Tea Growing Regions Part 1

Frank Weber: Hi Ron Welcome Back to Le Gourmet TV, today were at the Tea Emporium again and we’re going to be talking about loose leaf tea. So maybe you can tell us about your stories with tea before we get into the varying regions. Ron: Well surely absolutely why not, I grew up in Germany which most people wouldn’t associate with as a country has a type of tea culture, but as you know, tea found it’s way into Europe through the Portuguese and then was distributed by the Dutch. Naturally tea found it’s way through Holland and Germany and France before it even came to England 50 years later. So there is someone of a tea culture there Frank Weber: Okay Ron: And Germany imports the most of high-grade Dar jeelings of any other country, of any country in the world. When I was young we nobody age 12 or 14 I have this little collection of flavored teas with vanilla and with you know black currants and so forth, and so I always, it was always around it was always something that I enjoyed and then being in a colony industry, being a chef and being in restaurants. It was always something that, you know, I had and appreciated it, the quality of, you know, when we had our own restaurant we serve some tea blacks for safety. Frank Weber: Okay Ron: So out of that passion became a business and some, when we look at teas, tea is a phenomenal product because it all comes from the same plant. Essentially they are couple of sap varitals depending on they grow. Frank Weber: Okay Ron: Altitude, soil, climate, condition, precipitation, all these things are very much like wines, and some terra so to speak has an enormous impact on what actually happens to the leaves. So in the different regions, we see different of these sap parietals we see larger leaves, moisturized leaves and the shiniest smaller and so forth and that’s because the plant has a adapted to it’s surroundings and therefore we do a green tea tasting for example now from ten different types of green teas. You will actually see that the flavor profiles are all different, which is what makes it so interesting. On top of that of course we have to take in consideration what the tea maker is doing to the leaves, so whether the tea maker decided to make a white tea, green tea, and oolong a black tea or pu-erh tea, which essentially is on the five varieties that we recognize. Frank Weber: So it’s the process that they’ve putted through after picking Ron: Exactly Frank Weber: Completely changes the profile again Ron: So it depends on, this could had been made in to a black tea just as well as it has been to a white’s tea, just depending on the processing method. So and we always find that costumers are sometimes surprise to hear that, because they associate green tea being one plant and black tea being another plant. And when we tell them the health benefits of green and black tea, I mean it is the same plant it has anti oxidants, vitamins, minerals, it has the same, it has the same health benefits so to speak. Frank Weber: Okay Ron: Depending on the processing method, that changes slightly, more caffeine, less caffeine, high antioxidants, and lower antioxidants. However, the different is not as major as most people would believe it. We always tell people, if you enjoy a cup of black tea, and now your coming to us and you’re saying, I have to drink green tea and I really don’t like it because it’s much lighter, and I like to put you know some sugar in my tea or so forth. You’d better off drinking five cups of black tea a day than you know two cups of green tea a day.