The Economics Of Blending:
Standardisation, Cost & Control in the Global Tea Trade Blending occupies a central yet often misunderstood position within the global tea industry. While frequently perceived as a compromise on purity or origin, blending is more accurately understood as a structural response to variability, scale and market dynamics. Tea, as an agricultural product, is inherently inconsistent. […]
What The Flush Is Going On?
Second flush teas and the reverence on their shoulders Every year, somewhere between late spring and early summer, the tea industry collectively decides that weather is destiny. This is the season of the second flush. The brief and excessively romanticised period when tea bushes produce leaves said to possess greater body, deeper colour, and the […]
Notes From The Cederberg
Why one of the world’s most distinctive infusions still calls one mountain range home The trouble with maps is that they make everything look negotiable. Draw a border around something, give it a name, and it begins to seem transferable. Coffee came from Ethiopia; now it grows in Vietnam. Tea travelled from China to Assam, […]
Arranged for Examination
A novice peek into a practiced craft White lights overhead. The air conditioner hums with what seems like a purpose I’m yet to be made privy to. Control is what I can settle on, the kind of steady, regulated chill designed to remove variables, to keep the room neutrally obedient. They’ve prepared an operation theatre […]
The Locomotion of the Leaves
Allow me the occasional alliteration that makes you wince, but this headline seemed to have written itself. By now, we’ve laid bare the fact that tea goes beyond its status as a caffeinated beverage occupying pride of place in households, offices, restaurants, and commercial spaces alike, transcending geography and climate. Let’s zoom in, however, to […]