Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/71652
LOVING THE LEARNING continued from page 33 it turns brown," says Seven Cups' Hodge. "If you take an apple and splash it with boiling water for 30 seconds, it won't turn brown. It's been fixed, and it's the same with tea." Zhi's Lorien uses a similar sense of metaphor when tackling the subject, often comparing the changes in a darkening leaf to those happening in a garden compost pile. "The leaves actually heat up," he says. "There's an internal temperature that builds up as they turn." NOT SET IN STONE The six categories of tea are used to help bring some order and rigidity to a product that is marked by variation. So it's no surprise that what defines each category—and whether six is even the right number of classes—often seems up for debate. Sean Marsland, president of Toronto-based Spire Tea, says that when he first entered the tea world more than 20 years ago, only three categories existed: black, green and oolong. At that time, yellow tea and pu-erh were both grouped into the black category, and what most vendors now call white tea was classified as green. The "modern" six-tiered classification system came into being around a decade ago, says Austin Hodge of Seven Cups in Tucson, Ariz. It was then that tea players from around the world (most of them members of the commodity- market side of the business) gathered to find a more universal language with which to talk about tea. "What came out of that was a set of definitions based completely on processing," Hodge says, "and which didn't take into account cultivars or location or anything like that. The Chinese didn't sign off on that. It was kind of a very simplistic definition of categories." The push to better pin down classification The goal of articulating the technical process by way of simplistic imagery is not to hide truths but to break down barriers. If customers can quickly grasp the basics of something like oxidation, they'll likely view you and your staff as sensible customer service pros, not intimidating tea snobs. "It's so early in the game with specialty tea," says Lorien. "Complicating the matter drives potential tea lovers away. You want instead to encourage people into the playing field." NO SUBSTITUTE FOR TASTE Giving customers a basic intellectual understanding of things like oxida- tion is important for tea education to develop, but the true pathway to spe- cialty beverage appreciation runs through the palate. So no matter what you 34 Fresh Cup Magazine freshcup.com continues today. Bill Waddington, owner of retailer and packer TeaSource, says he no lon- ger considers pu-erh to be its own category. Instead, he views that variety as just the most infamous of a larger "dark tea" family, which consists of a range of different Chinese teas that, like pu-erh, experience fermentation after the manufacturing process is completed. "We've really re-tooled," says Waddington. "We re- printed many of our materials, and our new Web site will have dark teas as a separate category. I believe that's the more accurate description of the sixth category." Expect more shuffling in the years to come. "We'll continue to see a broadening of the cat- egories," predicts Spire's Marsland, "especially as producers on the other end see there's value in exploring different methods of production to follow consumer tastes and we start to see more hybridization and interesting blends. It's natural there would be a diversification."