Is there room for innovation in the tea industry?
I know we all love tea here but have you all ever wondered if there’s room for innovation in tea industry? I’m talking about the kind of specialized Chinese tea we all discuss here. I don’t think much has improved or changed in several hundred years.
What innovations?
- Pyramid Tea Bags ?
If your talking a timescale of hundreds of years Ripe puerh tea was an innovation just forty five years ago.
Sure there is. Unroasted/green oolongs are a recent trend as are some oolong varietals like GABA.
I think most of the innovation these days is coming from newer or less popular growing regions like Laos, Malawi and Hawaii. As far as technology goes, check out Teforia.com. I was really wowed when I saw a demo at World Tea Expo and again a few months ago.
Their infuser looks interesting but at $699 it’s currently more than I want to spend. I am also unsure if it uses loose tea per se or pods of loose tea? They appear to show some sort of pod akin to a k cup pod in their rather limited preview.
It uses 5g of loose tea which is what each of the pods contain. The advantage with the pods is that they have RFID technology so the machine will “know” exactly how to brew it. The price tag is definitely high but in terms of innovation, they are definitely up there. The app can control things like specific flavor profiles or the amount of caffeine extracted.
Laos and actually Thailand as well. I came across a documentary on veterans revolutionizing tea growing practice in Chiang Rai province a while ago. It’s an amazing story. Here’s an article:
http://theteadetective.com/TeasOfThailand.html
Sure. There’s new inventions all the time. The leaps in unorthodox/machine-based tea processing alone almost all happened around or after the turn of the century, 1900s.
-Rotorvane, 1958 (from forerunners in 1883 [Rotary Tea Roller] and 1933 [Equilizer])
-CTC, 1933
-Legg-Cut, 1923
None of those are particularly ‘chinese’, but.
And as Allan said, shu puer only came about in 1973, to satiate this new-fangled idea of aging tea.
On top of that, purple tea in Yunnan was only discovered in the 1980s, and the purple tea varietal in Kenya (originally from Assam) has been in development from cuttings from about the same time.
The above answers give great supporting evidence that the answer is yes. However I have a few more:
Dream infused matcha; still in the works, it’s suppose to provide vivid images in the mind while being awake through the caffeine properties.
Memory triggering Silver and Gold Needle Tea; unsure when it will occur, but the furry nature of the tea when it is processed is hypothesized to trigger memories from being swaddled as a baby.
Artery declogging oolong; it is said that the black dragon will actually find its way into your blood stream with the agricultural invented seeds that produce plants that generate human compatible stem cells that are trainable.
Time traveled puer; interestingly enough, there are theories that we can send particles back in time which has caused interest in sending puer back in time to a trusted individual who will keep it stored away to a vault that can be accessed to see that the tea is in it from when it was put there years and years ago.
Yeah…anyways, the answer is absolutely!
Yes but Liquid Proust current time machine theory only involves being able to send the puerh back to a time after which the time machine had been invented and turned on. So if you Liquid Proust invent a time machine in 2016 and build it in 2016 you would still have to wait 20 years and then send the tea back in time for aging. Believe it or not that is a current theory about building a time machine by astrophysicists.
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