Change is Gonna Come
Change is the fact of life we are all familiar with. It can build slowly, but when it comes to breaking point … it can be almost total. For years I have been enjoying my blend of ordinary black tea and some Twinings Speciality teas in loose leaf form,Darjeeling, Lapsang Souchon, while more recently being aware of the major category move to tea bags. Loose leaf tea is a lifelong habit I do not want to break. When Twinings loose teas were deleted from Countdown some years ago, I rang the Category Manager to complain. His response was that you “couldn’t give them away”. Of course retailers are bound to offer what they believe the public wants, but whether distribution or demand comes first is very similar to the chicken and the egg. New World continued with a reasonable range of loose teas up until winter 2016, but we have now witnessed an almost complete transformation of the tea category. It brings to mind the Chinese proverb, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it.”
My conclusion is that this is now not a “Tea” category at all, but rather a mock Health and Wellbeing category, filled with flavoured tea bags offering every mood you could wish for. Be well, be happy, be charged, be calm, be regular, be energized, relieve your menstrual pains (if you have any), detox your kidney, detox your liver, control your weight, get anti oxidant protection … all by using a humble tea bag! Tea is a product I drink because I enjoy it.
Can all these benefits be possible ? The honest answer, of course, is I don’t know, but if you believe all this you will be drinking a lot of tea..I know tea relaxes and calms, but these products are not tea, are not derived from the tea plant, camelllia sinensis. They do not contain tanin or caffeine (will the Coffee category be transformed as well?).
Tea or Witches Brew ?
These hibiscus ‘teas” have a wide variety of other additives. Fruit juice granules, milk thistle, licquorice root, bundock root, chicory root, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, uva ursi leaves, stevia, tribulus, cornsilk, bearberry, golden rod, horsetail, valerian, hops, passionflower, and any amount of flavourings. Here we have a right old witches brew. We know that spices, roots herbs can have some health benefits. Long ago I had personal experience of the effect of simple ginger tea – sliced ginger root lightly simmered, and taken with honey – had on severe stomach cramping. And valerian also affects me … when I first took valerian, it did relax me but gave me consecutive sleepless nights. Following that I took it in the morning to give me relaxed stamina during long work days, opposite the effect normally claimed. But it is the widespread reliance on flavourings that in my view discredits these products. If some of these fruit / hibiscus products were incorporated into the tea category I would have no objection, although they would seem better placed in a Health and Wellbeing category.. To see the tea category stolen by these products gives me indigestion ! At my local New World now, loose leaf tea accounts for less than 5% of product facings, you have to look hard to find it. The Camellia Sinensis plant has been moved aside.
Selling Products or Flavours ?
Flavourings are used in lemon and ginger, apple and pear, mango and strawberry, pomegranate and raspberry, chamomile and spiced apple, cranberry and raspberry, mango and strawberry. Healtheries call their range “Fruit Flavoured Herbal Teas” (“Relaxing the body and reviving the soul”). Many products do contain a mixture of what you could call real ingredients (fruit juice granules, peel, fruit pieces sometimes) and flavours, but flavour as an ingredient is always declared fairly high on the list of ingredients. This gives an indication of the relative volumes of ingredients. And there are some products that contain none of the actual name product, only added flavor … Mango and Strawberry, Cranberry and Raspberry, Pomegranate and Raspberry. These last three are Twinings products. I am personally disappointed to see this from Twinings. I purchased Twinings Mango and Strawberry for a taste test… a waste of time and money, it has no taste that I would call Mango or Strawberry, and no taste at all that I can identify. Flavours used are claimed to be natural rather than artificial but to me this product lacks any natural appeal. Clearly this is not my cup of tea.
Many of the ingredients in these products have benefits which the public has become aware of, so surely formulations so dominated by added flavours does the public a disservice. To offer some of this product with none of the name ingredient included seems to me to be dishonest. It will be very interesting to see again what this category looks like in a few years.
The Iron Goddess of Compassion.
To find the balance of flavour I wanted, I turned to alternative retailers. The supermarket was no longer filling my needs on its own. Specialty tea shops of course offer a wide variety, but at a significant price increase I wanted to avoid. I found a solution in the Asian supermarkets that are so popular now in Auckland … Oolong tea and White Tea. Oolong is a partially oxidised tea,, oxidation being a process of fermentation under climate controlled conditions, chlorophyll is enzymatically broken down to release tannins and darken the colour. As black tea is fully oxidized, and green tea unoxidized, Ooolong means “Dark Green Tea”, or, poetically, “Black Dragon Tea” White tea is made from buds or young leaves, like green tea it is not oxidised, fermented, and so is lacking in tanins. .
The brand I found was Hiland, both the Oolong and White are around $5.50 per 150 gms. The Oolong is branded Tie Guan Yin, meaning the Iron Goddess of Compassion. The marketing myth behind this tea is that The Goddess of Mercy (Guan Yin) appeared to a local farmer in a dream, and to reward him for regularly cleaning the abandoned temple, she told him to look in a cave behind the temple where he found the Camellia Sinensis shoot. Tie Guan Yin is dark oolong, more highly fermented than others, and produces a very refreshing, smooth, lightly smoky / woody plant based flavor that beautifully lifts my blend. My blend now is Dilmah, still, Oolong and White tea in a ratio of 4:3:3. The result is a golden light tea, a clean taste, light, smokey and deep flavours layered reflecting the combination of a black tea, an oolong and a white, wholly femented, partly fermented and unfermented. It is well supported by Rice Milk, and personally I sweeten with one tea spoon of raw sugar.
The three teas are difficult to mix though, Dilmah being a lot finer and heavier than White tea in particular. This means the taste of each cup varies, a variation I enjoy. It is always pleasant, sometimes outstanding, when the sharp freshness of the white tea sits perfectly on the smoky depth of the other two, so enjoyable I become a believer in the Tea Goddess of Compassion!
Monkey Business
A charming myth behind Oolong tea is that the highest quality tea is picked from higher elevations, and to do this, monks trained monkeys to pick the finest leaves. In the Tie Guan Yin range there is a Monkey Picked premium offer, but at $16.80 for 180 gms I have not yet sampled it. Whether it is worth that pricing is a tantalizing question that will have to wait for another day. In reality the premium leaves are not picked by monkeys, and never were, although they are apparently picked from higher elevations. But neither do flavoured teas like Cranberry and Raspberry contain any cranberry or raspberry. The myth of monkey picking does no harm, it is a traditional story that does not mislead the consumer about the quality or the ingredients of the product. In my view the same cannot be said for some modern marketing practices. This tea category now does contain some genuine products, but in other cases I have to conclude that the monkeys have come down from the tea plantations and moved into the marketing department.
