The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [1]
Today, three of us run Harney & Sons together: my father, my brother Paul, and myself. I was the first son to sign on in 1988. I first started to change my mind about tea after working in France with Camus Cognac, a family firm that had been making the spirit for several generations. While working with their distillers and blenders, I came to envy their traditions of family and agriculture, their collective pursuit of liquid perfection. I saw a chance to replicate those traditions in tea. Tea is, after all, an even more ancient drink than wine, and one that merits the same understanding. As I took on the roles of buyer and blender in my family’s burgeoning tea company, I grew determined to learn what makes tea great.
I have had some spectacular adventures. In search of the world’s best teas, I have explored some beautiful country along the tea belt from China and Japan through India and down to Sri Lanka. I have visited some of the flushest tea fields and taken tours of state-of-the-art tea factories as well as some enchantingly simple operations. I have befriended some remarkable tea farmers, manufacturers, and brokers, men with ties to the drink that stretch back centuries. In my work at our factory, whether examining new shipments or checking on our own teas, I taste around eighty teas a day, at least sixteen thousand teas a year. From dozens of journeys, hundreds of queries, and thousands upon thousands of sips of tea, I have mastered enough to know what makes tea so spectacular. The goal of this book is to allow you to achieve the same level of mastery, with far less time and travel.
Twenty years ago, a tea guide was hardly necessary. It was easy enough to become an expert in Earl Grey, English Breakfast, and the other blends that dominated the market. Today, it’s a different story. In only the last decade, globalization and economic development have helped widen access to more flavorful teas from among the best tea-producing countries of China, Japan, and India. Small batches of what were long considered local teas are now air-freighted to the West, providing an unprecedented variety of tastes and styles to choose from. The invention of vacuum packaging has allowed these teas to arrive on our shores more fresh and flavorful than ever before.
Adding to tea’s popularity, scientists report ever more good news about the drink’s health benefits. As a source of antioxidants, tea contains compounds that may help prevent cancer and cardiovascular disease. Research also continues into theanine, a compound in tea that increases concentration and soothes as it stimulates, making tea a milder, more beneficial pick-me-up than coffee or chocolate. The Wall Street Journal reports that total U.S. tea sales are nearly four times what they were in 1990, and the tea market is rapidly changing—and expanding—to accommodate new tea drinkers.
From our original six teas, Harney & Sons now sells more than three hundred. A visit to any good tea shop will yield sweet, vegetal green teas from China; Senchas, Banchas, and Hojichas from Japan; fragrant high-mountain oolongs from Taiwan; robust low-grown black teas from Sri Lanka; and three different seasons of tea from Darjeeling.
With so many new options available, how do you choose? How can you judge a good Assam from a bad? A properly brewed Sencha from a weak one? A spring Darjeeling from one harvested in fall? The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea will show you how to navigate this more complex tea world. This book is a compendium of the fifty-six best pure teas I think a tea connoisseur ought to know, with guided tasting notes for each.
Let me clarify what I mean by pure teas. Pure teas are harvested from the same variety of tea plant, from the same region, and ideally from the same factory. In the tea world, the opposite of pure teas are