For decades, to be a tea lover in the US was to wander in a wasteland. Even as Americans discovered fine coffee, with specialty coffee shops springing up across the country and debates over the merits of pour-over and cold brew, tea remained a largely pedestrian choice among mass-produced brands.
“When I was growing up, tea was drunk by old people and sick people,” said Andrew Weil, 72, a physician and director of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine. “It was Lipton and it was terrible.”
No longer. Online tea purveyors and tea salons offer a dazzling range of loose leaf teas from around the world, sponsor tea preparation classes and sell artisan teaware. Chain-store tea salons are appearing across the country: In 2012, Starbucks bought Teavana, which has 301 stores in the US.
Illustration: June Hsu
The Tea Association of the USA reported that retail sales of tea have soared from just under US$2 billion in 1990 to nearly US$11 billion last year, and a broad array of brands and styles can be found on supermarket shelves.
In New York, high-end restaurants such as Eleven Madison Park, Atera, Blanca and Betony have extensive tea lists, often with tasting notes to match. Matcha in particular is in vogue; the frothy powdered Japanese green tea is featured at shops like MatchaBar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Tea’s partisans cherish its complexity of flavors; the calming, often meditative, nature of tea drinking; and the subtleties of tea growing, processing and aging. Many can remember the moment they realized drinking tea could go beyond black tea bags.
Weil was 17 when he visited Japan in 1959 and discovered sencha and matcha. For Christopher Day, who runs the tea program at Eleven Madison Park, the epiphany was a sip of rose tea in a Chinese apothecary on a back street in Philadelphia. And for Sebastian Beckwith, a tea importer, it came while shepherding tourists around the tea plantations of Bhutan and Sikkim when he served as an adventure travel guide.
For many restaurateurs in New York, the guide to these nuances has been Beckwith, who founded In Pursuit of Tea in 1999 and now supplies more than 180 restaurants, a number that he said has accelerated in the last year. “It does seem like there’s a tide changing,” he said.
Customers trust their palates more, he believes, and so they are asking for higher quality tea. Restaurants, in turn, are responding to the demand and to the competition: “Everyone else has better tea, so I better up my game,” as he put it.
Beckwith, an engaging, unpretentious and encyclopedic tea maven, presides over tea tastings in a spare, serene apartment and office in the Flatiron district. On one wall is an oak pharmacy chest with dozens of small drawers containing tea samples. On the other, a glass container of water supplies his bubbling teapot.
One recent morning, he set out the elements of a Chinese style of tea service known as gong fu cha: a slatted wooden tea tray to catch excess water and tea, a lidded dish called a gaiwan for steeping, a pitcher to hold the steeped tea, and a few small porcelain teacups. As he deftly poured, steeped, discarded and resteeped, he provided a guided tour of tea, describing how it is grown, picked, processed and tasted.
Beckwith set out an oolong, a partly oxidized tea prized by enthusiasts for its complexity of flavors. Picking up the steeped leaves, he pointed to bite marks. They are made, he explained, by a small green insect called a leafhopper. The bites expose that part of the leaf to air, changing its chemistry and giving the resulting tea a distinctive sweetness that has traces of honey.
In a side room, he set up five types of oolong, ranging in styles from lightly to more fully oxidized or more aggressively roasted, steeping them multiple times. At each stage, the smell of the leaves and the taste of the tea changed, much as wine changes character as it sits in the glass, exposed to air.
In fact, said Richard Betts, a master wine sommelier and friend of Beckwith’s, there are striking similarities between fine tea and wine. Just as wine varies depending on where, how and when the grapes are grown and processed, tea varies with elevation, leaf size, soil quality, origin and age. Even the leafhoppers in oolong have analogues to botrytis, the fungus linked to great Bordeaux. There are tea collectors every bit as avid to stock their equivalent of cellars; for example, aged pu-erh, a tea prized by connoisseurs, can sell for US$45,000 a cake.
As with wine, it is easy to spend hours tasting and talking. When Day first met Beckwith, who supplies Eleven Madison Park with many of its teas, they drank samples until 2:30am.
At Eleven Madison, Day has adapted the same gong fu style of tea serving to the more formal and less leisurely demands of a restaurant. Its offers change with the season, with 32 types of tea served by the pot and five different teas available for tableside tastings for two people priced from US$26 to US$65.
Day began one of the earliest restaurant tea programs in New York City in 2002, while working at RM, with the chef Rick Moonen, and started the tea service nearly five years ago at Eleven Madison, where he is the dining room manager.
“Why is it that we as restaurant professionals spend so much time making sure every aspect of a meal is perfect and then at the end serve tea bags in a wooden box?” he said.
He has created the opposite experience with his tableside tastings, where a waiter wheels out a cart with the same basic equipment as Beckwith’s to present and prepare the teas. This spring, the restaurant offers three oolongs (“The height of the teamaker’s art,” in Day’s estimation, because of the way varying oxidation and roasting compress and layer the flavors), a black tea and a 2003 aged pu-erh.
However, there are as many settings to enjoy great tea in New York as there are tea varieties. Far from the soaring ceilings of Eleven Madison Park, a modest storefront on Flushing’s Main Street houses Fang Gourmet Tea, long a gathering spot for Chinese tea aficionados.
Fang, run by a Taiwanese family whose expertise spans generations, offers tastes of more than 70 teas at US$5 to US$10 for several steepings, and stocks dozens more. Pierra Cheung, gentle and authoritative, pours tea from a gaiwan in a room decorated with Chinese paintings and glass cases of prized teaware that can run hundreds of dollars (or, in some cases, thousands).
And in Williamsburg, next door to the Vice Media offices, MatchaBar dispenses everything from hot and iced classic matcha whipped frothy with an electric blender to “signature” drinks like Fuji Apple Ginger Matcha and Cinnamon Hemp Latte. With a Brooklyn-like fealty to origin, it sources its matcha directly from an independent family farm in Nishio, Japan.
The shop was packed one recent Sunday with a young crowd, drinking tea and hanging out. Eli Libman, its chief financial officer, who was doing double duty as a server, said that Vice staff members are frequent customers, drawn by matcha’s effective but slower-acting burst of caffeine. (“They work really long hours,” he said).
The caffeine in matcha is released more slowly into the bloodstream, allowing for a calmer energy boost, said Graham Fortgang, the bar’s 23-year-old co-founder. “The millennial generation is really looking for an alternative to a cup of coffee, espresso or energy drinks,” he said. “It’s their morning fuel.”
Back in Manhattan, Ippodo, a branch of a renowned Kyoto tea exporter, offers a serene alternative. Here a Japanese-speaking server whisks the matcha in pottery bowls with a chasen, or bamboo whisk, much as the Japanese have done for centuries for the formal tea ceremony.
It is a long way from the elderly tea drinkers of Weil’s childhood. “There is a tea culture developing in America,” he said, “that was never here before.”
How the experts brew tea
Tea can be prepared in several styles, ranging from the formal Japanese tea ceremony to the Chinese method of steeping in a gaiwan vessel and pouring into small cups. Matcha is typically served in bowls, and in a tea ceremony, the server follows a prescribed order, carefully measuring the powdered tea into a heated bowl, whipping it with a bamboo whisk, wiping the lip of the bowl with a cloth and offering the bowl to a guest. For regular green tea leaves, the Japanese often use a kyusu, a one-handled teapot with a built-in strainer.
The tea importer Sebastian Beckwith said tea steeping varies according to water temperature, the amount of leaves and infusion time. Western tea service tends to use less tea and steep longer, while the Chinese use more tea and steep very quickly, as little as 15 to 30 seconds.
The biggest mistake made in serving tea is water temperature, said Christopher Day, who runs the tea program at Eleven Madison Park. Water that is too hot can burn the leaves and spoil the flavor. Avoid putting tea in balls or infusers, since they are too small to allow the tea leaves to expand and release their full flavor.
For iced tea, Beckwith recommends cold infusion, rather than the more common method of heating and then cooling the tea. Take one tablespoon of loose tea of any kind, put it in a pitcher of cold water, then leave it in the refrigerator overnight.
All tea is made from the Camellia sinensis plant, which originated in China and India. There are different varieties of tea plants, but the processing determines the type of tea. As soon as tea is picked, the leaf starts to oxidize, releasing essential oils and gradually turning brown.
White tea is picked and air-dried, with minimal processing and the lowest level of caffeine. It is often grown in the Chinese provinces Yunnan and Fujian. The water used to brew the tea should be around 82oC.
Green tea is picked, then quickly heated (in China, tossed into a wok) to stop oxidation. The best-known green teas are from Japan and China. These teas require the lowest brewing temperatures, about 77oC to 85oC.
Matcha is powdered green tea whipped in hot water. Because the tea is swallowed directly, rather than steeped and discarded, it has higher levels of caffeine than other green tea.
Oolong is partly oxidized and often deliberately bruised to release oils and flavor, then heated to set the taste. Oolongs range in taste from green styles to more heavily roasted styles. Brew them at 82oC to 99oC.
Black tea leaves, the style best known to the West, are completely oxidized. Harvested leaves are spread out and allowed to wilt, then rolled, which exposes oils to the air. Then they are fired. Brew them near boiling, 99oC.
Pu-erh is grown in China’s Yunnan province from a large leaf variety. According to Beckwith, it originated when tribal people transported the tea to the town of Pu-erh, typically a week’s journey. During that time, the moisture in the leaves produced bacteria that altered the flavor. Pu-erh is typically produced in two styles, raw (sheng) and cooked (shu), and is often aged to mellow its flavor. It can be pressed into cakes or rolled in bamboo. Pu-erh should be brewed at a rolling boil, 100oC.
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