The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [2]
Like the finest wines, pure teas are fundamentally an agricultural product, subject to all the vagaries of Mother Nature. The best tea makers exploit nature to give their teas delicious flavors, artfully manipulating the ways the leaves grow and how they dry into tea. Tea starts its life as bright green leaves on a branch of the evergreen Camellia sinensis. These trees can grow to heights of thirty feet or more; they thrive in dappled shade in moist subtropical climates. The white and pink blossoms yield edible (if bitter) small tea nuts. The soft, shiny leaves have finely jagged edges and slightly pointed tips. Fresh-plucked tea leaves make an incredibly bitter brew; only after they have withered and dried do they take on their extraordinary aromas and flavors.
The best teas available today—and with one Kenyan exception, all the teas in this book—come from Asia: China, Japan, and Taiwan, as well as India and Sri Lanka. These countries make the finest teas for a number of reasons, but simply put, they have grown tea the longest and have the most expertise with the plant. The plant is indigenous to China and has grown in that country’s Himalayan foothills for thousands of years. China is responsible for the invention not only of green and black teas, but also of white teas, oolongs, and puerhs. Japan has been cultivating green tea since the ninth century. The British did not start drinking black tea until well into the seventeenth century, after Dutch traders first brought black tea to Europe. By the nineteenth century, the British had developed such a strong habit that they established the first tea plantations in their colonies of India and Sri Lanka. The colonists had such an important influence on the teas of South Asia that I call them British Legacy Teas. I provide a more detailed history of tea in an appendix (page 205), since the history of tea is not as important to our purposes here as the tastes.
Within each chapter and throughout the book itself, I have arranged the teas as I would structure a traditional tasting. To prevent your taste buds from becoming overwhelmed, I always begin with the lightest, subtlest teas and end with the darkest and most intense. Whenever possible, I suggest that you taste the teas in each chapter all at once, in the order presented. That way you can compare them with one another and take in the entire range of flavors possible within each category. If you can dedicate an afternoon to tasting all the Chinese green teas in succession, come dinnertime you will know the full spectrum of flavors and aromas in Chinese green teas. That said, you should also feel free to dip into the book at your whim, learning in greater depth about your favorites, one or two at a time. Contrast is a great teacher; to best cultivate your palate for tea, taste at least two at once whenever possible. For further comparison, I have provided some tasting “menus” in an appendix (page 187).
I also offer a list of reliable tea sources whom I trust (page 211). Since these teas are some of the best in the world, you want to be sure to buy them from suppliers who know what they are doing. Some of the teas are expensive, but these shops often sell them in small packages of just an ounce or two. Just one note of caution: Unlike wine, tea does not come in vintages, though it changes from year to year. The teas I have selected for this book were at their peak when I tasted them,