Infused
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Strain this through a fine muslin cloth overnight. Begin when the fruit is hot, to allow the liquid to flow most freely.
This should give you approximately 400 to 500ml of fruit stock. Put this back in the pan with the sugar and heat slowly, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Heat the syrup to 95°C to ensure it is sterilised. This will also be hot enough to sterilise the bottle it goes into. If a foam appears, skim it off before bottling.
The Ideal Infusion
To get the best out of your leaf tea it helps to control three elements:
1. Leaf-to-water ratio
2. Temperature
3. Infusion time
For each tea I mention through the book, I have given my idea of the best amount, temperature and infusion time. But they are just my preferences, not truths that shouldn’t be challenged. Please experiment with the variables to your heart’s content.
Leaf-to-Water Ratio
First you need to measure the tea into your teapot. This is usually 2 to 2.5g per teacup: roughly a teaspoon for broken-leaf tea or a dessertspoon for whole leaves. If you are geeky, like me, you can use a highly calibrated, micro-milligram scale to get it spot on. (Tea is no less precious than cocaine. Some teas cost more.) These scales are easy to come by, wherever kitchen gear or drug paraphernalia is sold. This may sound finicky but it’s just sensible. The better you understand the weight of each specific leaf, the easier it is to work with. Once you’ve weighed it a few times, you get to the point where you can do it by feel, like a bartender free-pouring rather than using a measure.
For a stronger flavour, use more tea rather than just extending the brewing time. The best flavours dissolve relatively quickly. The more tea you use, the more intense the flavour. Over time you will just draw out more tannin, making it more bitter rather than stronger.
Please don’t just fill up the teapot with water – it’s a ratio. The right measure of tea needs the right measure of water. Add 150ml (a teacup) per 2.5g of tea. You can use the cup to measure the water from the kettle into the pot.
To make a cake, we follow a recipe rather than just arbitrarily adding flour or any number of eggs. You don’t have to, of course, but you’re less likely to make a delicious cake if you don’t get the proportions right.
Water Temperature
The hotter the water, the more tannic your tea will be.
Tannin dissolves in boiling water – 100°C. But the softer, sweeter subtleties of flavour in a decent leaf tea have lower dissolving points. The polyphenols, amino acids and volatiles of each tea respond differently to temperature. Given the intricate chemical structure of the leaf, you need a bit of precision to extract the flavours you want.
If you are adding milk to black tea, you need the strong tannins to balance the milk proteins, so use water just a breath under the rolling boil. But otherwise, for any tea and some herbal infusions like chamomile flowers, use lower temperatures to bring out sweeter, more nuanced flavours. There is an important exception here – a teabag does need boiling water to draw out its flavour or you will get a pretty insipid, grey brew.
There are some excellent temperature-controlled kettles on the market. But if you don’t have the wherewithal or the conviction to get a fancy bit of kit just yet, don’t worry, you can control the temperature by adding cold water to boiling water. Your tea goes into the teapot, you measure a little cold water into the pot and then pour in the boiling water. It’s simple and effective, and if you use a cooking thermometer once – to measure the amount of hot and cold water needed to attain your ideal temperature – it’s easily repeatable.
Here’s a simple guide, for a standard 150ml teacup. I hope you don’t think it’s patronising. I just find it easier to understand some things visually.
For a single cup, measure out the tea into your teapot – you need 2.5g per cup. For whole or larger leaf tea, use one dessertspoon.
For smaller or broken leaf use one teaspoon.
For green or white tea at 70°C, add 50ml of cold water to the pot. That’s four dessertspoons or a double bar measure. Or I sometimes use half of my eggcup.
Then add 100ml of boiling water from the kettle: that’s two-thirds of a cupful.
For black leaf tea to be drunk without milk or unrolled oolong at 85°C, begin with 25ml of cold water (two dessertspoons or a single bar measure) and top up with 125ml of boiling water.
For rolled oolongs, I start with water at 95°C and let it cool naturally as I go for subsequent infusions. Just add a dessertspoon of cold water at the start.
Herbals (except chamomile) and black tea served with milk are happy at 100°C.
Fill the teapot with just the right amount of hot water. You can use your cup to measure the water – one cup for each measure of tea is the perfect ratio.
Infusion Time
A short infusion time will give a sweet, delicate tea. A long infusion brings out more bitterness. Over time more tannin infuses from the leaf. It’s the tannin that takes time and high temperatures to dissolve.
A higher leaf-to-water ratio speeds things up. If I’m making tea for a chef who is, as they all are, pressed for time, I add more tea to my pot. The rich flavours dissolve quickly and I get a lovely cup after just a few seconds, even at lower temperatures – if I’m careful to get the amount of leaf just right.
Lower temperatures generally require longer steeping times but reveal sweeter, more nuanced flavours. A white tea at 70°C takes one to five minutes, depending on your taste, but, again, you can speed this up by using more tea.
But good tea infuses more rapidly than you might think. The idea that you must leave tea for a long time to achieve any strength is really for cheap tea with little flavour or a small amount of tea in a large pot. Decent Earl Grey, for example, drunk without milk, is perfect after forty-five seconds to a minute. Even for a robust strength, to balance the addition of milk, it won’t take more than two minutes. If you’re not careful, the tannin starts to overpower the subtler flavours. They are still there, but swamped.
Multiple Infusions
Once your tea has infused to your desired strength, please strain all the tea from the leaf. When you are ready for a second cup, just refill the teapot. The second cup will be even more delicious than the first. With each new infusion, the water penetrates deeper into the leaf and the flavours change and develop.
Really do take care to pour all the tea from the pot. In China they call the last drip from the spout ‘the golden drop’. In this way, you stop the tea infusing. If there is any water left on the leaves, it will continue to draw out flavour and, ultimately, tannins. But if you drain the pot, the infusion stops and the leaves will be ready for further steeps.
Imagine you have the most perfect steak. It comes from a rare breed of cow that has been lovingly raised in lush green fields and hand-fed with acorns, its forelock stroked. Humanely killed and carefully butchered and hung for just enough time, it reaches the greatest peak of flavour. You want that steak medium rare and you have a world-famous chef to cook it for you. He cooks it with care and feeling, to perfection. But before he serves it to you he cuts it in half. He serves you half the steak and he leaves the other half in the frying pan. The first half is divine, tender and juicy and so delicious it brings tears to your eyes.
If you are a vegetarian, imagine instead a bunch of perfectly steamed asparagus, the first beautiful spears of the spring. Half the spears are served just as they reach the most tender bite, and the other half are left in the boiling water.
Once you have eaten your first half of the steak or asparagus, the rest that has been left cooking away will be, well, less than delicious. The steak is like leather and the asparagus are mush.
The same happens to tea left in the pot. It gets over-brewed.
But if you stop the infusion when it reaches the perfect point, then you can reinfuse the leaf, repeatedly. It’s truly wondrous how the flavour changes, and each time different nuances of taste are released. The second or third infusion of
a green tea is often the best, far better than the first. When it comes to an oolong, it might even be the fifth.
The more love and care you put in, the better it will be.
TEAS I’VE TALKED ABOUT
Black Tea
China: Beautiful Golden Eyebrow (Jin Jun Mei) 1
Emperor’s Breakfast 1
Jasmine 1
Keemun 1
Lapsang Souchong 1, 2, 3, 4
Tarry Lapsang 1, 2
Earl Grey 1, 2
English Breakfast 1, 2, 3
India: Darjeeling 1, 2
Meghalaya 1
Sikkim 1, 2
Malawi 1, 2
Masala Chai 1
Nepal 1, 2
Sri Lanka 1
Pu’er Tea
Malawi 1
Yunnan 1, 2
Oolong Tea
China: Big Red Robe (Da Hong Pao) 1, 2, 3
Iron Goddess of Mercy (Tie Guan Yin) 1, 2, 3, 4
Taiwan: Milk Oolong 1
Sunset Oolong 1
Green Tea
China: Dragon Well (Long Jing) 1
Emerald Green 1
Jasmine Pearls 1
Japan: Genmaicha 1
Gyokuro 1, 2
Matcha 1, 2
Sencha 1, 2, 3, 4
White Tea
China: Jasmine Silver Tip (Silver Needle) 1, 2, 3
White Peony 1, 2
White Silver Tip (Silver Needle) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Malawi: Malawi Antlers 1
Herbal Infusions
Almond Blossom 1
Anise Hyssop 1
Chamomile 1, 2, 3
Lemongrass 1
Lemon Verbena 1, 2
Rooibos 1, 2
Flavoured Tea 1, 2, 3
Teabags 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12
Tea Cocktails
Jasmine Silver Tip Martini 1
Prune Tease 1
Rum Punches 1, 2
White Silver Tip Martini 1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wanted to thank every single person who has enveloped me in their love and kindness – but I’m really too terrified of forgetting someone. You know me, I’m way too doolally. I’m sorry, please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.
I’m profoundly grateful to everyone who has read this far. If I had kept working on this book for another few years I might have shaped it into something far better and more cogent. But there is an urgency to the future of the farmers I know and love, and to your tea pleasure. Over to you.
THE TEA PLANT
Two leaves and a bud, the perfect pick for making tea: the first leaves of spring, with the next leaf bud waiting to unfurl at its centre.
The tiny Camellia sinensis flower. The tea plant puts all its focus into its lovely leaves, rather than its blooms.
FUDING, FUJIAN PROVINCE, CHINA
Fresh harvest of white silver tips.
One of my early trips to China at the beginning my tea adventures. Young love.
(photos: John Noonan)
GUIZHOU, CHINA
Emerald Green harvest. Wandering through the tea and stumbling on an old man’s grief.
Terry Clark, born 1919, navigator during World War II and one of the dearest loves of my life – inspiration for my Royal Air Force Tea.
Fighter pilots at RAF Marham where we drank a cup of Terry’s RAF Tea on the wings of a Tornado. (photo: Ben Cowlin)
SATEMWA ESTATE, THYOLO, MALAWI
From the fields to the tasting room. A truly rich and diverse terroir, along with some of the most wonderful people I’ve met in all my tea travels.
(photos: Ben Cowlin)
CLANWILLIAM, CEDERBERG MOUNTAINS, SOUTH AFRICA
Dr Frikkie Strauss harvests his wild rooibos on horseback to protect the delicate ecosystem where Cape leopards roam.
UJI, KYOTO PREFECTURE, JAPAN
The plants are shaded for the last few weeks before harvesting to produce the perfect leaf for matcha and gyokuro.
JUN CHIYABARI ESTATE, NEPAL. 1835 metres above sea level, in the foothills of the Himalayas.
In the withering rooms where the fresh leaf is laid out to release moisture and relax before being crafted into the most sublime black tea. (photos: Paul Winch-Furness)
TAITUNG, TAIWAN
Pluckers protect every millimetre of skin from the hot sun.
Fresh leaf on withering trays before being rolled and fired to make oolong.
Tasting and selecting the finished teas.
TOKYO, JAPAN
A temporary restaurant set up by Noma in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. For eight short weeks they created an extraordinary world within a world.
Rosio Sanchez and René Redzepi giving their blessing.
Making sure the tea was spot on with sommelier Yukiyasu Kaneko.
USA
Blue Hill Restaurant at Stone Barns, Tarrytown, New York.
Richard Hart, the world’s best baker showing me the ropes at Tartine in San Francisco.
Redwood Forest, Sonoma County, California where we tested my theories about pu’er.
LAKYRSIEW ESTATE, MEGHALAYA, INDIA
The beauty of tea gardens often belies the extreme hard work.
One of the pluckers spotting a hornets’ nest.
(photos: Paul Winch-Furness)
An ancient smoking house.
(photos: Michael Zee)
WUYI SHAN, FUJIAN, CHINA
Deep within the protected forests, lapsang suchong tea is smoked with pinewood.
PARIS
Tea and caviar pairing – eggs from different species of sturgeon and at different maturations. Each one paired with hot and cold infusions of tea. Not a hard day’s work.
SIKKIM, INDIA
Young girls on the Temi Estate dancing for my birthday party.
A plucker resting among the terraces.
NORDSKOT, ARCTIC NORWAY
In the twilight of high noon in December, when the sun never breaches the horizon. Roddie Sloan dove for shellfish for me to pair with tea.
HANGZHOU, ZHEJIANG PROVINCE, CHINA
Home of Dragon Well green tea.
(photos: Paul Winch-Furness)
The yellow leather ‘armour’ dress designed for me by Brett Mettler.
LOUISIANA, USA
Jim Meehan making tea-based punches for a dinner in New Orleans.
JAPAN
Mrs Moriuchi on her farm in Shizuoka, taken on my phone as we chat over tea, using translation apps.
SRI LANKA
Train travel through Sri Lanka.
Pluckers harvesting on Amba Tea Garden, above the Ravana Falls.
(photos: Anette Kay)
MEXICO
Toronjil
Diana Kennedy, legendary food writer, at her home in Michoacán, Mexico.
(photos: Henrik Olund)
SPAIN
Harvesting almond blossom from the trees in Tarragona, Spain.
(photos: Pimpakarn Sripungwiwat)
CHINA
Picking jasmine flowers in Fujian, China.
(photos: John Noonan)
Silver Tip tea being scented with the fresh jasmine flowers. (photo: John Noonan)
On a mountainside in Anxi, China with the Iron Goddess of Mercy.
(photo: Paul Winch-Furness)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Henrietta Lovell is best known as the Rare Tea Lady. She is on a mission to revolutionise the way we drink tea by replacing industrially produced teabags with an appreciation for the best quality leaves. Her quest sees her travel to the Shire Highlands of Malawi, across the foothills of the Himalayas, and to hidden gardens in the Wuyi Shan, to source the world’s most extraordinary tea. From tea plantations to dining rooms, Infused takes us on a remarkable journey, introducing us to the people who grow and craft the precious leaves and to the celebrated chefs who serve them. The result is a delicious infusion of travel writing, memoir, recipes and glorious photography, all written with Lovell’s unique charm and wit.
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bsp; COPYRIGHT
First published in the UK in 2019
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2019