What they are trying to change is the race to the bottom: less money for more tea as foreign buyers pay ever lower prices to shore up their profits in a declining market. As we in the West drink less bagged black tea, the only solution the big players have come up with is to pay their producers less.
The impact on places like Nepal, India, Sri Lanka and East Africa has been devastating and looks set to become ever bleaker. When the cost of production rises above the prices the big brokers are willing to pay, it’s easy to see that there is little future for tea gardens. The future looks grim for all but the giant agri-businesses. Unless they try something different. The bold change is to focus on making tea not cheaper but better, and seeking a better price for that tea from a new market. A fair trade: a good price for good tea.
Morris’s wife welcomed us into their home. Paul and Bachan shared one room and I was given another. These were the children’s bedrooms that they gave up for us, and the family slept all together in the parents’ room.
Mrs Orchard had no English, or very little, their daughter was too shy and their little boy too little. But all seven of us communicated happily around the simple feast of each meal. At breakfast, lunch and dinner the table was spread with vegetable curries and rice. Beside these dishes was a vast array of chutneys – sweet, bitter, spicy, tangy – each one intense and unique. A small spoonful of any one of them could transform each mouthful, giving infinite complexity to a simple dish. That table holds almost as much sense memory for me as the tasting room. Mrs Orchard and the two village girls who helped her were as gifted as many of the great chefs I have had the good fortune to work with.
She wore gorgeous saris, with a scarf artfully draped across her chest and shoulders in the Nepalese style, even when cooking, and never besmirched the bright fabric. There is a brilliant, inventive chef in San Francisco called Corey Lee. He has a Michelin three-star restaurant called Benu and is famed not just for his exquisite food but for a spotless kitchen and the whitest of chef’s whites. He serves Morris’s tea. One day I would love for those two to meet – Cory in his chef’s whites and Mrs Orchard in her sari – and to watch them cook together, exploring the possibilities of each other’s larders, equally unsullied.
A short walk down from the manager’s bungalow sits the tea factory with its ancient brass rolling machines, long, shady withering rooms and wood-fired drying machines. The view from the factory is one of the most stunning I’ve ever encountered. In mere moments it can disappear altogether behind a thick curtain of cloud, so that you can only see a few metres in front of you. And then, just as suddenly, the clouds draw back and the deep valleys and high slopes are revealed, densely green. At night, the darkness is spotted with needles of light from homes scattered sparsely across the fertile foothills of the Himalayas.
The tea fields perch on the ridges of the hills and flow steeply down. This is a tiny farm of just a few precious acres, producing only a few hundred kilograms a year. When you think that a large industrial farm will churn out millions of kilograms a week and thousands of tonnes a year, you get an idea of the scale. Morris walked us around the garden. It was early April and we wandered through the bushes admiring the spring leaf. The bushes were bright and the leaves shone in the wet air. A mature summer tea leaf is hard and shiny like an enamel-lidded pill box or a beetle’s glossy back, but the spring tea leaves are pea green and tender, sometimes edged in pink or red. Breaking and chewing the soft stems is like plucking fresh grass in an English field, but with a flavour a thousand times more intense.
During that first trip to Jun Chiyabari, as Paul clicked away, recording our adventure, some of my best times were spent with the pluckers, studying their techniques, understanding the leaf they collected and the leaf they left unplucked. That most extraordinary tea requires very specialised, selective harvesting. It was equally fascinating spending time with the women and men inside the tea factory, watching them craft and then sort the finished leaf with delicate care and unfathomable patience. I tested my fathom when I tried to join them in hand-rolling.
Firstly, they were horrified by my nail varnish and rings; a good tea lady has short, clean, unadorned nails. My varnish was that weird stuff that’s meant to last two weeks and needs to be professionally removed. If you’re going to have your hands photographed, it makes sense, but I couldn’t get it off to make tea, which didn’t make a good impression on the factory ladies. They had me remove my rings and they admired them politely, but I could tell they weren’t all that impressed. Each lady had the most gorgeous jewellery adorning her ears and neck, all of it gold and most of it studded with precious stones. Their wealth is always with them, there to be enjoyed.
They covered my hair with a scarf and I sat cross-legged on the floor between two of the most experienced women. This is considered entirely a woman’s job in Nepal. A man doesn’t have the patience or the delicacy to roll between his hands; they’re not soft enough. In China, Japan and Taiwan, contrarily, it’s generally a man’s job to roll; a woman is considered less skilled.
They showed me how to take a handful of leaf and enclose it between my two cupped palms, my right hand above my left. Using a clockwise motion, with my right fingers gripping the back of my left hand, I was to roll the leaves gently but firmly. With each movement the leaves turn and, ideally, each leaf is gently crushed. The oils are exposed to the air and so begins the oxidisation process. The subtleties of the movement and how hard to press are incredibly nuanced and change according to which pick the leaf has come from, in which field and from which harvest, and on the flavours Morris and his team are trying to promote.
Needless to say, my efforts were very poor. Whenever I held out my hand to show my latest attempt, the women would smile sadly, shake their heads, take the leaf from me and carefully re-roll my handful. As we worked, I saw them glancing up at me quizzically, but they relaxed as time passed. I kept my head bent low in concentration, leaving behind all thoughts of the office in London and the constant bellow of my brain. I’m not saying I became an expert roller in one afternoon, but I got a feel for the marvellous intricacy of the work and some of my rolled leaves were added to the communal pile.
I worked like that with the ladies in Anxi in China as they sorted the finest Iron Goddess of Mercy oolong. I sat one morning watching them sort the finished tea and they allowed me to join them. Any over-roasted leaf they removed, along with anything too pale or any stray leaves, so that just the bright emerald leaves in perfect rolls made it into the final tea. The grading and price of Iron Goddess of Mercy oolong is partly based on that final, crucial sort. It took me several hours to understand even the barest rudiments of the sorting criteria. Eventually I felt brave enough to take a careful handful of leaf and sort it myself. I then handed it to the woman next to me and she re-sorted and gave me back the discards. In this way I learnt, handful by small handful.
At Jun Chiyabari I also sat with the ladies who sorted the finished leaf of the machine-rolled tea. Please don’t think of the machine roller as something with electronic circuits and flashing lights; this was a solid, iron, Victorian stalwart with two ridged brass plates. This type of orthodox tea is described as hand-crafted because it is made in small batches, by one man or woman with precise skill, like a carpenter with his chisel or a potter at his wheel.
Before our trip to Jun Chiyabari, Paul had never tasted black tea that he really loved. He’s more of a green tea man. I could tell he was nervous the morning he shot me tasting and selecting the teas to buy. When you show your friend your favourite painting in a gallery, or play them your favourite music or watch your favourite film together and they find no pleasure in what delights you, it’s a blow. It can be a fatal blow. And it wasn’t just me he might disappoint, but more crucially Morris.
I’d forgive you for reading about tea and not being moved. But if I made you a cup of Jun Chiyabari tea, I’d be as confident as Morris Orchard that it would elicit a very positive response. Paul kept his eyes lowered as w
e watched him take his first tentative sips. He would make a very poor gambler. He just looked straight up at Morris and smiled with his eyes alight. You could see the relief and pleasure all over his face. Morris laughed.
CHAPTER 12
TAITUNG, TAIWAN
Leaving the pressure of choice aside, I love not knowing what I’m going to get, the thrill of surprise and tasting something for the first time. I often have to pick dishes from a menu written in Chinese entirely at random. I just point at a line of characters and hope for the best. There is no expectation at all. Some trepidation, but mostly it is a huge delight.
At Taipei station I stopped to buy some lunch before boarding the train. I picked the stall at random, or rather the ladies running it chose me and pulled me over. They selected bao (fluffy white buns) for me, nodding reassuringly and plucking the notes from my wallet. The buns turned out to be hot and filled with shreds of sticky, spicy pork.
The train to Taitung, four and a half hours north of Taipei, had no Wi-Fi. Sadly, we ran into darkness about halfway there, so I missed the view. I sat looking at the other passengers in the reflection of the dark glass, listening to Bach’s Cello Suites, feeling like a teenager, with my elation building. I had little idea of where I was going or what to expect at the other end. I got off the train in the pitch black. David, the man I had been emailing and had arranged to meet, was not there. I left the platform, left the station and was out in the street, looking around under the hiss of the sole lamp post. The air was hot and thick with swirling insects. The small crowd thinned as people disappeared into waiting cars. I had no clue what would happen next. I was almost disappointed when a young man shouted my name.
David drove me to a hotel close to the farm. I was the only guest. I was shown to a little room on its own, made of plywood, like a large garden shed with air-conditioning. I wandered through the patchy garden to the little hut which was a sort of reception, kitchen and bar, where two men were sitting in the darkness drinking beer. When I handed my phone to the young man who spoke no English, he understood and put the Wi-Fi password in, then pointed to the ground at our feet. I came to understand that the only place the Wi-Fi worked was right there. In the dark, outside a hut in the middle of Taiwan somewhere, among swarms of mosquitoes and the smell of jasmine, emails surged onto the screen. I didn’t hang around long. The connection was slow, and as urgent as the messages might have been, I didn’t have any insect repellent, and those were ferocious organic farmland mosquitoes.
The next morning, I went to the hut to wait for David to pick me up as arranged, and there was a spiced omelette waiting for me and a cup of teabag tea. I passed the teabag back to the man, shook my head and scrunched up my face. He looked at me blankly. Peering into his shed, I could see a fridge full of beer, a kettle, a hotplate, a computer, a stereo with speakers and a hipsterish siphon coffee-making contraption. We were deep inside Taiwanese tea country and I had a very good cup of coffee. We could have been in Shoreditch: he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with press-stud buttons, knee-length combat shorts, white socks and unblemished white trainers.
It’s the same in Xiamen, the hub of today’s Chinese tea trade. Along the harbour, looking out at the giant container boats, the richer youth hang out in coffee shops.
The temperature was up in the forties and my shirt felt like a fur coat. Wei, the young farmer, tall, bashful and funny, showed me round. I imagined he was funny; although he didn’t speak a single word of English, he laughed a good deal. His friend David translated for him. One of the barriers for farmers wanting to export is finding a market and then communicating with that market. But they are discovering ways – at least this generation is.
The first visit was strange and surprising because the farm was at a much lower altitude than any I’d visited before. Tea fields were dotted around farmland; little seedlings and new experiments were slotted between orchards of tropical fruit. It looked like a market garden, with some of the fields no bigger than an allotment. The government has set aside huge tracts of farmland where no factory or industrial production of any kind can take place. The area where this oolong tea was growing was entirely organic, all the farmers having to believe in similar agricultural practices, working as close together as they did.
I liked Wei even more when he showed me a field where the new seedlings hadn’t taken; they’d tried a new varietal that wasn’t suited to the land. The poor seedlings were mostly withered and dying. He wanted me to know that he was experimenting and wasn’t afraid to fail. And, of course, he also showed me his rich, lush fields. The pluckers wore hats topped with fringed umbrellas, and despite the heat covered every millimetre of their skin from the darkening sun. They had razor-blades sewn into their gloves to slice rather than snap the leaves from the stem.
That first day, Wei and David were most concerned by where we’d have lunch. The small villages didn’t have any restaurants. I asked where they would normally eat. They looked at each other rather apprehensively. David explained that it was a simple local place for farmers, and I said, truthfully, that that was my favourite sort of place.
I would have walked past it: it looked more like a butcher’s shop, obscured by thick sheets of plastic. Outside, a group of half-naked men were cooking in woks over open fires. It was 40°C. We ducked behind the curtain to find half a dozen plastic tables and chairs and a battered air-con unit. The diners sat inside in partially air-conditioned comfort while the cooks sweated it out in the midday heat. Chefs everywhere endure ferocious working conditions, but these chaps really had it hard. Like all chefs, they shouted and laughed and got on with the job of feeding people.
A large TV screen was showing a Chinese soap opera, and men were sitting hunched over bowls of noodles, reading newspapers and drinking cups of tea. It smelt amazing. There was no menu. After a brief discussion, the one waitress brought us food. I was given a large bowl of white soup full of noodles with slices of pork and vegetables. There was hot sauce on the table as well as soy sauce, both of which went in. Because we were having the soupy noodles, no tea was offered. I did ask, and they said, ‘We don’t drink tea with this kind of soup.’ I didn’t argue.
The people-watching was reciprocal and good-natured; nobody seemed remotely bothered that I was there. No one stared, but they looked, and I looked; I was probably the ruder until the food held my focus. Those noodles were really good. In the oppressive heat I thought I wasn’t hungry, but as soon as the aromatic bowl was put down in front of me, my greed stood in for my missing appetite.
Over long afternoons, I spent hours on the farm watching the different types of oolong production. Taiwan, once known as Formosa, is famed for this semi-oxidised tea. A stage beyond green tea, oolongs possess greater complexity but without reaching the dark profundity of a black tea.
Blunt-fingered experts bound and unbound the leaves in muslin cloths; twisted them into tight bundles; pressed these bundles between iron rolling plates to miraculously twist the leaves inside. They untwisted the cloth and released the leaves into drying machines; transferred the leaves to roasters; laid them out to dry; bound them again; rolled them; roasted them; exposed them, in an intricate dance that seemed to have no formal pattern.
The precise semi-oxidisation of the leaf, to reveal its most subtle, nuanced flavours, was all done by smell and touch and feel. There was no measurement or timing; the craft was in their instinctive understanding. Sometimes the tea went into the roasters for twenty seconds, sometimes two minutes. Sometimes the tea was laid out for days and sometimes for hours. All this was done by men who spent the spring season making tea and the summer and winter practising other trades: carpentry, engineering or farming other crops on their own plots of land.
The little plots of land were bound together not just by their overlapping crops but by their skills and manpower. One month a farmer might be cutting pineapples, the next harvesting and crafting tea. This was Pharoah Sanders playing gloriously intricate free jazz rather than the Royal Phil
harmonic Orchestra playing from sheet music.
I’ve seen this level of expertise give people a sense of gravitas, something the great oolong craftsmen of China sometimes express. On Wei’s farm they wore their expertise lightly. That same lack of pomposity is there at Momofuku’s Ssäm Bar in New York’s East Village, one of the places Wei’s tea ends up. It’s served alongside a bun stuffed with pork, a simple, perfect pairing, not unlike the food the farmers enjoy in Taiwan. The slick, sticky, unctuous pork and soft, pillowy bun fill your mouth with flavour and texture. Wei’s Sunset Oolong is like an umami take on a digestive biscuit or a rich vintage champagne without any of the sour notes. It amplifies the succulence of the pork and reinvigorates the taste buds for another bite.
Tea with food is not a new thing. It’s just that, other than at breakfast, we’ve rather fallen out of the habit in the West. In China and across much of Asia tea is still served with every meal, at the finest restaurant and the shabbiest street stall. A meal without tea would be weird. It used to be normal in Britain too. In the north of England, the evening meal is often called ‘tea’ because it used to be when the family sat down to eat together around the teapot. During the day, tea was in our thermoses and our cafes, restaurants and canteens, to wet the whistle while we ate. But we have become bedevilled by choice. Bottled water, fizzy drinks and wine have lured us away from the teapot. The thing that unites our choices is that they are almost always cold. Outside of a restaurant serving Chinese food, we seem to prefer cold drinks when we eat, and that’s how Wei’s oolong is served at Momofuku.
But tea is finding its way back into restaurants, mostly led by chefs and sommeliers who delight in finding new flavours or rediscovering forgotten ones.
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