What’s your favourite brew? The answer is likely to depend on where you live. If you’re reading this in the UK, then statistically speaking your answer is most likely to be a good old fashioned English Breakfast, but French tea drinkers are more likely to opt for green tea, while those in Spain apparently prefer their teas fruity.
This trend is one of the reasons why when I’m abroad I make a habit of visiting local tea shops. As customers in different countries have different preferences I find it’s a great way to try something new, as asking for recommendations from a Spanish tea seller may give you completely different results than from those in the UK. More on that later on, however.
I haven’t answered my own question, though. What is my favourite tea? As a commercial translator specialising in tea, I’ve translated content (articles, product sheets, sales strategies and more) covering more types of tea than you can shake a matcha whisk at, and I’ve gone on to try a fair few of them for myself. At various times my favourite tea has been an oolong, a rooibos and an interesting blend of black and green tea.
All of this is to say that you learn a lot from half a decade spent translating tea on a more-or-less daily basis. However, the field is endlessly broad and ever-changing and there’s always more to learn, so I still find myself lost on occasion when writing about a new type of tea or production method that I’ve never seen before.
To make sure this happens as rarely as possible, I’ve compiled a list of useful tea-related resources that I add to whenever I find a handy new source – whether it’s a blog, tea estate website or wiki. Whether you’re a tea translator like me, you’re writing in the area or you’re just interested to learn more, I hope you’ll find the links below useful!
HANDY RESOURCES
My starting point for information about new teas tends to be wikis. Although Fandom has a tea wiki (WikiTea, found here) it’s sadly quite bare, so I much prefer Teapedia, which as well as being fairly extensive also has the huge advantage of being multilingual (not as multilingual as Wikipedia, but it has French and Spanish pages, which are very useful for me).
Also interesting are the array of blogs written by tea enthusiasts around the world. I’ll admit I tend to read the following pages more often when I’m procrastinating than when I’m looking for something in particular, but Tea Epicure’s tea plant cultivar database and Babelcarp’s lexicon of Chinese tea terms make for fascinating reading!
If I can’t find a term I’m looking for on the wikis, the next place I’ll usually head to will be the websites of tea sellers themselves, as these will often include a glossary of tea terminology. Although these usually don’t overlap entirely, it can still be instructive to check these term bases across different countries, including Kusmi Tea’s French-language glossary and Twinings’ English-language glossary.
Last but certainly not least, going to the tea growers themselves is likely to get you the information you’re looking for. For example, the Obubu tea farm near Kyoto has a long-running blog with a lot of useful information on the tea harvest and the practicalities of growing tea.
HANDS-ON EXPERIENCE
As with so many things in life, however, one of the best ways of learning is by doing. With this in mind, Manon and I visited Obubu tea farm last year, where we visited the tea fields, toured the factory and picked some of the tea ourselves!
The picture above is of the plants Obubu uses to make “kabuse cha” (shaded tea). The tea is shaded for a couple of weeks shortly before the harvest to reduce its photosynthesis and help it develop its umami taste. It also reduces the production of bitter taste-creating catechins, resulting in a sweeter, less astringent tea.
Although on special occasions Obubu runs a session where they spend the entire day processing and shaping the tea leaves by hand, nowadays the picked tea leaves are almost always processed by a machine. A great example of this can be found in Obubu’s tea factory, which we were lucky enough to see up close during the tour.
Continuing with this theme, earlier this year I also took part in a traditional Chinese tea ceremony (or “gongfu cha”) hosted by the Confucius Institute at Cardiff University, an event which doubled as a fascinating deep dive into Chinese tea culture – from Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea to Doucha “tea battles”, I learned about China’s story of tea from prehistory to the present day.
As I mentioned earlier, Manon and I also make a habit of checking out local tea shops when abroad. Most recently we visited La Cabaña del Té, a local tea shop in Tenerife. I wish I’d managed to get a better photo than the one below; inside the walls were lined with loose leaf tins. The article I linked at the start may be accurate, as when I asked for recommendations, the very helpful seller suggested two fruity teas: a peach and passion fruit green tea and a mango rooibos. Needless to say, they’re both delicious!
We also had a great chat with the seller about the other teas they sell, and the benefits of each tea type. As much as all the online resources I’ve gathered over the years are a great help and have immeasurably improved my knowledge of the field, I still find that the best way to learn something new is to get out there and try things out for yourself.
Hang on, you (almost certainly didn’t) ask, you still haven’t told us what your favourite tea is! And it’s true – I haven’t. To tell the truth, I don’t really have a consistent favourite tea. At the moment I’d say it’s a matcha, but next week it could be an oolong or a rooibos. However, when I just want an excuse for a tea break at work, or I need a quick energy fix, there’s really only one option. One tea to rule them all. There’s only one tea we both drink so often that we’ve bought two enormous boxes of the stuff to make sure civilisation would collapse before we run out of it.
And that’s English Breakfast tea.
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