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/95647
Austin Hodge (top row, second from left) spends three to four months a year in China, building relationships with growers and buying tea directly from them. ustin Hodge has been on the phone for more than an hour, sitting in his Tucson, Ariz., office and explaining the challenges of buying tea in China. "Chinese culture is, at its heart, ambiguous," he tells me. "Nothing is defined, and that's just the nature of the culture. Even in the language it's hard to define things. There's no past or future tense. There's no con- jugation of verbs. There's no male or female pronouns. You have to build a context just to have a conversation." That veiled culture poses a challenge for a tea sourcer trying to track leaf to the source, but it's a problem Hodge has managed to overcome as the founder of tea importer/wholesaler Seven Cups, which sells only Chinese tea. Over the past 12 years, Hodge has spent an average of three to four months a year on the ground in China—delving into the language, forming relationships and discovering great teas—and has brought details like leaf varieties and farmer names into Seven Cups' marketing materials. "The Chinese system takes a lot of time to learn and navigate," he says. "But it's tough to get quality tea without doing this." Tea importers face challenges galore when tracking their tea to the source, but consumers' growing desire to know the background of the foods they consume has prompted more companies to tackle the traceability task—or to at least consider doing so. But what obstacles do specialty tea merchants face in finding that informa- tion? How do relationships at origin affect the quest for truth? And what might the future hold for the viability of tracing tea? THE UNIQUE CHALLENGES OF TRACEABILITY IN SPECIALTY TEA In recent years, the number of U.S. coffee people visiting produc- ing countries has exploded, and one reason for that is the relative ease with which one can trace that product from conception to consumption. Let's imagine a coffee buyer for a roasting company heading out on a buying trip. First, traveling to Latin America is a manageable trek for many in the U.S. Once there, that buyer can see coffee grown, picked and processed before it's shipped home as green coffee. And once those beans land on domestic soil, the buyer takes over and guides them through the roasting process to create the finished product. Things are markedly different on the tea side, geography first and foremost. The top tea-growing countries—China, India and Sri Lanka—are on the other side of the world, so there's a lot more distance to cover when tracing it to the source. What's more, tea doesn't have a roasting-like process stateside—that "refinement" happens before it's shipped. "Tea is a finished product that comes from a foreign land," says Mike Spillane, president of The G.S. Haly Company, a California-based importer. Without having had a hand in preparing the product, tea whole- salers and importers have a perplexing relationship to traceability. They want to know all they can, but there are barriers between their desires and tea's roots. Spillane feels a deep connection to the traceability issue, having helped create the American Premium Tea Institute (which was later folded into the Specialty Tea Institute) in part to address the enormous complexities of importing and sourcing. He says he has witnessed countless examples over the years of what he calls a "shell game," where the tea being sold isn't what the buyer thinks it is. He offers the example of Darjeeling; because it's a well-regarded origin, some producers have marketed their non- Darjeeling teas by that name. "For many years, some Dooars or Nilgiris were blended with Darjeelings," Spillane says. "Nobody continued on page 28 Fresh Cup Magazine 27 AUSTIN HODGE/SEVEN CUPS