Newsletter #191 🍃 The Best Tea Is Sold by the Kilo
Newsletter about nature and science
🍃 The Best Tea Is Sold by the Kilo
🍵 Tea is only tea if it says Camellia sinensis on the label.
That’s the name of the tea plant, mainly cultivated in China and India, but also in Indonesia, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Persia, and Turkey. Alongside coffee, true tea is the most consumed hot beverage in the world. Tea helps lower blood pressure and contains many beneficial compounds. But it’s a myth that tea contains no caffeine — it’s simply about half the amount of a cup of coffee.
🌿 The rise of herbal “teas” (like rooibos or chamomile) blurs the statistics on tea consumption. Yet with a global production of nearly five million tons, the true tea plant easily wins. Drying and oxidizing the tea leaves produces black tea; without oxidation, it becomes green tea.
🥇 Among the top varieties, aside from Assam (high in caffeine), Darjeeling — grown at the foothills of the Himalayas — is regarded as the “champagne” of teas.
🌍 The Tea Campaign
💡 Forty years ago, a Berlin professor launched the inventive “Teekampagne” (Tea Campaign). Growers receive a fair price, cultivation has become organic, and consumers pay less for top-quality first flush Darjeeling than for mediocre supermarket tea.
📦 How is that possible? By selling tea in kilo-sized packages — encouraging people to drink tea more often.
👨🏫 In 1985, economics professor Günter Faltin began a student project to create an ethical enterprise. He had studied the issues surrounding tea production in India and the complex supply chain between the plantations and European consumers.
💰 In Darjeeling, even in the best growing regions, farmers and pickers were poorly paid. The chain was full of intermediaries — auctions, exporters, importers, wholesalers, supermarkets, and retailers — before the tea reached the drinker, who had been trained to buy tea bags or small 100-gram packets.
🍃 Chemical pesticides were still widely used, and care for the environment was seen as a Western luxury concern. Only after a devastating landslide in 1968 did reforestation gain any real attention.
🌏 In the end, the Tea Campaign succeeded in convincing growers to join a fair-trade model, becoming the largest buyer of Darjeeling tea in the world.
🌳 More teas were added to the program — all organically grown, with strong environmental care (over 3.2 million trees planted), fair prices for pickers, direct import from plantations to Europe, and direct sales to consumers. The larger the package, the better the deal.
🏺 How Tea Is Made
☀️ Tea harvesting is a labor-intensive process, and so is production — especially for black tea. The young leaves must first wither.
🌀 Then moisture is removed by rolling the leaves between flat presses. Tea develops its aroma and color during oxidation — a delicate process where warm, humid, oxygen-rich air between 27 and 29 °C is circulated through the leaves.
🔥 Oxidation is stopped by heating and drying. From one kilo of fresh leaves, only about 200 grams of black tea remain. For green tea, the oxidation step is skipped entirely.
🧪 Besides caffeine (also called theine), tea contains fluoride (good against tooth decay) and antioxidants that help reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes and stroke.
⚕️ Tea was first introduced in the Netherlands as a medicinal drink. Later it became a luxury product for the wealthy, but by the 18th century it was widely appreciated across all social classes.
☕ The rivalry with coffee continues to this day. Coffee still leads, but about 70 % of the Dutch population now considers themselves tea drinkers.
💡 Tips for the Tea Drinker
1️⃣ Use good, soft water — preferably filtered or low in lime. That’s the secret behind every good cup of tea.
2️⃣ For black tea: let it steep for only 3–4 minutes in just-boiled water, ideally in a tea infuser that gives the leaves room to move.
3️⃣ For green tea: use slightly cooler water, between 70 and 85 °C, depending on the variety.
4️⃣ Herbal tea isn’t a protected term — most are harmless, but so-called slimming teas are best avoided.
5️⃣ Look for fair-trade and certified organic labels — otherwise, pesticide levels can be shockingly high.
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