The Tea Trade Interview
In the Footsteps of Fortune
© 1998 Tea Trade Press, LLC–used with permission

...Continued

TT: What are you doing to secure for export the quality that you require?

D: This last trip was very interesting. I found one of the best green teas that I ever found in China, from the farmer, and the price to the farmer was less than a dollar a pound. Unbelievable, and it was such good tea. I brought this tea to my exporter and we had a big tea tasting there and there were a lot of tea tasters and I slipped my tea into this lot. The tea tasters there singled this out as being a fine tasting tea and it proved to be quite an embarrassment to the exporter who was trying to sell me their teas at 50 times the price. So you don't need to spend a lot of money for great tea, but what you do need to do is go back to the source, back to the farmer and support the farmer to allow him to grow the tea in the way he knows best which is by feeding the soil with good organic fertilizer. This is crucial to getting fine tasting tea with good aroma.

Another thing that has happened in China that most people aren't aware of in the West– they think tea is tea. Well tea is grown from many different varietals of the tea plant (camellia sinensis) and what happened is that forty years ago, the government, through the Tea Research Institute in Hangzhou which is the main national tea research institute, they started working on strains of tea plants, varietals, that were high production, drought resisitant, insect resistant, etc., all the qualities other than taste and aroma. So what they did was put the emphasis on strains like (Fu yan) and (Liu hao), the varietals that had qualities for high production and good profit but not necessarily good taste and aroma. So what has happened now is that you very seldom find the older varietals of tea plant in commercial production, very rare. But in fact, the best tasting teas are not from these new varietals, but from the older varietals. This is a big problem now because most of the commercial gardens are not planted with these varietals. Farmers don't want to plant these because they're too slow growing and they sell tea by weight.

One of the projects I'm doing with the Tea Research Institute is singling out exceptional teas, and visiting the land, and doing the soil analysis to determine the organic content as well as the mineral content. Minerals are very important in soils.

The other thing is they've developed strains, different varietals, that are salt tolerant. With all those chemical fertilizers, you have a salt build-up in the soil. And this is the one thing you have to leach out. So you end up using 10 times the amount of water that you would for organic fertilizer. One, because there's no humus in the soil to retain the water. And two, you have to leach out the salts. So this is the ^ame situation in tea farming. ^

We're planting old varietals now, the farms I'm working with, we're going back to some of the better strains of tea plants. The old tea tasters will tell you this. I befriended one. He says the same thing "the teas were better tasting forty years ago".

TT: Are the tea institutes growing the older varietals and providing these as a nursery to the farmers?

D:No.

TT: So how would the farmer get the older varietal?

D: They have them on their farms. There are 260 varietals growing, but it's also a problem there. They're only maintaining them, it's like a museum. Some of the best tea I tasted in China was from wild tea plants and this is one of the things I've been promoting is going back to the wild strains. There are wild tea plants growing in China. You can't run a business on these few plants but it's great information for the palate, because when you drink that tea it's very different from any of the commercial teas.

TT: Can you clone them or...

D: Absolutely. You take cuttings, collect seeds, mostly cuttings. That's the best way to propagate these. And this is one of the projects I have with the Tea Research Institute is to take cuttings from these and then plant them, then do a comparison of the different varietals and compare the taste and aroma of these.

TT: Are you finding a receptive response there to your view?

D: Yes, they're recognizing the problem now in China, both on the farmer level and the government level. It's not an easy situation to resolve because the farmers have no room for experimentation now, it's at the survival level. All they want to do is sell their tea and get paid. What I am proposing is that if they have a better quality tea, they will get a much higher price for it, and if they can grow it organically, they get still an even greater price for their tea. This is what we need to do, we need to give support to the local . farmer, show them that there is appreciation for higher quality tea, which they know how to grow.

TT: Do you think there'll be support for China tea in the U.S., which has, really only since World War H, become attached to India and Ceylon blacks?

D: Absolutely. Which is good, because I think it will raise the quality of India and Ceylon teas. They've all got to realize the name of the game now is not how cheap you can make it or how much a farm can produce but instead how good is the quality. Let's get back to organics, let's get back to feeding the soil, and giving that soil all the nutrition that that tea plant needs to grow into a healthy plant. We've got to do it, there's no way around that.

What we need to do is to educate people how to drink tea, how to taste tea. And how to prepare tea. And my approach is to remove the intimidation of having it be complicated or difficult. Because it's not. It's simply a leaf off a plant. Nothing more, nothing less. It's only the sophistication of how they roll that leaf, how they pick it, how they prepare it, and how they feed the soil – or not feed the soil –that determines the differences between these teas. And, you know, this is nonsense, saying, '^his tea here, you have to prepare it at 164 degrees, and steep it for exactly two and a half minutes.' You know, no one does it that way. It's one thing if you've doing a comparative analysis of tea, and you have 20 teas lined up. [Then] you want to be sure the taste difference is from the tea and not from the technique. Then you have to be analytical about it, you have to be very precise; I make sure that each tea is prepared exactly the same way. But that's not drinking tea for the pleasure of it. That's not how you enjoy tea. There's no right or wrong way to make tea. You can do it anyway you like. So what I try to get people to do is, do whatever it is you're doing, but taste it along the way. And if you find it's not strong enough, let it steep longer. Still not strong enough, put more tea in it. But don't judge the tea because you had a bad experience the first time. And as you develop a palate for tea, you 11 learn what you like and what you don't like.

TT: Do you want to make a prediction for China tea?

D: China tea is going up. I am working hard to promote it. It still has some of the best teas in the world. The future of China tea is anyone's guess. There's going to be a lot of popularity in the product and there's going to be a lot of jockeying for position of control in China.

TT: What's the most satisfying aspect for you being an American trader in China tea?

D: I love tea, I love finding great tea. It's so wonderful to drink really good tea. It's one of those cheap thrills in life. You can have a wonderful cup of tea, it costs you pennies for the cup, it's very satisfying, it's good for your health, you can drink it all day long with no ill effects. Why not indulge in one of life's oldest, simplest pleasures?

There are four things that destroy tea. The first and foremost is humidity. You have to keep it dry, unless it's Pu-Er, which is in a class of its own. So keep the humidity away. The moisture content of the leaf itself should be no more than 5-7%. The second thing is oxidation. Store your tea with as little air as possible. In other words don't have a large container with a little tea in it, because it will continue to oxidize. The rate of oxidation is increased by temperature, so keep the tea cool. The fourth thing is sunlight, but that's usually not a problem, you just keep it in an opaque container. So ideally you want to keep it cool, in the smallest container as the amount of tea you have, keep it tightly sealed and out of the light. In the tea room we have dehumidifiers in the wintertime, we have refrigeration, we use nitrogen gas flushing in steel canisters to take out the oxygen. If we package for the consumer, then we don't; they're just going to be opening the teas soon as they receive it. If we're packaging wholesale, then we pack in 3-4-5 lb bags that are vacuumed and nitrogen flushed, so they'll be kept fresh.
- David Lee Hoffman