Turn Over A New Leaf

If you want to fully appreciate tea’s delicate flavours, you need to know what you’re tasting – and you need to brew it right. Mike Riley offers a few professional pointers

- Mike Riley

Tea is endlessly fascinating in its tastes and variety, but our quest for convenience has caused us to commoditise its wonderful leaves and hide them away in paper teabags. It might even be said that we have lost touch with our national drink. But perhaps if we give it a little more care, attention and awareness, tea can follow speciality coffee’s meteoric rise of recent years.

My journey through the world of caffeine started three decades ago when I trained as a tea and coffee taster for a large commercial tea blender and coffee roaster in the north of England. While I spent most of those years focused on coffee, I never lost my love for tea and its range of alluring flavours, so I recently joined Storm Tea, a small family business dedicated to organic, fine and rare teas.

Taste enhancers

Tea’s wide-ranging flavours are brought about, in part, by the many variations in the way the leaves and buds of the evergreen shrubs Camellia sinensis and Camellia assamica are processed. Tea-producing countries such as China, Japan, Taiwan, India, Kenya and Rwanda all use differing techniques to preserve their tea leaves, which results in varying flavour profiles.

In simple terms, the fresh leaves are partly dried, which is known as “withering”, then rolled or twisted to release the juices and enzymes. The tea can then be further dried through a process known as “firing” to create white and green teas, after which the leaves are graded and packed.

Alternatively, the rolled or twisted green leaves can be exposed to varying degrees of oxidisation, when enzymes react with oxygen to change the colour and flavour of the tea. Black teas receive a prolonged oxidisation period before being fired, whereas oolong is only partly oxidised to create a tea that is somewhere between green and black.