The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [34]
After two hours of oxidizing, the dark brown leaves are spread out on bamboo trays and moved to a small room above the same smoking chamber where the leaves are withered. The same hot, piney smoke rises from the level below. The leaves rest there for four hours, drying out and absorbing a smoky flavor like so many tiny slabs of bacon. When they are finished, the scent of dried Lapsang leaves is as much a pleasure to savor as the actual taste of the tea.
BRITISH LEGACY BLACK TEAS
It’s common to presume that Darjeeling, Assam, and Ceylon teas have as much ancient history as do Keemun, Lung Ching, Sencha, and the other great teas of China and Japan. While teas from South Asia are also incredible, they are, remarkably, only a little older than the telegraph. Named for the regions where they grow, these teas are a product of the British Empire, when British industrialists first established tea plantations in their then colonies. In the last fifty years, since the region won its independence from Great Britain, the tea styles, too, have evolved. Native tea makers have found ways to give them more nuance and character than the original industrial combines first sought. All three styles of tea retain some marks of British influence, so I group them together under my own term, British Legacy Teas.
Historically, these British Legacy Teas were both revered and derided for assertive, unsubtle flavors and brisk, tannic body. These are the teas that made black tea famous for its pucker. Today, many of the teas have evolved to become considerably more sophisticated. They retain some of that characteristic British Legacy bite but now boast nuance, charms, and engaging flavors ranging from guava to dark honey and malt.
British Legacy Teas were originally developed to require the mellowing effects of milk and sugar. By the 1830s, when Samuel Morse first started tinkering with wires, the British Empire was nearing its apogee. Tea consumption was rapidly increasing with the prosperity born of the Industrial Revolution. A new class of factory workers depended on tea with sugar and milk to supply them with a surprisingly large portion of their nutrition. Paying China for all that tea, however, was causing severe cash shortages. The British began looking for ways to get tea for free. Numerous attempts were made to establish tea plantations in the new colony of India.
After much trial and error, by the 1850s the British had succeeded. They found that Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, the native Chinese variety of the tea plant, thrived in the cool, steep mountain slopes of northeastern India’s Darjeeling region. In the nearby province of Assam, botanists discovered an entirely separate variety of tea plant, a larger-leafed variety they called Camellia sinensis var. assamica. Vast plantations quickly grew up in that flatter and more low-lying region, churning out immense quantities of assamica’s larger leaves. In the 1870s, Scots brought both varieties of tea to Sri Lanka, or what was then called Ceylon, after a blight wiped out coffee crops there.
In all three places, the British appetite for cheap tea led the new British tea merchants to reinvent the beverage. At first, the British tried to imitate the Chinese style of tea making. However, they soon found that their new vast tropical tea farms rendered the Chinese methods impracticable. These new estates produced tea in quantities never seen before in either China or Japan. The hot climate pushed out leaves year-round—quite large leaves in the case of the assamica plant—more leaves than human hands could shape or fire over woks. What’s more, in the time Chinese tea makers allowed their leaves to wither, South Asian tea leaves would rot in the climate’s heat and humidity. The British applied their industrial innovations to tea making, combining steps or cutting them out altogether,