Infused Page 4

  MAKING GREEN TEA

  I use 2g of leaf per 150ml of water.

  Heat the water to 70°C and infuse for about ninety seconds if you like a light infusion, or heat to 80°C and infuse for around two minutes for a deeper brew; those extra 10°C and additional thirty seconds make worlds of difference to the taste. You can use boiling water, but be quick – just a few seconds at that temperature will release the flavours, and if you are too slow it will rapidly become bitter.

  CHAPTER 5

  A DIVERSION: HOW ENGLISH BREAKFAST BECAME THE NEW BLACK

  If you’re a British or Irish tea drinker, the following sentence may knock you hard, prompting you to take a sharp breath, tighten your brows and make a swift movement of your head twenty degrees to the right so as to look at this page at an angle rather than face the enormity of the heresy full on.

  Not everybody thinks of an English Breakfast blend as normal tea.

  Indeed, I could go further. Brace yourselves, non-Asian readers.

  Green tea is normal tea.

  Across the English-speaking world, it can seem as if a robust, blended black tea is the mainstay of our lives. In the United States it is still mostly served iced, but the tea is much the same. We call these black-tea blends ‘English Breakfast’ or often just ‘normal tea’. Normal isn’t, of course, normal to everyone.

  My normal daily intake of caffeine, for example, might seem excessive to you. The national average in Britain is around six cups of tea a day. I probably drink double that. When I have a day hosting chefs in my tasting room, I might drink twice as much again, and when I’m in a tea garden sampling different batches, I might run to more still.

  It’s one of the most pernicious myths that green tea is less caffeinated than black tea; some people even believe it to be a herbal tea containing no caffeine at all. In fact, green tea and black tea are the same leaf, from the same plant, containing the same chemical compounds; they’re just crafted differently. No one has been able to tell me how the misconception that green tea isn’t caffeinated arose, but, repeated often enough, it takes on the patina of truth.

  If normality is conformity of opinion, there are more tea drinkers in the world who consider green tea to be normal. It has been the daily staple in China for millennia, and there are more Chinese tea drinkers than Irish and British, of course. If we were in Japan, normal tea would be a steamed green tea like a sencha. In Hong Kong it might be oolong or pu’er. If we were in Russia, it would be strong Assam, possibly sweetened with jam. In Morocco it’s a green tea flavoured with fresh mint and herbs and sweetened with dunes of sugar.

  What British people call ‘normal’ tea, English Breakfast tea, had a fascinating genesis that was far from normal; in fact, it was an audacious revolution.

  All our tea once came from China. The Chinese did let the Japanese grow a little by the tenth century, but it took the bold adventurer Robert Fortune to steal the bush for the British in the nineteenth century.

  Fortune was a Scot, and through my paternal grandmother I have Fortune relatives, so it’s possible he and I share an adventurous lineage. There may be more hope than genetics in that claim, but what a fellow. He was a botanist. He came from a humble background and rose to become the director of the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, the top job in his profession at the time. This was his reward for having risked his life traversing the globe to bring back rare plants, the most famous of which was his stealthy acquisition of Camellia sinensis.

  Only finished tea was for sale in China at the time; taking tea seeds or seedlings out of the country was illegal, punishable by execution, and the technology of production was in no way ‘open-source’. The British had no idea that black tea and green tea came from the same plant, nor did they know how to grow, cultivate or produce tea.

  Fortune, a man of few means and, aptly, keen to make his own, risked everything to bring back stock and seed of Camellia sinensis and to learn some of the secrets of tea production. In 1848 he travelled into China with a false ‘queue’ (a pigtail hanging from his hat), purchased seed from corrupt Chinese officials and managed to hide seedlings inside bamboo canes. From his cunning began the development of the British tea industry.

  Fortune had been commissioned by the East India Company (EIC), which controlled all trade with the East. They had a government-sanctioned monopoly over the importation of tea from China. The Chinese emperor controlled the trade at his end. He allowed the EIC boats only into Hong Kong and Macau and would take payment only in gold and silver. There was no exchange of goods; newly industrialised Britain couldn’t trade guns, machinery or machine-made cottons for the silks or porcelain (‘china’) she was importing. The emperor was extremely disdainful of crude Western culture. He wanted none of their tawdry bric-a-brac.

  Tea could have made it to Europe along the Silk Road in around 200 BC. The Romans traded with China, but they didn’t get any tea, presumably because the Chinese were not yet ready to share. It was the desire for precious metals that finally led the Chinese emperor to trade the precious leaf in the sixteenth century. China had very little gold and virtually no silver deposits beneath its soil. However, a massive population with a sophisticated economy needed a medium of exchange: money, coin, and lots of it. In return, they needed to trade something consumable that required a constant, steady supply. Something so good that importers wouldn’t be able to get enough of it. Tea.

  And it worked. Ships laden with gold and silver headed east, to be packed with tea and ceramics for the return voyage. As Britain’s thirst steadily increased, the trade deficit became unacceptable to the EIC and the British government. They looked around for something else to trade, illicitly, and lit on opium. The poppy, which grew in abundance in the British colonies of India and Afghanistan, was unknown in China.

  The EIC began illegally exporting opium into China despite the emperor’s protests, trading the drug for tea and saving their gold. It had a devastating effect on the health and welfare of those who became opium addicts, and by 1820 the Chinese were outraged enough to confiscate and burn a few tonnes of the stuff. The British responded by sending warships up the Pearl River. Not only was the EIC running a nefarious narcotics business, it was supported by the British government with gunboat diplomacy. Ultimately, they opened five more trading ports and made the emperor sign over Hong Kong. Not the British Empire’s finest hour.

  The Chinese were now addicted to opium, but the British were addicted to tea. By the early nineteenth century, tea had infused society completely and the Chinese monopoly was troublesome. This was where Robert Fortune stepped in. He took his stolen leaf to India.

  British India, on the other side of the Himalayas, looked like suitable terroir. Indeed, while they were hunting out places to grow their stolen Chinese plants, British botanists found a previously undiscovered variety of tea bush flourishing in Assam in north-east India. Tea had been there all along. There are only two varieties of Camellia sinensis: the China type (Camellia sinensis var. sinensis), and var. assamica. All of the many varietals or cultivars, created from crossing different bushes, as with vines or roses, stem from these two varieties.

  The Assam is the less lofty; it is a lowland plant with much deeper, malty characteristics and possesses less of the sweetness and fewer floral notes than its high-altitude Chinese sister. But it has a very important place in the development of British tea.

  Assamica doesn’t make great green tea. But it does make a very passable black tea.

  With green tea you’re trying to bring out the subtle, soft, elegant flavours through delicate handling and the painstaking application of heat and pressure. Black tea, however, is made by crushing or breaking the leaf to expose it to air and oxidisation, thereby bringing out deeper, richer flavours. Oxidisation is what makes black tea, but in China it is often wrongly termed ‘fermentation’, a linguistic peccadillo that is difficult to break. I’ve had entirely pointless arguments in China because of this, fuelled by our different terms for the same th
ing. The only tea that is truly fermented is pu’er.

  The crushing can be done by a roller that mimics the action of two hands. Imagine two metal plates, one above the other, with wooden or brass ridges, the top one rotating in one direction, the bottom in the other, with the leaf gently rolled between the two, as if between two palms. Other processes, such as the withering, drying and application of heat, differ from tea to tea, but all black teas go through this rolling process. Nineteenth-century British industrialists were delighted that this could be done by machines. The Industrial Revolution had allowed for the cheaper production of goods such as cotton and silk and now the same could be done with tea. They could break the Chinese monopoly, producing cheaper teas, grown in their own colonies, that were still high quality. Black tea also travelled the oceans well, being already oxidised and more stable. More delicate green teas didn’t always reach Britain in good condition, having had to endure being transported in wooden boxes lined with lead, and being salted by the sea air.

  Those early Indian black teas were not just affordable, they were pretty good. There are some I search out and buy that are still crafted on the original rollers in what is called the ‘orthodox’ method – in small batches with great craft and precision. There are also some rare hand-rolled Indian, Nepali and Sri Lankan black teas, which are extremely valuable, but orthodox teas can be truly delicious.

  A word on rolling: what cannot be truly excellent is tea produced via the modern industrial batch-processing method known as CTC (Cut Tear Curl). This is done in a single vast machine that looks a little like a giant web press, with lots of flashing lights and switches, the mechanics hidden behind metal casing. In one end goes green leaf and out the other comes the brown dusty stuff you find in a teabag. It’s almost impossible to create nuance, to bring out the finest chocolate, caramel, burnt-sugar, toffee and honey flavours, the heady florals or the fruity citrus notes. You might also find it hard to write tasting notes on an instant coffee.

  Colonial black teas started to replace Chinese tea, but there was another revolution to come.

  In China a good tea comes from one distinct place. You might not know the garden that you’re buying your Tie Guan Yin oolong tea from, but you know the tea is from the Anxi area of Fujian province. To mix Tie Guan Yin oolong with Da Hong Pao oolong, which is grown in the Wuyi Mountains in another part of Fujian, would be complete anathema. It would cause heart attacks, strokes, apoplexy. They are two different oolong teas, from different places, crafted in different ways. Oolong tea is never blended (except by lunatics like me). It’s the same with pretty much all tea in China.

  The British were new to the tea malarkey. They had different ideas. They were planting Robert Fortune’s stolen Chinese tea in wholly new terroirs. Leaf from a varietal grown in Darjeeling tasted different from leaf grown from the same varietal but in the mountains of Yunnan, just as a grape from the same varietal would taste different depending on whether it was grown in New Zealand’s Marlborough region or in the Loire Valley in France.

  On top of this, they had the new assamica, with different flavours again. And further still, the creation of new hybrids. The botanists of the nineteenth century went to town. This has led to the development of more than three thousand cultivars. And those inventive Victorians back home began to consider what might happen if they mixed things up a bit.

  It started at the breakfast table. ‘English Breakfast tea’ means a tea to be drunk with an English breakfast. It’s not an exact mix. There is no formula. The name just denotes a blend of black teas combined to go well with breakfast food. It was a term coined by a New Yorker at the turn of the twentieth century to describe the sort of tea English people liked for breakfast. It used to differ in each household, according to individual preferences: a bit more Indian tea here, a tad more Chinese there. A stronger tea with kippers might warrant a touch more Assam, whereas marmalade on toast is better with an emphasis on the lighter Darjeeling. If I’m having scrambled eggs, I like a high Himalayan tea with a tiny pinch of Lapsang Souchong. I put a spoon of Earl Grey into the blend, in place of the Lapsang, when I’m having toast with honey. For boiled eggs and soldiers, I like a fifty–fifty blend of two Chinese black teas, Keemun and Emperor’s Breakfast. When it is carefully combined, using great teas, English Breakfast can be a tea of real beauty.

  It seems so obvious now, but it was revolutionary. Not just growing and using tea from outside China but the bold move into blending. And it had a tremendous effect, reaching beyond even tea.

  Tea blenders were the first whisky blenders: people like the grocer Alexander Walker in Kilmarnock, whose family went on to make Johnnie Walker. In the nineteenth century they didn’t drink much whisky in Glasgow or Edinburgh, or anywhere in the world beyond the highlands and islands of Scotland. They drank brandy and rum; imported spirits. Whisky was considered wild stuff. Much of it came from illegal stills and was rough hooch for Highlanders. There was certainly little consistency. You were safer with a bottle of rum.

  The Scots grocers, having had great success blending teas and building customer loyalty, turned their attention to whisky. You could go to Walker’s and get a reliably decent blend of tea. You weren’t at risk of getting a dodgy lot. Why not apply the same principle to whisky? It really wasn’t until whisky was blended for consistency and a rounded, balanced flavour that it hit the market and started to flourish in Scotland, then England and soon after the world. Despite the more modern rise of single malts, blends are still more widely enjoyed.

  It was English Breakfast blends that brought the British fame in the tea world, and brands began to acquire global reputations. Sadly, those reputations are not all they once were. I gave a Chinese colleague a very famous breakfast blend teabag and he didn’t even recognise that the drink it made was tea. But when I travel to China, where people still spend a higher percentage of their income on tea than alcohol, they do sit up a bit when it comes to rare blends of black tea. A sublime tea, crafted and blended with love and care, will find favour everywhere. It’s the same with our whisky. (I say ‘our’ because I’m a Scots/English hybrid and switch allegiance capriciously when it suits.) The supermarket blends aren’t much to write home about, but there are blends that are divine elixirs – in tea as in whisky.

  To British people, English Breakfast tea, or ‘normal tea’, has come to represent so much more than breakfast or flavour. We often use tea when we need comfort or courage. The food writer, broadcaster and one-time ad man Tim Hayward gave me the strapline for one of the first English Breakfast blends I made. It was for a Royal Air Force veteran of the Second World War: ‘Fortifying in times of national peril, calming when courage is required.’

  That’s what many of us in Blighty think of when we reach for a hot mug of tea. It gives us that stoic stiff upper lip and reassurance. It’s almost certainly a strong black blend, with a silky drop of milk to smooth its roughest edges. We are looking for something powerful, warm and loving, the way we like our mothers. We know it’s rarely true, but we like to hold onto the fantasy that our mothers, or a strong cup of tea, can fix anything.

  CHAPTER 6

  LONDON, ENGLAND: CAMDEN TO WHITEHALL

  There was a time when I used to start work at five o’clock every morning, exhausted and in a panic. Please don’t picture some uber-efficient titan of industry with a ferocious lust for work. Think instead of a woman alone in a frozen forest, trying frantically to make a fire by rubbing two ice-lolly sticks together.

  I had set up a business where I got to travel the world to source rare and lovely leaves direct from the farmers who grow and craft them. And then there was, and continues to be, the other, less glamorous side: how to move their tea from remote mountainsides; how to import, package, distribute, export and sell it across the globe. A few years in, I had a fairly successful business but not enough people to run it, and insufficient income to employ more. As the company started to get somewhere, we were overwhelmed.

  I was working about f
ourteen hours a day. This increased to eighteen or even twenty hours one winter when a key member of the team left abruptly. I had little time for a social life. I wouldn’t have survived if it weren’t for tea. Coffee will deliver you a swift punch to get you moving, but tea is sustaining.

  That winter, in the cold pre-dawn, I held onto the cup like a life raft as my computer started up. I would sit there dazed, having gone to bed a few hours earlier, too exhausted to go on. Stock was missing from the warehouses and invoices had gone unpaid and unmade, all of which kept my mind from resting even when I was unconscious. Again and again, I would wake up with the same anxieties written in permanent marker on the whiteboard of my mind.

  The office was in my flat in those days, a minuscule apartment in north London that I had converted from a studio. My bedroom had once been the kitchen and was fitted out like a ship’s cabin, with books and clothes lining the walls and my bed built high over drawers to make use of every centimetre. The kitchen/drawing room/tasting room/office was the only other room, except for a small bathroom and a storage space down the hall. Boxes of tea were stacked to the ceiling. The laptops, printers and files could be piled onto a toppling wheeled trolley and trundled into a cupboard when I needed some living space. In the centre of the room was an inherited Georgian dining table covered with a linen tablecloth. Round this we sat on chairs upholstered in moss-green velvet that I had bought in the Bowery in New York in another time, another life. The teacups stored inside the glass Edwardian shop cabinet that I used as a kitchen cupboard were hand-painted. We used silver cutlery and Japanese hand-made plates. And made soup to save money.

  Huge windows dominated the two tiny rooms. Light flooded our cramped quarters from the open spaces beyond. Everything had its place, but there were so many things and so little space for the four, five or even six of us in that room. As the team left in the afternoon, they made way for me to host tastings and meetings there with the chefs and customers we worked with. Once they had gone, it was there I worked on bespoke blends and tasted new harvests sent to me from farmers across the world. After that it would be back to the paperwork.