'A HISTORY OF...'//'CASE STUDY: TWININGS'//OUGD504-SUMMER

TWININGS:

http://www.twinings.co.uk/about-our-tea/twinings-tea-tasters/oolong-chinese-green-tea-twinings-tea-tasters

FINEST BRAZILIAN BLACK TEA (CTC) - TWININGS TEA TASTERS

BRAZIL TEA HISTORY

You can imagine back in the 1800's travelling on one of these huge clipper ships to bring the tea back home to the United Kingdom: from the new world, from South America, from China, from India, being stood fast here at the helm of the ship, making sure that your precious cargo got back to the UK. Imagine being onboard here onboard a clipper ship in the race to get your valuable cargo of tea back home to the UK. One ship worth could make you a millionaire for life, and you can imagine the water breaking over the side of the ship. You just begin to understand what a very dangerous and adventurous life this was onboard the clipper ships.

The interesting thing about Brazil is tea production [or tea] was first introduced to Brazil in around 1812 but it didn't become commercially viable until the 19^th Century. Quite a small production country [Brazil], producing about eleven million kilos which is around 20% of the tea that somewhere like India would produce. Its largest market is probably the US where 70% of its exports go.

There are two very distinct growing regions in Brazil. In the North, there is a region around Registro City and this is producing a lot of black teas like this one that we have here today. Then there is a region in the South of Brazil calledParaná, which is growing a lot of green teas with some of the Japanese tea variants that were introduced more recently.

BOILING AND BREWING YOUR TEA

We'll put a good heaped teaspoon of this beautiful brown Brazilian CTC into our tasting crockery. Don't forget if you're doing this at home and you're using a teapot, use a good heaped teaspoon for each person that the pot serves and then one for good luck. For our tasting crockery, one good heaped teaspoon there and we're going to add some hot water.

We've used water that's just come off the boil. We're going to add that to our tasting crockery as the water and tea meet, the tea looks terrific swirling around and brewing in the crockery.

We're going to leave that now for three and a half minutes, as we always say on Twinings. 'A minute for the colour, a minute for the flavour, and a minute for the goodness.'

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CTC TEA AND ORTHODOX TEA

This is a CTC tea and the CTC teas are mechanically processed so they have a granular, almost powdery look to them. The benefit of teas like this is that they yield more quickly in the cup and you get a better conversion from leaf to finished product. This differs somewhat from a lot of the orthodox teas that we've had a look at on Tea Tasters.

Orthodox teas are rolled in a very traditional sense and these have been rolled between two flat rollers. You can see it produced more of a twist in the leaf. With an orthodox tea, they are slightly slower to yield their colour and flavour, and a lot of purists will tell you that orthodox tea is the only way forward but these CTC teas are now becoming very delicious and we are really excited to be trying this now.

LIQUOR

We're going to see what beautiful tea we have brewing in here. We're just going to give a gentle tap on the lid and spoon out the tea because the CTC tea is quite fine when it brews up.

Here we can see all the characteristics of a well-grown tea one that's had plenty of rainfall, which gives this tea a nice, rusty, red look.

As we look into the infused liquor, we've got a nice, deep, bold caramel colour, indicative of a really good quality tea. This is an absolute beauty from Brazil and we are sure it's going to taste as magnificent as it looks.

TASTE

We've given our tea three and a half minutes; we had a look at some of the colour of the infused leaf. The liquor looks fantastic and now we're going to have a little taste. So Brazilian tea has done very well over the years, it's predominantly used for blending or the production of iced teas in the States, but for Twinings we really believe in this tea, and it should be considered as a fine tea in it's own right, they taste absolutely fantastic.

The taste is beautiful. A very subtle sweetness to start and almost a gentle, powdery coconut body and then what is really different about this tea is there are no overwhelming tannings invading the mouthful, leaving an after-tail of taste.

This is an ideal black tea, great with milk, without milk, or even with sugar or without sugar if you're that way inclined, but definitely not one to be missed.