Photograph by George Sakkestad
Pat Ramirez, owner of Lisa's Tea Treasures in Los Gatos, pours tea for customers Jeanie Fairman and Christina Pratt (right)
By Clarence Cromwell
Look in the bottom of a teacup and you will see 3,000 years of history: the ancient Chinese scholar Lu Yu scratching onto paper everything known in the world about tea, Japanese tea ceremonies, Dutch ships skimming across oceans with bellies full of tea, the Boston Tea Party, high tea, Lipton tea bags, the Nestea Plunge.
The more things change, the more tea stays the same.
Three millennia after the first sip, Los Gatans are drinking tea in teahouses, espresso joints and at home, and tea merchants hope people will be buying more.
Teri Hope, owner of the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Co., says tea is in the midst of a minor revival.
Specialty tea sales have grown from 2 percent of the national tea market to about 5 percent during the past five years, said Michael Spillane, president of the American Premium Tea Institute. Tea is becoming more popular because it's available more places, he said; after coffeehouses exploded across the landscape, competition made many of them add tea to their offerings. Coffee magazines are writing more about tea, too, he added.
Hope explained a little more about tea's appeal: "Tea is a very social thing. It's kind of like coffee; it goes hand in hand with people wanting to share and communicate."
But tea has less caffeine than coffee--enough to improve mental concentration, but not so much that tea drinkers get wired or feel sluggish, as they might if they swallowed a couple of espressos or a can of soda. Tea also comes in more flavors and varieties than coffee.
Some believe there are health benefits to drinking tea. Tea is believed to prevent cancer, cleanse the body of fat and clear plaque from arteries, says Los Gatos herbalist and acupuncturist Josi Thomas Riley.
Alas, tea may never pass coffee in popularity, Hope says. It just doesn't give the jump start that a lot of people have come to expect from coffee. "But I think it is certainly a niche that's growing," she said.
Most tea has been prepared the same way for thousands of years.
The little tea bush--it would grow into a tree if left unpruned--thrives in almost any climate, but the best plants grow high in the mountains of China and India. Tea planters shear the shrubs of their delicate leaves and buds and preserve them by firing in pans over a flame. Or they ferment the leaves before pan-firing them.
The taste in the dried leaves varies tremendously, depending on where the leaves are grown, the firing temperature, the amount of fermentation and other factors, says Peggy Wong, tea seller for the importing firm Ten Ren Tea Co.
Unlike coffee, which varies only slightly from one variety to another, tea leaves soaked in water can flavor a brew with anything from a grassy essence to a strong, bitter taste that's similar to coffee's. The strongest flavor comes from fully fermented tea, known as black tea, Wong explains; unfermented green tea has a distinctly vegetable flavor with no bitterness and carries a spinachy smell. In the middle are partly fermented teas--merchants say oolong is a popular variety--neither bitter nor spinachy. Indian, Chinese and Japanese varieties of tea taste different.
Most of the tea sold in the U.S. is further spruced up with flavorful additives like jasmine, apple blossoms, or at least lemon.
Tea drinkers should buy loose leaves rather than bags, says acupuncturist Riley. The white paper used to bag tea may contain cancer-causing bleaching agents, he explains. He also doesn't like the quality of the tea usually used in bags and sells his clients only loose-leaf tea from his offices at 292 E. Main Street.
"What you're finding in tea bags is what's fallen on the floor, and they've swept it up and sent it to this country--and we bag it and drink it," Riley said.
In the past two decades, America has introduced further obscenities against the tea leaf, namely instant iced tea and cheap, chilled tea marketed in aluminum cans, like soda. Canned tea has made the tea business a $4.7 billion a year business, up from $1.2 billion before the can, according to Spillane of the Tea Institute.
Finding the best-tasting loose-leaf tea is not so easy.
In general, the best tea consists of whole leaves, not torn bits, and no pieces of stem or branch, says Wong, manager of Ten Ren's Milpitas store and a tea seller for more than 15 years. A strong floral smell drifts up from most varieties of tea leaves, even when they're dry, she explained.
Tea experts would be able to judge a particular sample on a handful of other criteria, but expectations vary, depending on the type of tea.
Brewing tea is a lot like making coffee; for the best taste you have to carefully measure the correct proportion of tea to the water, get the correct water temperature and brew for just the right amount of time.
In Los Gatos, you can have your tea just about any way you like it. A number of shops around town offer small selections of loose tea leaves and flavored blends, but the following four offer the biggest variety of tea leaves and a place to sit and sip a cup of tea.
* Lisa's Tea Treasures serves teas blended with other flavorings: vanilla beans, freeze-dried strawberries, even flowers. And Lisa's serves them in a setting fit for a Jane Austen novel.
The rustic, steep-roofed cottage is filled with an unexpected Victorian clutter inside. China cabinets, their shelves loaded with cups and teapots for sale, line the walls. Customers sip blended teas and taste dainty snacks--sliced fruit, scones, salads-- in wingback chairs at tables elegantly set in white linen or heavy drapings. The clatter of cups and saucers cuts through background music.
At the counter, patrons can buy a baggy of their favorite blend of tea from one of Lisa's aproned tea ladies.
The shop carries plain green and black tea, for purists, but only serves the fruity, flowery blends at its tables.
"Our guests feel like they're kind of stepping into the past," said owner Pat Ramirez. "It helps them relax and take a little tea and take a little time out for themselves."
* Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Co. serves up 24 varieties of tea, mostly to the blue jeans crowd. Most of the teas are straightforward, green or black tea, but a couple of them are jazzed up with flavors like toasted rice and black currant. The shop has numerous varieties of tea and also tea-making equipment, like kettles, cups, saucers and teapots.
Still, it's more a coffeehouse than a teahouse. There's a buzz in your ears that consists of conversation, whining coffee grinders, occasional blasts of steam from the cappucino machine and, behind it all, a barely audible violin concerto.
* Peet's Coffee and Tea, in the King's Court Shopping Center on Blossom Hill Road offers 29 kinds of loose tea to take home or drink on the premises. And the new Starbucks at Blossom Hill Pavillion serves up a handful of flavored teas.
* Ten Ren's nearest store is in Milpitas. It's a long drive, but Ten Ren offers more types of tea, carries higher grades of tea than do other shops in the South Bay and has tea experts in the store to answer questions.
The perfect cup of tea
To brew Chinese tea to perfection, says Ten Ren tea seller Peggy Wong, use about a teaspoon of tea for each American-sized cup of tea. Water should be 70 degrees celsius for green tea, 80 for semi-fermented tea and about 100 degrees (boiling temperature) for black tea.
Use a small pot. Tiny pots, big enough for about two American-sized mugs, are usually used in China and Taiwan because they brew better tea; brewing is harder to control in a larger pot because there's too much water to sift through the leaves uniformly. In China, thimble-sized cups hold the tea, but small pots are also the perfect size to fill two small coffee cups or one really big mug of tea.
First, Wong warms the little pot with steaming water, so it will keep tea hot longer; she warms a pitcher with the water from the pot, then transfers it to the cups, then tosses it out. Tea is never stirred during brewing, because it damages the leaves, she says.
Put about a tablespoon of tea in the pot, add hot water and immediately pour the water out. You only have to do this with quality loose-leaf tea. The first pot is usually too strong, and a good rinsing also opens the pores of leaves, moistens them and washes away tea dust and dirt. You can use the first tea to further warm cups before dumping it out.
Fill the pot again and brew for about 30 seconds. Stop the brewing by emptying the tea into a tea pitcher (or any vessel that will hold all the tea); this also mixes the tea. If you pour straight from the pot into tea cups, the first cup will be watery, and the last will be too bitter.
Loose tea can be brewed more than once. Better grades of tea will yield seven to 10 pots per spoonful.
To adjust the taste of tea, Wong says, tea lovers change one of the three factors that determine taste: amount of tea, temperature of water and brewing time (the amount of water is always as much as the pot will hold).
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, February 12, 1997.
©1997 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.