I guess how some people wouldn't think about breakfast cereal. You you don't really love breakfast cereal, but you eat it in the morning or maybe some people do love it. I mean, was, when you're a child, you eat it. And then as you're girl, do you think, well, maybe this is not for me. And I went to China.

to do some work on some print stuff in another life and I got invited to drink some tea. know, there two times that I don't remember which came first but I was in, I remember very clearly, this is like the end of the last millennium. Okay, Y2K. Yeah, late 90s, I'm in China and I'm in a very fancy hotel and someone orders tea for me and it was $50. ⁓

could not compute in my brain how tea could cost $50. And that's late 90s. For a pot of Well, it wasn't even a pot. It came in a small Gaiwan, I think I have one over there, little lidless pot.

a lady made it for me and she made the tea in this little lidless, sorry, spoutless pot, it had a lid, a spoutless pot with a cup with a lid, a guy one, and she made it in this, and she put the lid at an angle to use it to hold the leaves back, and she poured it into a jug, and then she gave me a small cup and poured me the tea and it was an oolong, was a tiger onion oolong.

of Mercy and I drank it and I was like, what is this? This didn't taste like anything I'd had any experience before. I'd never had an oolong tea before. I think I probably never had a green tea before and I'd certainly never had something that was made by a farmer, crafted to be delicious rather than made by a mass industrial machine to be cheap. It was just like, this is amazing! And then she made me another pot from the same leaf. She did the same thing again, she poured it into the jar

and then I poured it from the jug into my cup and I had like three little cups and then she made another one so this leaves just kept giving and giving incredible flavor and the flavor changed with every infusion and it got more complex I remember you know

I don't remember how tasted then, but I can tell you now that tea will start quite sweet and almost candy flossy and then go into this kind tropical fruit, passion fruit and crazy tropics, mango, and then goes into a much more vegetal, subtle green flavors and going to finishing in a really mineral finish like her.

could like the evolution over a fusions would be like a New Zealand reasoning or something. It starts super, smells very fruity but it's not sweet and it goes to a lovely mineral finish. Amazing tea and you can get like, I say, know, at least six infusions out of the same leaf.

And so when you say leaf, is that a single leaf? So there was a little handful of rolled leaves in that oolong. But I think also people don't realize that tea is a plant and it's a leaf and it's a rehydrated leaf. Because when it's in a bag and it's hidden from you and also the origin is hidden from you, don't even hear about, like going back to wine, if I gave you a bottle of wine and I said...

I've got a gift for you, and it's wine and it's red. First thing, where's it from? Yeah, and you'd also be bit offended, but I'd given you something without any origin, any story. And if I said, no, no, no, no, single origin, it's French.

still be a bit like, yeah, come on. And I think with wine, we don't even know the country. Sorry, with tea, we don't even know the country. It might just say green tea or English breakfast. And that hides a lot. Where does it come from? What country, what nations, what people, what communities? And then you don't even know it's from a plant. A lot of people, even Michelin-starred chefs that I might work with.

really fancy chefs who know all about food and provenance, they might not know that tea comes from just one plant, chameleons and insis, just like wine comes from grapes. And that it's the process, it's how you grow it, where you grow it, but also the terroir of that little place that's going to determine flavor. So from the same raw material, from the same plant that grows these beautiful leaves.

from field to field, from case to place, the gradient will be slightly different. So how the water drains through that field, how the sun hits the field in the morning, and the pH of the soil, the way the mist will stay on the field in the morning, or how cloud cover will obscure at different times of the year. Just as like in champagne, from one field to another, it's not exactly the same grape.

And then it's when you harvest it. And then, of course, how you process it, what you do to it, how you care for it. The soil, how you looked after the soil, all the things that grow around it. It's biodiversity. All the tiny things that make that place in the world unique and the craftsmanship of the maker unique will influence how it tastes.

There's everything you know about wine and all the nuances and subtleties and beauty and why things might cost almost nothing for an industrial version to extremely expensive for something rare and special crafted by the weight maker. That's all true of And I started in this world of tea because I discovered that there was this...

cornucopia of flavors and like crazy amazing things that came from a land and a place and a maker and there was just a whole world to fall in love with. So it found you? It found me and then I started to read like where does this tea come from?

It was possible at that time to hire a car and go into China and meet people and find things which had just started to happen. been quite closed off and it had been difficult to travel, especially as a solo woman or just as an independent traveler in China. was forbidden. China started to become more open and it was very possible. And I found that there were people still making tea in the same way they were making for millennia. And the same places, the same terroirs. And you were telling me earlier about a Hopi farmer

who had been for several, his family had been for several thousand years on that land. And that's true of some tea makers in the world. And so tea plants, they're perennial, yes?

And there are very ancient tea trees that have been there for really long time. So it's technically a tree? Yeah. It's a small tree. It is a tree, I think. It grows a bit leggy when you let it go. But it will grow tall. And it's a camellia. People have camellias in their gardens. And they're small trees.

I don't know what the difference between a shrub and a tree is actually technically. Maybe. I've seen camellias that are 20 foot tall, 30 foot tall, and I'm sure they go bigger. But they're often kept at a certain height that looks like a shrub so that it's easy to pick the new leaf. Otherwise it's going to be hard to harvest.

so you were in corporate America, right? Yeah, I went for an American corporation, yeah. It was sort of a corporate finance kind of organization, but more on the operations rather than the money side. We did documentation, printing, and servicing of things like mergers. And was really, if you sat next to me at a dinner at that time and you said, what are you doing? And I'm like, I do financial printing.

nothing interesting to tell you about that, apart from that a lot of my clients were the masters of the universe who used to enjoy swearing at me. Lovely. Yeah, it wasn't great. So T was your escape from that world? Yeah. Okay. I had a, I think they call it like golden handcuffs, you know, it was a well-paid job. It wasn't like a crazy well-paid job like if I'd been dealing with the money. If you owned the company. Or if I'd been doing cash, you know, if I'd been dealing with money.

operations. But it was well paid and it was secure and I got to travel and I got to live in New York and It was really boring and there was lots of grey corridors and boring meetings and difficult people and I don't have very much memory of that time. Even though I worked in it for several years, my memories condensed to a very small chunk of like

get in, punch the clock. of, yeah. It wasn't fascinating enough. then the visit to the tea garden or to having my first teas in Hong Kong.

my god I mean I can tell you long stories I've written books about it and I think I learned that adventure and doing something that makes you really happy and connects you with the world and people and communities is so enriching and it fills your life and your life becomes bigger and richer or I could have had this kind of rather empty one where it was only my time outside of work that I could tell you stories about.

sick and he was still really young and vigorous and had all these plans and he died very quickly and I thought, shit, you know, he was just starting to blossom as he had less work and more time and I thought, I can't wait until I'm retirement age and then maybe I don't survive it, I better do it.

And I was naive and stupid and I thought, know, and I had a lot of hubris. I can start a company, you know, I can do that. People say it's brave. Actually, I think it's very stupid. Well, sometimes that's what it takes. Some stupid act or blind faith or belief in a benign, benevolent universe that you can work, you know, you can do things and you can start new things and create something. Yeah.

Optimism helps. Hope, optimism and stupidity. Naivety. You know, mean, it questions what stupidity really is. mean, well, I think...

reason is conformative opinion from the philosophical standpoint. I actually have a master's in philosophy. Fantastic. I can forget that myself. I can't remember much about it. I had a lovely time at university. It must have made an imprint on you to do something else with your life. Maybe. In combination with everything else. It was very fun time. lived in Edinburgh for four years and I had a great time.

I think that I did sort of specialize a little bit in science and how we reach truth. you look at scientific truth, it's conformity of opinion, and it changes. As we discover new things about the world and as the scientific community takes on a new perspective, then the truth changes. And I say, OK, well, that was what we used to think, and now we think this.

The first one, the Einstein or whatever, is a madman because he's outside of conformity of opinion, he's outside of truth. So I guess, yeah, it's not bad to be mad or crazy. I like that, not bad to be mad. So you went to China. Now tell me about the first tea farm that you visited.

Again, very naively, I knew that there was a region. I wanted to go and find this white tea called White Silver Needle or Silver Tip. And there's a region for it. There's a region for fizzy wine in France. And it's a little place called Fouding in Fuchan. And I thought if I go there.

I'll be able to meet a tea farmer who grows that tea. And by some kind of miracle, I did actually manage to go there and meet a tea farmer with some characters written on a piece of paper. This is way before Google Maps or the internet, pretty much, or anything. I they weren't even guidebooks of China, of course. It was just really blind faith and a little tiny, dangerous bit of knowledge. But then I met incredible people.

I I can do this, can buy this tea and bring it back and set up a business because people in Britain love tea. I didn't realise that there was no market for loose leaf tea, was no market for white teas and green teas in Oolong. So that took bit of time. But then I started to visit other tea farms and I started to realise that...

There's a very complex economic world around tea and it's mostly built on exploitation. So in China, there's millennia of years of appreciation and respect for tea and people understand it as maybe, say in Europe we do wine where you buy the best you can afford and there's no sort of snobbery in it, you just try and drink the best you can. And you're prepared to pay for the best you can. Whereas...

tea in other parts of the world outside of say Japan, Taiwan, China, where it began, where began in China, but where the British took it in their colonial period. Not in any way something we should be proud of. They stole the tea bush from China, took it to places like India, East Africa, Sri Lanka, grew it for commerce.

The market was not endemic to that country. It was for export. It's for the global north. if we don't have an appreciation for that, too, then there's no value in it. it's become something. It's quite complex. I don't want to go into too much of a boring history in economics. But the Second World War, we had rationing, and we had a breakdown of international trade.

tea when Britain was rationed right then you had the same tea, whatever you were allowed, a small amount of tea every week and it was given to you by the government and it was the cheapest tea and it was bought by contract from farms and it was like soldiers tea.

And we got used to drinking that and rationing went on until the 50s in Britain because we were so broke after the war. And at this point, this was still loose. Still loose. It's not until like the 70s. Americans, I'm afraid, invented the tea bag in about 1905. But in Britain, we were still very resistant to that until the 70s. And then it was like space food, know, convenient and cool and modern. food. Right. But you know, like, you know, I don't know, we've had like

I remember as a kid we would like to eat things like dessert that could be made from just adding two things together, like a powder and milk or mashed potato that was just a powder and you could just add something, it was like cool. A TV dinner. was like convenient and quick and that's what astronauts ate, I think. The marketing was on point.

We sort of gave up on eating mashed potato that came from a powder, but we still drink that very, you know, we hold it very close to our chest here. And our hearts, this tea bag, this industrial tea bag, I think because it was an egalitarian age. How wonderful that people will work together during the war and it didn't matter what your social class was or your economic class, you were equal. So the Duchess of Devonshire and her butler or her gardener would have the same tea. Right.

And I think from the Second World War we came out with free education, unemployment benefit, health care, welfare state, something really amazing. We all realized by looking after one another we would all benefit and flourish. And I think that the idea that we all have the same tea was part of that. And then...

when rationing's over and we're all used to this same generic tea and if you think, I'm going to drink something a bit better, then maybe you're leaving the, you're kind of betraying your brothers and sisters, you're leaving the egalitarian world and becoming, trying to be elite. But actually the betrayers are brothers and sisters in East Africa and India who are...

not getting the value they need from the product that they grow and they've slipped further and further into poverty as we expect more and more cheap industrial tea. So today there's about 15 million people that work in tea. and most of them are women and most of live in poverty.

so that we can have a cheap tea bag that's going straight to us. That's not people in Japan and China. That's people in India and Africa who producing tea for big global international companies, for big brands. And there's no traceability. don't know any. We have no connection with them. We don't know that, for instance, Malawi and East Africa, it's its second biggest export. It's the second biggest employer of the country. The whole country's built on tea. And yet, you don't know that your big brand tea bag is coming from there.

So you don't feel, you don't realize that there are people who, life expectancy is in the 50s, mothers who will not grow, who will not see their grandchildren.

And that's, think, once you know it, you can't unknow it. And then you make that connection to the land or the community. You're like, ⁓ I don't need to. I could drink something super delicious that benefited those people. It's there's more of a, something about loose leaf tea, there's more of a ceremony. Even, you know, if you're not having a full blown ceremony, it's more of a conscious act to brew a pot of tea rather than just put the bag in.

Well, at the very beginning, I wanted to show that many different kind of people love tea.

and I wanted to stop it from being snobby and elitist. And so I looked around my friends and family and customers and I saw this builder who really loves tea. We often call it builder's tea, but he would be drinking really, I had a Polish builder who loved really nice, teas and quality, beautiful leaf that came from somewhere and was like, he likes it, and a tattoo artist. And one of the people who I knew was really in love with tea was this,

a ⁓ nun who lives in Scotland at Samling Ling Monastery. And I went to interview her and asked her about her tea. And she said just the making of it is a meditation. Just putting leaf and water together. She said I don't, she's a sentinel nun. She basically looks after the monastery and prays for the monastery all day. She lives in isolation.

And she said it's not, everything in her life is meditation, but the making of it was the most pleasurable one in her life, and the drinking of it. Just very simple, she just put tea leaf in a pot and put water on it and then strained it off.

But listening to the water in the kettle reach a temperature, feeling the warmth of the temperature in the pot and the cup and waiting for it to infuse right, the aromas coming off as, all those things if you take notice of them, they're so insanely wonderful. But yeah, like the leaf in the pot, man, if you don't smell that leaf, you've missed.

most of the flavor and the pleasure that we often don't even think about that, that the leaf is, that the aromas on the leaf are part of the flavors of tea. It makes me think as a gardener, I much prefer the act of gardening rather than...

the eating of whatever I grew. Yeah. I just recently grew some tomatoes in X-Ga and I didn't eat it. It took so long and it was so beautiful and I so enjoyed it, watching it grow and change color and I didn't harvest it at all.

But it's the process, it's the act. mean, for this nun, it sounds like just the act of making the tea was more enjoyable than the drinking of it. But the drinking as enjoyable. Every part of the step in the process. also, I'm sure you know this, but Buddhist nuns don't have their own income. need to...

they need to have benefactors. this, I supply her tea. And like the act of my act of giving it is such a pleasure to me. And her act of receiving it and writing a letter and thanking me every time I send it. And this has been going on for decades. It's really a long time. And every time we have this pleasure and then the office, receive a card.

she gets me at tea and she writes it so beautifully. That's so special.

Andrew Valenti (18:48)
And so tea is originally from China. And then the English went over there and stole it. Brought it to the other places that it's grown. And then they discovered that actually there is, so there's Camellia sinensis, which is from China. And that's the starting point of all tea we thought. And then you can hybridize it like roses or grapes.

And then, but in like the 1830s, they'd taken it to the other side of the Himalayas into India and gone, this plant looks a lot like tea. It's slightly different, but it looks like, ⁓ yeah, there's another variety of Sammica. So there was tea in India the whole time. It just hadn't been used to make tea. So there are two, and the Sammica is the lovely multi-deeper.

You know, the China's the China's teas are much more floral and light and that kind of deep multiness that you get at the base of an English breakfast is in a Samarkand. Now, I can imagine or I can start to imagine how English breakfast got its name. where does that where did that come from? 1901, think something like that. describe what English people, New York describe what English people drank for breakfast because we started to blend. That was the unique thing that English people had done. If you said to a French wine maker,

I'm gonna take some burgundy, I'm gonna mix it with some Alsace and we're gonna make and they were like You'd be killed. Yeah, there would be death threats. I'm sure And it was kind of like that with tea, know, like a Tai Guan Yin comes from Anxi in Fujian province and you wouldn't mix it with a Da Hong Po

I mean like a different kind of oolong from the wuishan. mean, no, there's no blending. And the British had got these different terroirs in different regions and a Chinese tea and also they were learning how to cultivate and how to process. There wasn't all great and there were some different flavors coming and they were like, my god.

blend them or get something consistent, so expensive and it's so precious we should try and get something consistent that people will love and then they'll come to our shop and they'll support us, know, it became a way of making something better than the sum of its parts, something really good, something that was going to, you know, get you the big bucks and customer loyalty. And that was very, very unique.

Also people started to do this in their own homes and thinking, oh my gosh, the Assamica is very malty and it doesn't have all the florals I want, so I'll add some fancy Chinese tea to it. And you can still buy cases in America where you have a mixing bowl in the middle, a little glass bowl, and you'll have two wooden chests on either side. It's like a box with two chests, one on the left, one on right, and in the middle an indentation where a glass bowl would have been and you would have mixed your Chinese and Indian teas together.

And so anyway, breakfast was a blend of teas to be better than the sum of its parts and to be suitable to your taste for breakfast as well. Whether it was done by your tea broker or by you at home, you were trying to make something amazing that would wow your friends and guests because tea was very precious and very expensive. Right. So at the time, were Americans more coffee drinkers or were they also? Very, very much. mean, gosh, we get into politics. We get to tea and the Boston Tea Party.

people love tea. There was also an amazing plant called yupon in the Americas that the indigenous people would drink like tea. I there are lots of herbs around the world. Like, we didn't have tea in England and people might have drunk hawthorn or rose hips or, you know, different things in hot water. But yupon is a lovely, it's quite bitter. I prefer it blended, but it's an incredible plant. But the British called it something like vomitus or something. They gave it some awful lattice.

name where it sounded awful and tried to stop people drinking it so that they would drink tea. Now is Upon caffeinated as well? I don't think so, no. It's a herbal infusion. But it's super interesting.

The Spanish did it in Mexico, you know, they didn't want people to use amaranth. you know, people, mean, power and influence has been dictated by plants, I think, a lot. anyway. Well, that makes me think about there are ceremonies around tea. Have you ever been a part of a tea ceremony? Yeah, in all these years. I don't actually like the Japanese one as much like the Chinese one. The Chinese one is more...

utilitarian, like you spill tea and you make it and it's all about like you know drinking it and enjoying it and it's quite rapid and you people might be...

I mean, the idea of overflowing and spilling is part of the thing. Whereas in Japan, it's very measured and very thoughtful, and there's music, and there's a geisha, and a sleeve. I'm not very good at that. I'm too messy. And I'm too impatient. want everything now. And now, the ceremony based around? What are they based around? Is it just for the tea? I think it should be about flavor. It should be about enjoyment and sharing in flavor and experiencing something, especially the evolution of a leaf. So when you make tea,

in a pot, whatever the pot looks like, with leaf and water for a group of friends and you share it and you see how the leaf evolves with different flavours as different amino acids dissolve into the water as you extract it.

My god, it's like people sharing anything wonderful and exquisite that comes from the land where you take cheese, for instance. could be like taking a selection of delicious cheeses with friends who love cheese and then trying them. then the conversation flows and one flavor will lead to a story. God, that reminds me of. Right. Right.

I think what I'd like to do more than anything else in the world is bring people back to the fact that it comes from a place and it comes from people. And I'm probably in love with the people because the people who have amazing land and amazing plants are really amazing people. They come together. It's very hard to find really great farmers who are not good people.

That's true. really is. Erin Andrea said it, when you look for great flavor, look for great people. It's same in admiral husbandry as well. Yeah. And that trickles down too, because I just think about the energy of when you're making food, when you're making a meal. Happy hands, good energy makes a good meal. so true. So it starts. And even to the point where go to my favorite restaurants aren't always the best restaurants. They're the place where I have the most fun, where the people are lovely and the amb-

is great. Yeah, is a huge part of it. I some of the... I've never worked in the restaurant industry but the intensity almost seems counterintuitive to me because I don't want that intensity in my meal. want somebody who's making my meal to be happy, be, you know, to want me to have a great experience, you know, so and it goes back to the farm to the...

to the seed. So that makes me want to ask what is the whole process of your tea, loose leaf tea, seed to cup? That's super might not be a seed, it could be a cutting.

⁓ But seed is better because it has a tap root. so even most of the farmers I work with, they will have seed teas, even if they're using cuttings, because they grow a bit faster. But they'll have seed teas throughout that because the tap root has one long, deep root, whereas a cutting will grow across horizontally.

rather than vertically. So it's really good for soil strength. you plant it, it's going to take a while to plant a seed, it's going to take sort three years to be able to be planted out into the field. then it's going to be like five years probably before it's ready to be harvested. between that, depends on where you are in the world and how quickly things grow and how high your altitude is. For instance in Nepal.

It goes very slowly, super amazing flavor. I that's really its area, high mountains. That's where it comes from. It's a high mountain plant. And the intensity of the flavor is insanely different than growing on a plain where it'll go more rapidly, but there'll be more moisture. And it won't have the same flavors. So you're going to wait some years. Then then then.

try and create a bush that's easy to pick the growing tips so that you can take just the growing tips because that's what we process into tea. I industrial tea that you might find in a bag will just be machine harvested and it will be any old leaf and bits of stone and wood and whatever. But hand plucked tea, really great tea that's made by a maker, be just the new growing leaf with the two leaves around it will be plucked. That's two leaves in a bud. OK. And timing of year, has this happened just once a year?

Yeah, it depends on what tea. So like white silver tip tea, the one we talking about which is made into jasmine tea, that has got five days probably. Five days harvest. So similar to wine. Yeah, and then it could be like a green tea that you might pick over a month as those little buds come up. You might be taking the second flush. That's the next flush is when the new leaf bud comes.

It's not a flower bud, but a leaf bud that will open to the next set of leaves. So you might pick over a month, or you might pick over two months, possibly, or just two weeks. It depends on the tea you're trying to make, and how special it is, and what the flavor profile is. It might be just like one week over several fields, and you might blend them together.

And then there are different seasons. So that's the very early season, the first spring, the first flushes. They're amazing. And then oolongs are picked later, just the beginning of summer, because you want, I to be bit older and more mature to have more flavor. And then there are autumn flushes sometimes, autumn harvests, where the tea has gone through the summer period where you don't pick, because it's been...

not enough rain or too much rain or whatever and then you might go into an autumn and there are some teas that just picked all year round they just like keep picking that tea and that will be the more industrial version. Right, okay. And you know that I mean every field, every farm, every place will have slightly different seasons and... Sure.

But most of the I buy will have one season. All the teas I buy will have, they'll be picked at a certain, I choose a harvest. And I'll be like, okay, this harvest, this time, this field, this farm, these people. And so do the tea...

trees, tea plants, do they flower? Yeah, they have little, you know, few other Camellia in your garden, it these beautiful big flowers. The Camellia sinensis has tiny little flowers, little tiny, about the size of your thumbnail, bit bigger, depends how big your thumbnail is, my thumb probably, first joint. And they're white and they've got a little yellow stamen and they smell sometimes quite jasminey. Lovely little flowers, but they, well you don't really want the tea to produce flowers, you know, and seeds and put its energy into that, so a little bit of the flowers

left to do, the tea will be, some plants will be left to produce seeds because you want some seeds but really it's the leaf buds that they're after. And so in the cycle of the year of harvest, does the flower come first or after the harvest? So it's different than like a fruit tree? Because with fruit trees it's flowers and then leaves. it comes later on but I mean...

It's a small part, that particular varietal of chameleon isn't really a very, the flower is not the important part of this. Even its physiology, it's like, it's so different when we see ornamental chameleons with the flowers. It's huge in comparison and all the color and it's obviously very important for fertilization and. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So the new.

shoots are harvested. and they're processed. So if it was a white tea, they'd be dried in the sunshine, possibly on a frame inside. It was a very cloudy, wet season. They picked the really good white tea. It's only a spring harvest and it could be, shouldn't be in the spring in the Himalayas or, you know, the high mountains of China. There's not going to be too much rain. It's a nice dry season. And so they just dry out. You put them out on kind of frames all over the farm and they dry in the sun.

But if they're as cloudy and it's damp, they bring them inside on those frames and they'll dry inside. But that's it, it's dried. What about wind?

If a little gust of wind were to come? mean, it's quite a heavy, like the leaf buds and the leaves, they're quite wet and they're quite heavy and they're not. yeah, guess wind, if it was a very, yeah, it was very Just the challenges of farmers. Yeah. And then green tea, you're picking it and you're trying to add heat to it very quickly so it kind of keeps its greenness. So you add steam in Japan to make kusensha or you would do a kind of wok fire in China. like adding hot dry, dry

heat very quickly to sort of seal it from oxidization and then in Oolong you're actually crushing the leaf a little bit to enhance the oxidization because you want it to oxidize a bit but you control it either by rolling

ash or like they're different ways to get oolongs and then with black tea you're crushing it because you want the oxidation as much as possible you want fully oxidized tea you want all the oils in the leaf exposed to air as much as well you also control it but expose it and then you roast it to like really add more depth and flavor

There's also Pu-erh tea, which is a fermented version of tea. So most teas are just oxidized and then Pu-erh is fermented. Okay. Yeah. So it dries out essentially. And then it's processed. Well, you don't actually want it, no, you don't want it dry. Not dry? No. So white tea would just be dried, but green tea will be processed before it's dried, like heated and then dried. Okay. And then black teas will be withered a little bit so that they're softer and a little

lost

some moisture but then crushed or broken and then to oxidise and then roasted and then that roasting will be the drying process. there's so many things but there are so many farms doing so many different things and there are lots of innovations now which is great you know people doing all sorts of extraordinary things so I don't think one should get too tied up on like the interstices of processing and would love people to get tied up on the interstices of flavour like what do you love? Right. Because there's so much out there to love.

And you might think, oh, I really like this kind of tea. And when I do a bespoke tasting or blend for somebody, I do make a few blends for fancy people who I spend a lot of time with. we'll start with, OK, what are you looking for? And they'll go, oh, really like Japanese green tea. And so we'll start tasting something like a Himalayan green tea from Nepal. And they're like, oh.

I'm really like this. And then end up with the blend they get at the end. It's got nothing to do with the blends, the things they liked at the beginning. Because I tell you, we often fall in love with the first thing, and we don't realize there's more. There's more. I love all of them. I'm in love with everything. I'd be the worst person. But you're driven by a flavor. flavor and pleasure and farms.

I think once you know the story, if I tell you the story of a winemaker and you know this is amazing female winemaker and she's had all this like difficulties and she's overcome and then you know how amazing the process and how she looks after the land and she really cares about long-term sustainability of her soil structure and their biodiversity all around and the viability of the farm into the future and then you're like this is amazing.

And I am a little, I think the story of the farmer and the maker helps you appreciate the flavor. It does. It does. So tell me about your charity. Oh, so our charity is pretty wonderful, actually. We've put people through university who come from tea communities. And I started it because, well, actually, I had cancer the second time. And I thought, oh my god, I might not.

And if I don't live and someone takes over my company, they might not take the same principles. And I wanted to make it so that the welfare of the farms that we promote and work with was so integral to the value of the company that even if I wasn't around, would be, you wouldn't want to work or invest in RET unless you cared about those things. So I took a percentage of revenue

and we give that to a charity. And I went to the farms and I said, what would be, if we were going to give you, instead of fair trade, which we were doing, and we found that 80 % of the revenue we were giving to fair trade was going to fair trade and not to the farmers. I said, if we were giving it the other way around, if we set up a charity where 80 % of the revenue goes to you and only 20 % is on the ad.

what should we do with the money? What would you want to do with the money? And they said they'd like their children to have better lives. And I said, how do we do that? And they said through educational opportunities. Because tea farms are often in very marginalised places. They're far from good school and education and infrastructure. And they wanted their kids to be able to do all the things that we all want our kids to be able to do. most of the aid that goes in is in two years, one and two. It's like literacy.

And there's a lot of hate in in places like Malawi and life expectancy in the years I've been working on it has kind of stayed pretty much the same and sad living has dropped despite all these NGOs and aid workers and

So I think it's the imposition of like what we think people need rather than giving the opportunities to shape their own lives. It was kind of simple. They taught me. It wasn't my idea. They were like, this is what we need. So we would like tertiary. We looked at we can do a small amount. Infant feeding is really important and for tertiary. But there's a real gap for kids going to university from tea communities or any tertiary education. So, OK, there's the gap. And that's the hope. know, like if you do well at school, you might be able to go to university. So it keeps.

kids in school as well. So we pay full scholarships so you get your codes, your travel, your accommodation, your food. Someone from an underprivileged background can access full education. You could become a biochemical engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or whatever you have your dream. The first time I interviewed the kids in the primary school I said who wants to be an astronaut and they didn't know what an astronaut was.

the kids who go to university come back to the schools and try and get more kids to stay in school and maybe apply for the scholarships. And now we actually put girls through secondary as well because we weren't getting enough girls coming through because it's expensive to educate people.

and families put their priorities in their male children. So now we have a program where we get secondary girls going to boarding school so they're not a burden on the family, which is really, and we started doing secondary in school in Nepal as well. Amazing. So it's been, it's very small and very niche, it's like in key communities we know, people, you know, where we, it can be run very cheaply. So only 20 % of any of the revenue we raise goes to

the admin of the charity. And like you said, simple, because ask them what they want. That's the fun thing that gets me about so many charities or nonprofits. It's such a good idea, but often it's putting...

on top of somebody. And also it's funny because we were struggling with, because we're based in London right and then who's administering the charity and we had some fancy people administering in Malawi, Malawian people and then we realised that they didn't care as much as the kids did so now we have a governing body that are scholars, post scholars, they run the charity on the ground and gives them experience, gives them money, it gives them you know a connection back with their communities and it's been really

It's been really good. But we're learning all the time and we're changing and you have that's nice about being small as you can adapt and you can change and you can audit very clearly What's going on? It's this tiny thing. I always think in a world where it feels like We're powerless. There are tiny things you can do and it's better to do what you can in the community that you know

and to try to feel dispirited because we can't change bigger things. I think to lose hope is the most worrying thing because if we lose hope, then we're hopeless. And it's harder as you get older. I'm 54 now and that seems crazily old. But I think I see people in my generation saying, well, that's just the way it is. And I think if we can keep that childlike.

wonder at the world and know that it's always changing and that everything is possible. And that just because things were the way they were doesn't mean they have to be that way.

That's a really important thing to hold onto and to share. That's beautiful. It's so important. It's not always possible. Sometimes we all get dispirited though. I know, I do understand. We shouldn't beat ourselves up for the moments where we do despair. mean, it's okay to feel that, but then let it

I've had lot of conversations about tradition and how tradition changes. And even with tea, in 1901 there was this English breakfast tea that defined, for some people that defined what the English were. And then after the war, that changed. The new traditions were changing, but now it's more in this tradition of bag.

But it's changing so rapidly because I've been selling matcha for 20 years and my team at Red Tea would often be like, why do we sell matcha? Nobody drinks matcha. Sometimes it would expire before we'd sold it. It doesn't stay good forever. Matcha, they got two years max, you know, and so maybe even less. So we would like give it away to chefs to use to make cakes, know, really good, you know, the really good stuff. I mean, how we call it, like top grade or ceremonial grade or whatever, but the really

the really nicest kinds. And they sort of was mad. now Matcha is probably, I mean, know it's our best-selling tea, but it's a huge part of what we do. And I'm so glad that I have those relationships with those farmers, because I can get it. Because if you were starting up a tea company right now and you wanted to buy actual Japanese, especially organic Japanese Matcha, they'd be like, no, sorry, book's closed. Right.

It's changing Japanese tea culture because all the tea that's being made is now being made into matcha. If you try and buy Hojicha or Sencha or Gemmacha they're like, sorry, we've already ground it all up. It's such a demand. And then I was in China earlier this year and I was drinking some very nice matcha. Because originally ground tea comes from China. It's a tradition that came from China to Japan. so there's no need to be terribly snobby about it. But said, where is this matcha

going and they said 99 % of it is going to Japan. think that's like whiskey, know, there's a lot of Japanese whiskey, there's not enough production of Japanese whiskey so they buy whiskey from Scotland and they bottle it in Japan. So is the case of so many things. It's wild. Which is why it's so nice to know that you get something from somebody who knows where it's grown and knows the farmer and the gyokuro that I get from Kagoshima, from Sakamoto-san.

If you saw the soil, if you saw, if you were there standing on the field, Mr. Sakamoto, and he puts the bamboo cane into the soil, and it's as tall as he is, and he just puts it down into the soil, that soil is so good. Knowing that and drinking that gyokuro, you know, that's...

That's one of the biggest pleasures in the world. But what I'd love people to know is that we know that Japanese tea is expensive, and you know you would pay for a really great gyokuro. Most people know that, right? It's not crazy talk. But I could give you a tea from Malawi that was as good as that gyokuro. Different, but as good, and served at the same Noma, or three Michelin-starred restaurant. Good enough to be judged by a famous Semelean chef to be good enough for their restaurant. That quality.

But the value of life in Malawi, they could be exploited. You can't buy cheap Japanese tea that someone's been exploited for. So I would love people to know that if they look for great flavors and great quality and for direct trade where the farmer is getting the value of it.

They could be really changing a community's life. it's not, they don't have to give anything away in terms of flavor. They don't have to do it because they're good people. would flood your life with pleasure. You're doing the best teas in the world. And you could be sporting a community of people that might otherwise live in poverty if they had to sell it to the big industrial company,

firmly believe that it affects the flavor. you know where something's from. But also, mean, these are, like, it's not just me saying that. I've, over the last 20-something years, I've sold those teas to those great chefs in, you know, Sezan in Tokyo, which has voted the best restaurant in Asia, or, you know, Noma in Copenhagen, or...

Benu in San Francisco. Those chefs that we know have great food taste and we admire them and damn well for the way they look after the land. Those people who care, they think it's good enough. is why, and sometimes people ask me, why do you sell? Why is your world based around hospitality? Rather than direct to consumer, I do both. I mean, you can buy my tea online anywhere in the world, or you can buy it.

to restaurants is because they champion those great flavors. They really care. That's so smart of you. But at the beginning, there was nowhere else. Everyone just laughed at me. were like, white tea is tea with milk, or loose leaf tea, nobody's going to drink it. And those chefs who care about flavor, they were like, oh, I'd like to drink it. In fact, we're going, red tea is going on. like we have our Christmas party after Christmas because it's just a bit more chill. And we're going to one of our favorite restaurants, which is here in London, called Lawn. Because Katie Exson, who

owns it was the first customer ever bought my tea at a restaurant called Shea Bruce in South London. And she was the she's a sommelier and she was the first person to say, my god, that's I really want to try this. And I'm still friends with her. And I still I still want my team to know her and share with her the experience because you need champions. Yeah. And you you are a tea champion. Well, I'm championing the farms. And I hope that I hope and when I do training for the teams in restaurants or wherever I am, I

about tea, I say to people, like, it's your responsibility to make sure that you serve this tea really well so that those farms who put their whole life and their whole futures in our hands, that they will be treated with respect and other people will fall in love. And it's a huge responsibility to place on a poor waiter in a coffee shop.

I think we can make a difference. There's no difference though. If you were to be serving of beef, of cheese, a glass of wine, a bottle of wine, there's no difference. Coffee, chocolate. It's just a matter of...

retraining our brains but oh yeah of course tea should be of high quality as

Also I love bed tea. Yes. So get up in the morning tiptoe over to the kettle make your tea like keeping your eyes kind of still closed don't wake up too much and go back to bed with your first cup

tea. ⁓ my goodness and wake up with the tea, wake up with the aromas and thinking about the place where it came from and it's the best way to get up or if you're very decadent and you've got time in the bath. Actually that's usually where I will enjoy a cup

Really, in the bath? Morning bath. If you have time. Not everyone has the luxury of time in the morning. No, mean, my baths are usually later Sunday morning. Or whenever you have time. And it doesn't have to be every day. If you're really in a rush and you think, OK, I really need a tea bag.

I'm not going to tell you you're totally wrong. I would just say that you could take a little infuser basket and put it in your mug with loose leaf tea, which would take exactly the same amount of time as putting in a tea bag, but you'd be in control of what leaf you put in there. And also, tea bag is a single use of precious resources. It's a single use. You don't need to. We can use leaf tea. And there's no such thing as an environmentally friendly tea bag because it's that single use. even if it's made of paper,

You're like, it's clean, it's made of paper. That's still trees. And trees are the most incredible beings on our planet. And to cut them down to make a bit of paper to put your tea leaves in that you don't need.

If they're made of corn, that's still corn that could be made into food. then they made the corn ones are made into plastic. they say, but it's not plastic because it's not made of oil. corn is still made of nanoplastics and all kinds of chemicals are used to make the paper, the plastic one, bleachers and glues and solvents. You need to go back.

the material might be great, but the process to make that material into what it becomes. Exactly. And then the material that you have also releases the toxins and things that have been used to process it. Because you can't turn a wood or corn into paper or plastic without using industrial chemicals. And they don't disappear. And so it's not great for our bodies. It's not great for the environment. And it's not great for flavor. So it's easy. Abandon the bag. I would love people to do that. Buy tea from someone.

who knows where it comes from. Learn a little. I mean, it's easy because the world is, I mean, it's awful and as wonderful as things like websites and social media are. You can see, you can follow, you can trace back. If you do buying tea online or from a company and you look them up online and there's no farms anywhere near and they don't know where it comes from, they say, or they just say, we buy from farmers, but there's no picture of a farmer. I think that's good enough. We just need to make those connections. So I'm curious because

I have a morning routine of my coffee. I'm a coffee drinker. You're good. I love coffee. mean, delicious flavors are delicious flavors. And that's a bean. That's a delicious bean, right? It is. And now I'm thinking about the terroir of coffee plants and...

So many more questions. But so my morning routine, I boil my water, I measure out my beans, I grind my beans. In a commandante? No, I don't do them by hand. I have an electric grinder. Yeah. I like that.

There have been times where I've used a hand grinder. There's one that someone gave me called a commandante. don't know who it, but it's the smell from the hand grinding. It's a work and it's a part of the ritual. And you never over grind like you only because it's quite hard work. No, of course, of course. But then I use a...

drip cup. Yeah, you so but before I even put my grounds into the filter, I rinse the filter first, the flavor of the filter away. And then I make my coffee, which is a process. Yeah, it is a process. Right. And so for me to be convert, say, say you wanted to convert me to a tea drinker. Yeah.

I would say, the thing is you're used to very intense flavor. You don't put milk, or do you do put milk? I do. I put cream. So you could have an English breakfast tea. So would the intensity of flavor and the creaminess and the comfort could work for you for a black tea with milk or cream? Yeah. And I love Earl Grey. OK, so I would have a vessel that you, a teapot that you really loved. I think you can see here in the office, I have loads of different kind of teapots.

It's going to last generations, It could last your whole lifetime and could pass that down. It should be something that you really love. But it could be quite simple. And I think so you're having this thing that you like touching. I believe that if you have nice glasses or nice cups, you should use them every day because you touch them, right? And I think the idea of keeping them in a closet or a cabinet for special, it's a bit sad because then you only use them occasionally and you only touch them occasionally. yeah. So I use really

lovely.

I like a bowl because I like putting my hands around it. A cup is a bowl really with a handle.

I would, you know, I think having knowing how much tastes like being a free pour bartender, you know, bartender doesn't need to use a measure, a really good one. It's been doing it for he knows. And so each tea has a different shape of leaf and a different weight in your palm of your hand. So after a while, I like to, I would say you starting, you would weigh it, like a micro milligram scale, like a drug dealer, a little scale, because you're only going to use like 2.5 grams or something. So you want to be kind of precise. And then after a while you go, okay, actually, I like three grams or I two

So you're going to get the amount you want. And then you put it from the scale into your hand, into the palm of your hand each time. And you see for each tea, ⁓ it's this much. And then you get really good at knowing exactly. And then it feels very sensual. Like each tea, know exactly how it feels in your hand for the amount that you like. And you put just that much for one cup into your hand, and you put it in the pot. And if it's making it for more people, you do it each time. It's enough for each person. And then you take the water for the cup, and you put it into

pot so you know exactly how much the leaf to water ratio has got to be perfect so it might be like for I would say for an English breakfast tea I would use if I was making would you mean mug or

a small mug, rather than a big, vast one, I'd like 3 3.5 grams to 250, 300 ml water. So I'd put the tea in the teapot and I would know exactly how much water that was. So you might, to start with, pour it into your mug first and then into the teapot. And then you see inside the teapot where it fits. And you're like, oh, it's that much.

And so, you might weigh it or whatever. So you've got exactly your, like, if you're making a cake, would know exactly how much eggs and flour and it's a recipe, If you just do it by eye without any thought, it's never gonna give you an consistent result. And you don't know what you like. And after a while, you start varying it. You start using a little bit more tea or a little bit less water. And then your third variable the infusion time. How much? So in the first 90 seconds, most of the grape flavors will have dissolved.

So when a box of tea bags says three minutes, that's because it's going to take that long for a small amount of tea and a lot of water to colour the water. It's not really about making a delicious cup of tea. 90 seconds is where most of the flavours, the amino acids, that will dissolve into the water. And then after that you're going to be mostly increasing the tannins. So if you want it really dry and strong to match your cream, you might want to leave it a little longer.

And then you've got temperature. How hot is the water? If you're making a lovely green tea, you don't want those dry, bittan, tannic flavors to dissolve. And they need 100 degrees, they need boiling water. So if you drop it down a little, you'll get just a suite of flavors dissolving into the water. So like, you might go down to, I'm sorry, I'm doing centigrade, but 70 or even 60 degrees for certain green teas, white teas. And you're going to be drinking English breakfast with milk. So you want 100. You want it like fully on the high,

temperature to dissolve all those really like strong bold flavors that are going to balance with the milk. So electro kettle clicks off right there. Right there on it. But if you were going to drink it without milk, the same tea that your wife really liked and she doesn't want to drink it with cream, I would stop the kettle at like 85 degrees, so 15 degrees less, pour the water on there and fuse it little longer. She might have it for 90 seconds, know, at a lower temperature or 60 seconds and she'll get this like much more fresh.

nuanced flavor and yours is going to be a bit more overpowered by the tannins but that's good because you're adding the milk proteins and the milk proteins will attach the tannins and soften and sweeten the flavor so instead of if there were if there was no milk those tannins would attach to the proteins in your saliva and make your mouth feel dry and you wouldn't get that creamy lovely which I have experience with tea yeah

So if you don't want that really dry, drop the temperature down a bit, infuse it little bit less, see how you like it, and give it a bit more brutal with it if you're add milk, because you need the stronger, robust flavours. with that you're going to get like a very comforting, creamy, rich brew that you're looking for in your coffee. So it's a sin, and you're going to get caffeine, you're going to get a good amount of caffeine. But the caffeine is going to stay in your system longer, and you're getting some L-theanine. And the L-theanine is good for mood.

So it sort of keeps you in a more like zen state. So you get the up with the zen. Whereas caffeine doesn't have L-theanine, so coffee. So you just get the up and then you get more of a crash. unless you're drinking matcha, you're not going to get as much caffeine as coffee.

I mean, you could make yourself a matcha latte. So matcha has more caffeine because of the way that it's... Because it's the whole leaf. It's not an infusion of the leaf. It's a ground up leaf, like a coffee bean. So you're getting... can... It's also very intense. mean, when you see people drinking huge things of milk with matcha, think, gosh, they're drinking a lot of milk and also drinking a lot of caffeine. Right.

⁓ and it might make you feel a bit strange, but it's also a lot of milk. Man, that's a lot. Those huge Fente things. I love matcha and it's actually more bioavailable, all the goodness in it without milk.

didn't know that about the L-theanine in tea. That's wonderful. That's why monks have used green tea for meditation, because it's going to give you alertness without, hopefully, anxiety. And it tails off much lower. It keeps in your system. And if you had another infusion of the same leaf, you can keep yourself going with an oolong all day, with a few grams of leaf, and keep yourself topped up. Obviously, it's getting less and less each time. That's kind what you want through the day. And then could have some fresh leaves.

in the afternoon when you pick me

one of your favorite food memories?

That's such an interesting, I love rhubarb very, very much and I remember, that's something that, gooseberries and raspberries and I used to spend my childhoods in Scotland and the parents would be, the adults would be inside having a drink, they'd have tea and then they'd move into whisky and they'd be chatting and we'd be sent out to the garden and we could, in the summertime we could pick gooseberries and raspberries and things like that. We were allowed to forage in the garden and

we'd be allowed to go into the kitchen and have a cake or puddings. In Scotland, in my grandmother's, there was always a rhubarb something. It either rhubarb cake or rhubarb food. I think she would save it up through the year. She would sort of make a confit or something and we would always have it there. So think those fruits, those English fruits are my kind of first food memory that I remember thinking, is really good.

What's a rhubarb fool? Oh, just cream and sugar and rhubarb. OK. Yeah. And then like in terms of as an adult and...

I really love to...

together and we're just in sync. He's a chef, I'm not, and we decide to cook something. We don't have to talk about it. That is really amazing. We just make something, and I'm doing one thing, he's doing another, and it all combines together. We're in silence. It's almost like a meditation. We go to a meditation retreat, and people are cooking without talking. It's really amazing.

It's just, I don't know, you have a shared goal. You know where you're going to get to. And it just suddenly happens. And I think, how did we do that? How did you know that those potatoes were going to be ready in that time when that, you know? It's a mystery and a miracle. And it just kind of happens without thinking about it. And as soon as you stop thinking about it, it could go wrong.

food experience but I don't have anything with it in the morning, don't want to eat with it, I want to have my tea first. That's not food, that's a drink experience isn't it? And then also I love making cocktails with it as well in the evening so I could quite happily turn that into something a little boozy, I'm not too puritan. What would you add to this? That's really, I've just been thinking about it as we're drinking it, I think I would take a kind of...

blended rum actually but not like I would use this this particular tea I would use it as a lengthener with a blended rum and then perhaps because it's they've already it's already got a lot of some tropical fruit notes in that rum I might add a tiny bit of maple syrup to bring out the sweetness without being overly maple syrup and tea work very well together so you need a tiny amount where you need quite a lot of sugar

salt. It's a very simple one, maybe even a salt rim, like with a little citrus salt rim, just on a part of it. To get a little, yeah, it could be good. What would you call that?

I'm not very good at naming drinks.

Something, I would call it delicious, that's what I'm sure of. the tea was also infused nicely into rum, which would be a very different experience because alcohol acts like a solvent on tea and takes the flavour out very quickly like boiling water. So you can do very quick extractions with tea, 10 seconds, 20 seconds, a minute and get really interesting flavours into the alcohol. Which is not that, I mean I've been making tea cocktails for 20 years, but it's not that known, people don't use it very much, they use it more as the length in their rum than

a flavour. Yeah. The alcohol. mean the only thing I can think of is a hot tartie. Yeah which is also delicious.

Yeah, God, a hot toddy. It's amazing when you aromatize alcohol, if you put it in hot water, it aromatizes. So if you put, you need a tiny amount of alcohol into a tea to make it hot tea, to make it really taste. So it's quite a nice way of having something without being very boozy. You know, like having the luxury of a hot alcoholic drink, but you only need like five mil, 10 mil of whiskey to make it taste really rich and delicious. Because sometimes I think, like you were saying,

knowing the story changes the flavor, but also you can fool yourself. You can get quite drunk on a tiny bit of whiskey. you think, ⁓ I'm drinking hot whiskey and it's actually only five ml. Like a teaspoon. Totally.

So much fun. I couldn't talk about all the land and the earth, but all my farmers say one thing, all the farmers I work with, I only buy tea that's organically farmed, but it's not certified organic because that's often very, very complex and expensive and out of the...

capability of a lot of small farmers. don't have the money, they don't have the skills, they don't have the technology. Also, it can be in certain regions a little corrupt.

So some of the fetees are going to be self-tired and some are not. And I don't say which ones. I don't want you to think this is better. But we them all tested in Germany or Switzerland to see that they are actually organic. So I take the responsibility well on the farmer. And I go and visit the farm so I know how they work. And I see the weeds and the richness and the biodiversity. And the bamboo state that goes straight to the earth. Yes, it's healthy soil is healthy mankind.

I that, I know that, and you see it, and you see the community around the tea garden, because the earth is healthy, the environment is healthy, there are trees and plants and herbs, and lot of the tea farmers grow herbs as well, so that there is biodiversity within the farm.

It's clean, brilliant, sustainable world as opposed to when you go and see a big industrial farm which uses horrible agricultural chemicals. It's not just the farm and the tea, it's the communities around it that you see stricken and the rivers and the water systems and all that kind of stuff. it's not just us who drink the end product that will be the healthy mankind. It's also the people who grow it and the communities around where it grows. It does matter.