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Unsung hero

August 29, 2018 / / 2 Comments

We all know about Robert Fortune and the British East India Company (for a really small summary, you can look there) in the spreading of tea from China to India (I will not go on the topic about the different Camellia sinensis varieties and their origins).

We all know that he went through a lot of efforts to find the tea bushes, to bring them to the coast, to ship them to India and then to Darjeeling.

I say through a lot of efforts as even at that time, sailors, warehousemen, customs officials… (but not botanists or should I say not all of them) knew few things or cared not about the way to take care of plants, seeds, resulting in heavy losses like the ones suffered by the first delivery Robert Fortune made as of the 10,000 seeds sent 100% had rotten and of the 13,000 young plants and only 80 were healthy enough to try to thrive in their new home.

And this result was achieved in spite of the use of up-to-date technology from Victorian times, the real unsung hero of the tea adventure: the Wardian case.

What is a Wardian case? It is a sealed container protecting the plants or the seeds that needed to be protected from salt, moisture… yet at the same time needed light, water… because it is a living being that can’t live without food, water, solar light. Through its glass top, it allowed the light to get in and the closed container allowed humidity to develop, humidity that gave the plants the water they need.

The name comes from its inventor Dr Ward, a physician interested in botanic. He made in 1829 an experiment with a glass bottle and some moths and seeds; the final result being that plants could live/grow (okay not like in wild nature but enough for other uses). Since at that time, the different European powers were all looking for ways to develop their colonies with new agricultural products (a trend that began the first time that someone somewhere saw a fruit and managed to bring it back alive to its own country), the Wardian case seemed perfectly suited to give an answer to this difficult problem: how to bring alive the seeds or plants.

Sometimes as with tea, this exportation of new agricultural products to a country was done through smuggling, because one country (China, France, the United Kingdom…) didn’t want to lose its competitive advantage by allowing someone else to produce the same products they had. This too is a really long story that can be seen in the history of the spice trade once the European managed to get into the Indian Ocean (for an example of this, you can look at the history of Mr Poivre (Pepper in French and yes, it was his true name))..

This case was not using any breaking technology but Dr Ward was the first one to reduce the scale of a greenhouse, freeing it from the need to add extra heating and water, as his case was self-regulated.

To be perfectly honest, Dr Ward might not have been the first to have the idea or to experiment with it (according to some a Scottish botanist might have created one around a decade earlier but I couldn’t find more than a tenuous reference) but he was the first to publish (if you want to protect your inventions, get a patent or publish) and he found an associate in Mr Loddiges, owner of a well-known plant nursery in London that traded with the whole world (it pays to have friends), which helped him spread the use of his invention with for example the shipping of plants from Australia to England in 1833 with almost all of them surviving.

This was what Robert Fortune used like so many others for sending his findings be them plants or seeds and an invention that was instrumental in bringing tea from China to India.

And after this explanation, you might wonder why the Wardian cases failed the first time. The explanation is simple: human curiosity. Custom officials eager to know what was so special about these cases did the only thing that shouldn’t have been done: break the seal and open the cases, breaking the process.

Understanding economics

July 30, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Sometimes I tend to ask myself some strange questions (strange for most people, not for me). One of them goes around the question of price (see there and there). I am most intrigued by how prices are made.

Sure every price depends on how much was needed to make the tea you are drinking with a chain of middlemen bringing it from the garden it was harvested to your cup. And every one of these people has its own costs and wants to make a living out of it. Then there is the price the customer is ready to pay based on the reputation of the tea, on the reputation of the company he is buying it from, on … But is there a way to do that? The answer is that there is always a way in economics (otherwise, it wouldn’t be fun) and it is called hedonic regression or hedonic demand theory.

Now you are probably looking at a dictionary trying to figure out what I might be talking about. And my guess is that you found the definition of hedonism but guess what? Things are well done and hedonism and the hedonic demand theory have something in common.

Hedonism is a school of thought that focuses on maximising net pleasure (pleasure minus pain) in everything. Following that, there is a whole different bunch of people and schools making some variations (more or less important) to this basis. The most famous being the Epicureanism, which is usually summed up by indulging in pleasure without any retinue, which is a misunderstanding while for true epicureans, the goal is to reach tranquillity and absence of pain.

But enough philosophy and let’s get back on topic and tea (although some might find that a tea well done is a way of following the steps of this school of thought but I won’t go any further alongside this road).

The hedonic demand theory builds on that and on the idea that you can divide everything in constituent characteristics and therefore get estimates of the value of each smaller part in the overall price. This is done for real estate economics (among other things) where a good/house is made of different attributes (number of bedrooms, distance to the city centre, size of the land…), for each one which a price or an elasticity (the way one variable responds when another one changes, for example when price go up or down) are looked after. Once the information is compiled, it can be used to compare prices or to create a price index and compare the evolution over time.

You are probably going to wonder where this will lead us but you will have to wait a little more. While I was browsing on the topic of tea and this hedonic price function, I stumbled upon an article upon something that is not tea but that is more akin to it than the real estate economics: wines from Champagne. I found out that in 1998, someone analysed and published such an analysis (for the complete reference: Gergaud Olivier. Estimation d’une fonction de prix hédonistiques pour le vin de Champagne. In: Économie & prévision, n°136, 1998-5. pp. 93-105, http://www.persee.fr/doc/ecop_0249-4744_1998_num_136_5_5940). What I found in here was something that I think can be used for tea too, a complete method about how to gather data and calculate everything to find out whether or not such a function could be made for tea and lastly a kind of value-for-money equation.

From what I read, it will be quite a challenge both for the gathering of data and the mathematical skills behind it.

I also think that like for the wines of Champagne, a choice will have to be made regarding a peculiar geographical area and type of tea (I think that flavoured teas are out of the scope of such an analysis). Even with such a smaller area, the gathering of prices and the qualitative analysis over “long” periods of time will be a difficulty. By long, I mean the longest possible as with everything in data, the longer the period of observation, the better the interpretation and thus the capacity to find correlation, function and so on.

What do you think? Is there an interest in such an analysis? Would it be worth the time investment?

And my title? It is a quote by an American economist and economics professor. The full quote is Economics is everywhere, and understanding economics can help you make better decisions and lead a happier life. Something I find well in line with the ideas of hedonism.

Problems are not the problem

June 30, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I am sure this title puzzles you and furthermore, I can also say that there is a problem going on in the tea world or I could say that there is a big one.

You can relax since the first rule of dumb if you want to be read is that you need to begin with something dramatic to catch the eye and the attention of the reader-to-be. So allow me to use this artifice for a couple of lines in order to get your attention.

Now that I have it, I can begin with the « problem » that I have identified or should I say the problems as I have identified two of them but feel free to add more of them in the comments and I will see if I can add them to my list or write about them later on.

And no, don’t worry, they are far less dramatic than the climate change (that might turn into a real problem for the tea world by reshuffling the cards about the production places) or anything big like this but more with things from our everyday life, things that everyone has probably experienced one day or another.

The first one is linked to the way we buy our hot drinks. As you might have noticed, you pay more for a tea than for a coffee. Since there is not much labour involved or any device to pour tea into your cup (and since there is more labour and device involved in coffee-making, the only difference I see to explain it is that the price is based on the quantity of hot water they put into the cup they serve you.

The next step is logical as we all think that we want the right amount of good for the price we paid. This is when we, as customers, face our biggest challenge (and this holds true for tea bags or tea in leaves): the amount of tea in our cup/pot… because of the idea I just explained, we usually drink a bitter tea.

However apart from what economical wisdom says, I still think (like I once wrote) that the main basis for this lies in the lack of education from the people owning and operating tea rooms, restaurants.. and from those drinking tea. There are 3 things that matter for a good tea (apart from the water and the type of tea you have): the water temperature, the amount of tea and the time you leave it into the water.

Usually those that put too much leaves or bags in tea are also leaving it too long and/or at higher temperature, leaving something that is bitter (hence sometimes the sweeteners like milk or sugar but this is something that happens with coffee too).

I think that to enhance customer experience and therefore their likeness to come back and consume more, waiters should be tea educated. It is in the interest of everyone to do so and it could be a good move for the companies providing teas to bars and restaurants, allowing them to :

  1. improve the quality of their products,

  2. decrease the amount of tea per cup.

Both ideas would allow for an increase in quality and either in margin or prices; a win-win situation, no?

The second problem is a trend that comes from the USA, is spreading slowly in Europe and is a bit antonymous with the way people thinks tea should be drunk.

To be clearer, usually, tea is seen as something that needs time, to prepare it and to drink it because it is a social event. However, today, people are more and more in a hurry, always trying to make the most of their time (because time is money) and end up taking hot drinks either in plastic or paper cups and drinking them on the move almost mechanically without giving any thoughts to what is being drunk or to the people around them (and tea is all about sharing with people).

This leads to a certain unity in the way these hot drinks are made and usually not for the better as they are made quickly for use in these disposable cups by people that only have time to burn themselves if they drink too quickly or to taste a cold beverage because they waited too long in the bus or train before they could have the needed space to drink.

With such a predictable use, why would most people want to make a quality product? Since competition is based on price and margins, the answer is simple: no one. Price being more or less the same between the different tea “to go” places, the only way to stay into the business is to make something drinkable, something that will let people feel they have something for the money they paid (see my previous point) and something that doesn’t cost that much so that the margins and profits can be good enough to pay for all these places in urban settings, where the renting prices are usually quite high.

To break away from this infernal spiral, the solution is not unique but in a mix of different small measures:

  1. see above as the quality and training are always a premium for food-stuff and tea is a kind of it,

  2. improve the recyclable aspect of these cups and communicate about these new and better cups,

  3. find a solution to improve the quality of the recipient: use glass since it can be used forever, china bone, 3D printing to make lighter cups that keep things warm while doesn’t changing the taste,

  4. change the layout of the stores to encourage people to talk to each other and to stay a little longer in stores.

  5. …

This is a move towards a different experience, one that might make people eager to spend 5-10 minutes in the stores rather than hitting the road again. After all, I am sure they/we all have these 5-10 minutes to spare to enjoy a good cup of tea on our way; the question is whether or not we are ready to take them.

As long as it is good

May 28, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I often hear or read that tea people are a bit snobbish, asking for loose leaf teas, for specific blends, for specific water quality or temperature.

But what do people mean by that? And is it true?

According to the dictionary, snob is :

1. a maker of shoe,

2. one who blatantly imitates, fawningly admires, or vulgarly seeks association with those regarded as social superiors,

3.

a : one who tends to rebuff, avoid, or ignore those regarded as inferior;

b : one who has an offensive air of superiority in matters of knowledge or taste.

 

The first option is rather interesting and funny (from a tea point of view) but obviously out of place.

What about the other definitions?

The imitation of upper social classes might have been true sooner in certain parts of Europe or in areas under European influence with nice bone China sets and trying to stick with what the aristocracy does like drinking tea only at 5 o’clock

But first, people drank and drink tea outside of this area (otherwise, tea wouldn’t be the second most consumed beverage in the world) and second, this might have been true but when I look around nowadays, I see people drinking at different times, trying different blends or pure leaf teas, having tea to go, sitting with friends, drinking alone…

A Reading of Molière or Reading in a salon by Jean-François de Troy

Tea is still sometimes part of a social ritual like the famous 5 o’clock tea that could be the English answer to the French salons (the gathering of people under the roof of someone more prominent or inspiring to discuss about literature and other cultural things (or let’s face it, gossips)), but I don’t feel drinking tea is only that.

 

Do tea drinkers rebuff, avoid or ignore those regarded as inferior?

I have two problems with this definition. First, it describes something that almost everyone does. Human beings tend to stick together and for doing this, define “us” and “them”. This has been going on since the beginning (just look at a history book to see it).

Second, who would be the inferior ones? People drinking other drinks, people with different drink habits? This seems to me completely ridiculous as I know a lot of people who drink several drinks along the day and I can’t think of them in any way as being superior or inferior to me.

This point goes along the last definition.

I mean we are humans and even if I just wrote that I can’t think of people not drinking tea or not like I do as being superior or inferior to me, we are prone to think of ourselves as right as opposed to the others being wrong. Doesn’t this ring a bell in you?

Yes we do this all the time. Sometimes we are not even aware of judging the others but we do it all the time (just look for those driving, how we all think we are the best drivers around and how other people are just bad drivers).

However, even if we think we are doing it right or are very specific about what kind of tea leaves should be used in our drinks, why should we be offensive to those that think in a different way? Beauty comes of diversity and tea drinking is in no way a religion with a strict dogma.

We might want to have our tea made in a certain way because it is better (for us) this way and we, the so-called “tea experts” might shiver hearing someone saying “tea is always bitter” simply because he or she let it for too long in a water that was too hot but having a sense of superiority will not change anything. We should try to explain things (like not so long and not so hot) and let people make their own choices.

And for those curious about it, the title of this post is a part of a quote by Jerry Greenfield (the Jerry of Ben&Jerry): “I eat many different ice creams. I’m not an ice cream snob, although I do think Ben & Jerry’s is the best. But I’m happy to eat anybody’s ice cream, really. As long as it’s good.”

And guess what? I think it can be applied to teas, so avoid being a snob and let people drink tea how they want, as long as they find their tea a good one.

In space, no one can hear you scream

April 28, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I was reading a sci-fi book (not linked to the title of this post as it would be too obvious and by know I think you know me) set in a very far-away future where mankind is no more and what remains are a full nation of huge spaceships that have to deal with an extraterrestrial threat. Don’t worry, I won’t bother you with a summary of the two books and their more than 1,000 pages but get straight to the point (without teasing just in case) and to the tea.

At the end of it, two of the main protagonists are watching something happening above them and trying to figure out what to do and one of them drinks a liquid just before this small dialogue takes place (the translation being mine and only mine, all mistakes are also mine):

  • This infusion has a strange taste to it.

  • This is no “infusion”, it is tea. The drink of a civilisation that no longer is.

And then they keep on looking at the skies where a space battle is taking place and talking about what to do and what not to do.

Apart that I was delighted to see in a book I was reading someone thinking that tea would still be around in the future, which means that I am not the only one thinking about tea in the future (apart from a bunch of Stormtroopers), it made me think about a couple of things.

Even if there is no human around and probably because the protagonists were in a way created by human beings, they value the products of the different civilisations originating from Earth (or at least one of them and no it has nothing to do with the British Empire). This means that by saying “the drink of a civilisation that no longer is”, it puts tea above every other drink, giving it a quasi mythological status and enabling the two characters drinking it to access to a quasi “human being” status because they act like ones even though the last human disappeared a long time ago.

What I find even more interesting is that for the writer in the future (and we speak of thousands of years) and in spite of the fading memories of everything linked to human cultures, drinking tea is still linked to moments of calm, meditation… I know this is a personal view but it reminded me of the legends of Shennong or Bodhidharma discovering tea while or after meditating. Perhaps the author knew about this because one of his two protagonists, the older one, the one that knows abou tea was at some point in its history the gardener of a stone garden, a bit like the zen gardens, the ones that are designed to imitate the essence of nature and not nature itself in order to help the gardeners to meditate on life.

And the last interesting thought I had is that tea is indeed a civilized drink as it is used to foster conversation and to do it in a civilized way while contemplating a space battle with thousand of deaths. Does it give the people drinking it the capacity to absorb themselves into something else or does it have something to do with being drunk slowly over and over, which makes people more likely to try to do something like small talk while waiting for the next gulp? Does it bring people to another plan of existence that makes them more gentle and likely to talk?

Because of what I wrote before and the thoughts these few lines brought to my mind, I couldn’t picture any other drink that could do the trick but perhaps I am biased. So tell me if you share this analysis or if I am completely wrong.

But beware of who or what might be roaming in space and in the far away future as “in space, no one can hear you scream” and I highly doubt tea will be able to save you.

I want it all

March 21, 2018 / / 2 Comments

After a small hiatus, I am back and I must confess something: I am a consumer and a modern one, which means I want everything, that I want it all and I want it now.

No don’t bother to send me over to any video website with “I want it all” from Queen, this is not what I want right now. Mostly because I prefer the album Queen II with the story you can imagine in it or some specific songs… but enough of digressing and back on topic.

As I said, I want it all and I want it now. I have been well educated by all these companies selling products on the Internet, you know the ones with all the products you ever wanted, including this old book/CD… that you wanted and that were published in 1985 or something like that. Of course, they have everything because their strategy is focusing on selling a small number of every product instead of a “huge” number of best-sellers; they make more money by doing the first than the second and this for several reasons, among them their capacity to optimise infrastructure both physical and virtual. This strategy is called the long-tail.

As is perhaps obvious from my blog, I am a tea consumer and as most of you (or so I guess), I have my preferred teas, those that I am always eager to have or to drink (which doesn’t mean that I don’t experiment with new ones from other companies or sources) and they can be nature or aromatic. My main problem is that over the years, I have developed a selection of teas that I like that are from different companies and in spite of most of them copying one another, there are still some unique blends or gardens that can only be found by one company.

This is where problems might begin as there are two options: first, the targeted teas are only available at a physical shop, which might be in the neighbourhood or not ; the second option is that they are also available on the Internet on the website of a company selling them. However (and I understand why), the shipping costs to the customer are high, even more when buying only one tea. As I said, I understand why there are high because most companies are trying to protect the products they are selling from harm, they are also using nice ta boxes (which are heavier) or offering you the possibility to follow your shipment… but understanding why doesn’t mean approving.

In an ideal world, these companies (both small or big) could work together through a website focusing on the long-tail approach, with a lot of different teas from different companies, enabling both a big choice and controlled shipping costs thanks to their expertise in logistics and their size, which would allow them to negotiate in better terms with delivery companies.

However, even if it might seem a good idea on paper, it is probably a bad one in real life for at least 3 different reasons.

First of all, as I said earlier in this post, companies are quickly copying one another and bringing them all together on one distribution platform would mean increasing this as companies would be able to see what sells best and try to bring it into their portfolio. This would lead to less innovation and more conservatism for most companies.

Second, tea is a fresh product, one with a date of consumption (even if it varies depending on the tea and the way it is stored), which means you can’t store it forever and expect to sell it in a drinkable way, unlike a book or a CD or most products.

Third but not least, there is the problem of the bargaining power between the platform and the tea companies. Most tea companies are small or let’s say smaller than the distribution platform would be. Why does it matter? Because when you are small and are facing a giant, you don’t have much bargaining power and thus in the negotiations for the split of the benefits, you have less weight and are more likely to lose it, making your company lose money or earn less.

This is why although I, as a consumer, would probably want it and like it, I can’t recommend on the long run the creation of a big centralised webstore with every or most teas as it would do more harm than good.

I feel compelled to end this post by a disclosure note. Don’t worry, I am not the customer that I depicted; after all I drink tea and I keep calm. Although sometimes…

Every luxury must be paid for

January 24, 2018 / / 2 Comments

I have what I would call a professional bias: when I read about prices from old times, I think about how much it would be today. You might not know it but for different reasons, prices are changing over time meaning that you can buy more or less goods for the same amount of money. This is what is called inflation.
This has been going on since the human kind invented money (don’t worry, I won’t bother you much longer with details) and it explains why the real value (real in economics) is different than the nominal one (again in economics).

When I read thanks to Twitter that the oldest reference to tea in Britain had been found in a document from 1644 I was really curious but when I read that there was a price for a cup of green tea from China, I was even more.
4 shillings for a cup… How much would this amount of money be worth now? And how would it compare to our standards?

As I explained earlier, to know that, you just need to find either a table with all the figures of the yearly inflation from 1644 to nowadays or one showing the real value of the money between those two time periods.
The problem being that statistical institutes weren’t around so early and the goods making the price basket weren’t the same now and them. Both things making it quite complex to make extrapolations.
Luckily, I found two papers dealing with this topic in Great Britain. The first is Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables, Compared with Builders’ Wage Rate by E.H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins in Economica, New Series, Vol. 23, No. 92 (Nov. 1956) and the second is Inflation: the value of the pound 1750-2011, Research paper 12/31 from the House of Commons Library (29 May 2012).
With these two papers combined, it should be possible to go as far as 1244 and back to 2011. I said “should” because the method used in both papers is not really the same and the second one uses also several methods to give the members of the House of Commons an approach and a range for the oldest inflation rates.

So by mere calculation (those that followed until now will tell me that there is a gap in my years but converting pounds from 2011 to 2017 is easily done thanks to some tools found on the Internet), the 4 shillings of 1644 become between 37.22 and 46.50 pounds of today or between 42.20 and 52.72 euros.

To give you (and me) an idea, I looked at prices for 100 grams of green tea of China and I found a price between 5 and 68 euros depending on different things, which for a cup of tea with let’s say 3 grams of tea in it would make a price between 0.15 and 2.04 euros.
Even if the price would probably be a little higher (people have to make a living out of it) and if there might be a few mistakes in the conversion to real value (something quite understandable due to lapse of time under consideration), the difference shows us that in 1644, tea was really a luxurious product and that drinking a cup of tea was the sign of belonging to the upper class.

I am glad I don’t live back in these times as I wouldn’t be able to indulge in tea drinking and that would be really sad.

(Go West) We will do just fine

December 23, 2017 / / 10 Comments

I don’t know if you see a pattern between the title of this post quoting the Pet Shop Boys, my previous post where I did a little (and probably not that good) Haiku with a reference to map and tea and what you will find in this post but I hope that by the end of your reading you will.

As the idiom goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. This is what had bothered me when I looked at the FAO data, splitting the world of tea into two categories: the Old World and the New one. If you don’t remember this post, its conclusions were that unlike in the wine industry, there was not a big reversal of production in the tea producing countries (but perhaps interesting developments going on in terms of diversity of producers).

But let’s get back to a picture is worth a thousand words. I am lucky to have at work two people working on our Geographical Information System, which for those who don’t know about it is according to Wikipedia “any information system that integrates, stores, edits, analyzes, shares, and displays geographic information. GIS applications are tools that allow users to create interactive queries (user-created searches), analyze spatial information, edit data in maps, and present the results of all these operations.”

Those two people were friendly enough to help me to refine my needs and helped me find a way to present to you a visual representation of these data.

So you will find below a representation by decade from the 1960s to the 2010s (with the data ending in the year 2014) of the tea producing countries in the world and for each an average of the yearly production of each country during these 10 years. Even if it doesn’t always mean much, I thought it was as good as anything else to represent how much each country weights in the tea world. For more details, just click on the link below each map.

Tea producing countries from 1961 to 1969

Tea producing countries in the 1970s

Tea producing countries in the 1980s

Tea producing countries in the 1990s

Tea producing countries in the 2000s

Tea producing countries between 2010 and 2014

 

What can we learn?

First, that there are over these 50 years only a few new producing countries. I am still undecided whether or not this is true or linked to a problem in the way the FAO collects its data. If you see any country missing on the maps, do tell me and I will look further on.

Second, we can now visually see the rise and decline of some countries in terms of their yearly average production through each decade, something which might be of interest for later investigations.

Third and most important for me, we can now see the 3 main producing blocks in terms of number of countries located on three different continents (the South of Asia, the centre of Africa and South America from North to South) with some more exotic spots around them. It might be obvious to some of you but although I had all the data available, I had no idea that so many countries produced tea until I saw it

And what are your thoughts on these maps? Did they bring anything to you?

Were you born on the sun?

October 28, 2017 / / 0 Comments

I could have gone with The Times They Are a-Changin’ from Bob Dylan but quoting a Nobel Prize is a bit too much out of my league, so I had to get back to a good old classic, Good Morning Vietnam.

I read just a few days ago in The Washington Post (no I don’t read this journal, I just happened to find out about it thanks to the powerful tool that is a collection of blogs on various topics) that scientists were working to adapt coffee plants for climate changes and other woes. Their efforts go mainly towards the creation of new “species” (something that has been done for centuries) to make up for the limited gene pool as only two species of coffee have been used for human consumption. However, some people say that it might be too late for all the places where coffee is being produced.

This article made me think a little about our (I guess so if you are reading my blog or at least my) favourite drink and what might happen with it. I remembered having found some research reports on some really specific or country related problems, like the future for the Kenyan tea industry.

The most obvious effects of climate change are changes in temperatures, changes in rainfall and a certain unpredictability of the weather (with the famous “there are no seasons anymore”).

For now, perhaps because of the high differences between the different producing countries, I couldn’t find any consensus on the main consequences with things ranging from “we will manage to get through it without any problems” (which seems a bit unbelievable) to “it could be a complete disaster and force us to stop or to reallocate the production of tea in other areas or in other countries.”

The main reason behind these differences is that the producing countries are located in a rather wide set of conditions and on different continents, with each one facing different potential weather problems. Just to illustrate, let me remind you that tea grows mainly in tropical and subtropical climates but some varieties tolerate marine climates. The tea plants require at least 127 cm of rainfall a year and prefer acidic soils but this is not absolutely vital. You can find them in elevations up to 1.500 meters above sea level but also on much lower grounds.

There are however some things that are agreed by most.

First, the climate change is likely to be changing the taste of tea because warmer seasons and less water are interacting with the chemical components of the tea leaves, making them react in other ways as they would “normally” do. This has already been documented in China (in the province of Yunnan) and in Japan.

A second impact that makes consensus is that changing weather hurts the production but in the future who knows what might come up and who knows how fast the changes will go on.

On a positive sidenote, tea bushes requires less water than coffee plants (I read from 1 to 10), which might be of some help.

There are other indications that perhaps the geographical locations of some tea gardens are isolating them creating a micro-climate that could mitigate the effects of the climate change, because of the mountain slopes, the winds and the mist are giving on a daily basis water to the bushes and could make it up for the less frequent and abundant rain.

Mist at a tea garden at Darjeeling by Joydeep

Other solutions advocated are to go for organic approaches with natural techniques to mitigate the impacts, things like having the ground covered by natural nutriments…

For me, at this moment in time and with no certitude regarding any potential long impact, there are three ways :

– trying to improve the plants through research,

– trying to mitigate the effects either through specific methods (better irrigation systems when possible) or through more general ones (like covering the ground),

– migrating the production.

The most likely road is a mix of the three depending on the interest of all the people involved in the tea industry, of the readiness of the consumer to pay more and on the progress of these climate changes.

This means that we (tea drinkers) like a lot of people are likely to see a radical change in the way we have to deal with our favourite drink.

We need to know that and be ready to face changes in the tea industry and support them or try to find better ways for The Times They Are a-Changin’.