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The Tea
Enthusiast's Handbook:
A Guide to Enjoying the World's Best Teas
By: Mary
Lou Heiss and Robert J. Heiss
 Mary
Lou Heiss and Robert J. Heiss, authors of the James Beard
and IACP-nominated The Story of Tea, announce the
publication of their second book on tea: The Tea
Enthusiast’s Handbook: A Guide to Enjoying the World’s
Best Teas.
The Tea Enthusiast’s Handbook is an authoritative
pocket guide to tea that no tea lover should ever be
without. It is a singular blend of practical know-how and
rich detail on how to buy, discern and enjoy the six
classes of tea (green, yellow, white, oolong, black, and
Pu-erh). Advice on steeping the perfect cup, storing and
aging tea at home, alongside a gallery of more than
thirty-five individual teas with tasting notes and
descriptions make The Tea Enthusiast’s Handbook a
singular source of both practical information and rich
detail about this fascinating beverage.
The Heisses know that crafting fine, premium tea requires
a highly developed sense of perception that no machine can
replicate, and that every tea tells a story in the cup
about the soil and air that nurtured it and the teamaking
skills that transformed and shaped it.
Mary Lou and Robert have been premium tea retailers since
1974. They are adventurous tea trekkers and food and
travel writers, and they also present popular educational
tea workshops and tastings around the country. They are
coauthors of The Story of Tea and Hot Drinks. When not
traveling to source tea for their shop Tea Trekker (
www.teatrekker.com ) the Heisses make their home in
western Massachusetts.
Published by:
Berkeley, CA / Toronto, Canada
Our books are also available at the following sites:
Excerpt. © Reprinted by
permission of Ten Speed Press. All rights reserved.
Introduction:
The Glorious World of Tea
How times have changed! Premium tea is enjoying the
spotlight today in ways unimagined just a few short years
ago. Until the 1990s, retail purveyors of premium tea in
the United States could be counted on one hand, and
specialty food stores stocked just a tame selection of
humdrum black tea blends. At best, these selections were
marked by country of origin, with perhaps a simple
attribution to style of tea or country of production.
Unlike today, little detailed information was available to
tea drinkers, and most people did not even know what
questions to ask. For many, tea was, well, not very
exciting, but something that you could count on Grandma to
have on hand.
Today, we are learning how enticing and pleasingly
distinctive premium tea really is. Tea can be subtle and
alluring, bold and bracing, sweet and fresh, young and
full of vigor, or rich and matured. It is always fragrant
and welcoming at all times. Premium teas once unknown in
the West are now becoming familiar, and new tea shops and
tea houses are opening for business across the country.
For tea enthusiasts, this offers a superb opportunity to
travel the world of tea one delicious cup at a time.
Crafting fine tea requires a highly developed sense of
perception for touch, sight, and sound that no machine can
replicate. And every tea—from Taiwan’s Ali Shan High
Mountain gao shan oolong to a brisk and bright Ceylon
black tea from the Nuwara Eliya region of Sri Lanka—tells
a story in the cup about the soil and air that nurtured it
and the tea-making skills that transformed and shaped it.
So get ready to explore the world of premium tea, with
information to decipher tea lists, tea labels, and tea
menus and to purchase a varied selection of wonderful and
delicious tea with assurance.
About Our Book
In our thirty-five years as retailers of premium tea, we
have been asked just about every possible question
regarding tea, tea steeping, and tea storage. We have kept
these questions in mind as we approached the topics in our
book.
Right up front, let us say that we define tea in the
classic, historic sense as a caffeinated beverage brewed
from the leaf of the Camellia sinensis bush. While it is
commonplace today to refer to noncaffeinated, herbal
beverages such as peppermint, chamomile, and lavender as
“tea,” we believe that such beverages should be called by
other, more appropriate names, such as herbal teas, herbal
infusions, or tisanes. Many of these beverages are
delicious and refreshing, but they lie outside the scope
of our book, and we leave discussion of them to others.
The world’s best teas comprise a tiny percentage of the
yearly worldwide production of tea. Yet to us, these teas
are the most significant. Therefore, our book focuses its
attention on pure, unblended, premium teas from the
tea-producing countries that have made the greatest
contributions to the art and science of tea cultivation
and manufacture: China, Japan, India, Sri Lanka, and
Taiwan. As a result of learning, observing the results,
and perfecting their techniques in the tea factories,
generations of tea masters in these countries have created
the most stunning teas imaginable.
We believe that learning as much as possible about tea and
the process of artisan tea manufacture will heighten your
enjoyment of each cup you steep. We hope you take delight
in our journey through the vibrant world of tea.
A Simple Cup of Tea Is No Simple Matter
Tea is an essential beverage that quenches the collective
thirst of millions of people every day. Whereas tea was
once grown only in China, today tea is cultivated in
forty-one (and counting!) countries of the world, and new
tea industries are developing as worldwide demand
increases for more various types of tea.
Tea drinking has never gone out of fashion—it has simply
changed course and usage with each new generation of tea
drinkers. Tea, the most widely consumed beverage on the
planet after water, still proudly maintains its title as
the world’s oldest beverage. Tea is a wonderfully
intricate and complex commodity. There are said to be
approximately twenty thousand different distinctions of
tea made in the world, a vast number by anybody’s count.
Yet, no two teas ever taste exactly alike, and every great
tea has a distinctive, trademark flavor. You might even
say that tea has a cultural identity.
Yet, all tea is made from the fresh leaf of the Camellia
sinensis bush, and its three major varieties:
Camellia sinensis var. sinensis (small-leaf China bush)
Camellia sinensis var. assamica (large-leaf Assam bush)
Camellia sinensis var. cambodi (medium-leaf Java bush)
Additionally, in parts of Burma (known today as Myanmar),
China, India, Laos (officially Lao People’s Democratic
Republic), Thailand, and Vietnam, strains of indigenous
tea bushes and old tea trees coexist with hundreds of
local cultivars that have been developed to better meet
the needs of tea growers in their specific environments.
Since all tea starts as freshly plucked leaf, it is
theoretically possible to turn any fresh tea leaf into any
of the six classes of tea: green, yellow, white, oolong,
black, and Pu-erh.
But tea manufacture is a precise, controlled, and
predictable process, and in most tea-producing countries,
tea producers focus on only one or two classes of tea.
Japan, for instance, produces primarily green teas, but
they are very distinctive and taste like no other green
teas in Asia. On the other hand, China, the country that
unlocked the secrets of tea making and established the
manufacturing process for each of the six classes of tea,
is the only country that produces all six classes of tea.
What explains the seemingly endless selection of tea
available for sale in grocery stores and tea shops? The
answer is terroir, or place. Terroir is the
culmination of all the reasons why, for example, Chinese
green teas are so different from Japanese green teas. The
same forces that work to create all of the wonderful wines
and cheese that are so distinctive and appealing are also
at work in every tea garden around the world. Terroir
is not just about the place where a plant grows, but also
includes numerous other influences that are responsible
for the variation in tea. Let’s take a look at all of
them.
Terroir: Why Tea Is Unique
This word terroir has meaning that can fill volumes. By
its most simple definition, terroir refers to the place
where the roots of a bush or tree or plant nestle into the
ground, and the effects that a distinctive environment,
including geography, climate, and weather, contributes to
the unique character and taste of a food.
However, our visits to tea-producing countries have shown
us that other unique particulars also contribute to the
overall effects of terroir and the distinctive
differences among teas. These include the subvariety or
cultivar of tea bush (generally, subvarieties are
naturally occuring and cultivars are the result of human
intervention), cultivation practices, the season of the
pluck, the method of leaf manufacture, and the craft of
tea making.
Tea that is grown in the high, thin air of the Himalaya in
eastern Nepal will invariably taste different than tea
that is grown in the low-lying, hot, and humid river
valley region of Assam, India. What is it like where the
particular tea bushes grow? Do the bushes go dormant over
the winter or produce new leaf year-round? Are there
weather conditions such as monsoon seasons or frost that
affect the leaf and subsequently the taste of the tea?
Terroir can have a large connotation, such as tea from
India or tea from China, or it can refer to a small,
specific geographic connotation, such as tea from the
Huang Shan in Anhui Province, China. Terroir
distinguishes between locations within the same country as
well as between countries.
When we look at all of the tea produced in the regions of
any one tea-producing country, we see a composite of teas
from north and south, coastal areas, and inland regions.
Each terroir has specific tea bush cultivars that
contribute leaf of a particular character and style to the
teas made in that region. When the elements of place are
distinctive and strong, they conspire to keep a particular
tea from being able to be duplicated in exactly the same
way in other places. The sum total of all of the unique
places and teas in any one tea-producing country combines
to create the collective regional or national character.
Tea Bush Subvarieties and Cultivars
Three main varieties of Camellia sinensis (and thousands
of subvarieties and cultivars) flourish in tea gardens
around the world. It is important that a tea bush variety
is planted in a place where that bush will thrive. The
foibles of the English in the nineteenth century when they
first attempted to cultivate tea in India are a perfect
example of what happens when the wrong tea bush variety is
chosen for a given location. What many may not realize is
that the tea bush variety works with terroir to
provide the backbone style and to influence the flavor of
the tea.
In China, several tea-producing regions in the provinces
of Fujian, Guangdong, and Yunnan have native strains of
tea bushes and tea trees (some are centuries old) that are
not found elsewhere on earth. The fresh leaf from these
indigenous varieties is responsible for much of the unique
character of the tea from these regions. If you compare
tea that is made from old tea tree leaf with one made from
the leaf of a modern tea bush cultivar planted nearby, the
difference in taste and aroma is quite noticeable.
Tea bush varieties and cultivars look different from one
another, too, which means that they act differently during
manufacture. Some bu...
Other books by Mary Lou &
Robert J. Heiss:
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