What do you want when you say transparency?
Having said that, what we are seeing here in the West, is that companies are taking an interest and even supporting development of the farms that produce their products.
So a coffee farmer who is producing a good product, will receive better benefits from the company that sells their coffee. In turn, the coffee shop chain gets to sell better coffee.
What that really means is that there is a link between peoducer and seller.
That can also just be lip service. Fortnum & Mason, one of the oldest English tea houses, has a horrendous human rights record and promised to do something about it (and then did very little, if anything).
There were some American ‘chocolatiers’ making high-end chocolate with premium beans. Slick website, hipster beards n all. Someone discovered they were melting down grocery store chocolate, remolding it and selling it for a hefty premium. Caveat emptor…
As a consumer, I am more skeptical of products thst come from countries with poor human rights records. We are tslking about transparency. How can we have transparency in a country that represses its own citizens, and where corruption is rampant. In countries with strong democratic and legal traditions, there are mechanisms for dealing with sellers who make false claims about where their products came from. If someone tries to sell me maple syrup and tells me it was made in BC when it was actually made somewhere else, I can sue them.
That pretty much lets out tea from almost everywhere but Japan. Certainly lets out China. India in particular has a bad record of the way tea workers were treated. As a consumer of Chinese tea I have to accept that people will lie to me. It’s a fact of the Chinese tea trade that lies are told about the tea. Lies about a tea’s origin, lies about a tea’s age. There is a particular village in Yunnan called Lao Ban Zhang which has the most expensive tea if you get the genuine stuff. Easily $1000 for a single puerh cake. However, more tea is sold as Lao Ban Zhang than is actually produced by that village. In fact, you can almost always assume tea marked as Lao Ban Zhang actually came from somewhere else.
In Yunnan, they even have recipes for faking the taste profile of tea from certain regions that involve tea that doesn’t even come from China (Laos, Myanmar).
While very little tea is produced here, Hong Kong is #12 on the UN’s Human Development Index and sometimes merchants here mix in a little red tea with their white tea to improve the flavor profile (and don’t tell customers this). Even the Japanese aren’t above playing little games to sell their tea for more…selling kabusecha as gyokuro, for example.
If you’re going to write off entire nations for human rights abuses, you’re pretty much stuck with Japanese and Korean tea.
RE preference for products from good human rights records. They got tea grown in Canada now! And yeah, $350 for 25 grams. North American labor isn’t cheap.
There is also tea grown in the USA. Hawaii has some excellent but expensive tea. South Carolina has a tea plantation as well. The South Carolina tea is sold on Amazon. Charleston Tea Plantation I think the place is called. I forget what they market the tea as. It’s not bad tea but you are fairly limited if that is your only choice. I think they make about four varieties. I think they harvest by machine. Their tea is too cheap for them to be paying pickers to harvest by hand. It might be called American Classic but I’m not sure.
Even the Hawaiian tea isn’t $350 for 25g. For that price I could easily buy Lao Ban Zhang. And the people who live in Lao Ban Zhang village are well paid for their tea picking efforts.
I believe most of the profit is made by the middle man resellers, so the LBZ tea pickers would see little of that profit.
Bigelow Tea owns the Charleston, SC tea plantation I believe.
Tea is grown all over the world, Scotland supposedly produces some good tea (although I’ve never had it).
I wouldn’t think Scotland had the right climate to grow tea in. But there are surprises everywhere in the tea world.
Yea I didn’t realize Scotland had tea either, but I have yet to try it. Its on my list one day. Check this out…
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-26955938
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-2929524/Tea-grown-Scotland-named-best-world.html
http://weeteacompany.com/index.php/scottish-tea.html
-Location/mountain/village
-vintage/year
-season (spring, summer, fall)
-flush (first, second, etc)
-agrochemical/fertilizer use
-teamaster involved in processing/picking/mixing
-storage location
-varietal (if relevant)
-wild or farmed
-altitude (if relevant)
-quantity of specific tea produced that year
-age of trees (hesitant to even put this, because I think most vendors don’t really know and majority of farmers just make shit up)
-is it single tree or blend (if a blend, whats in it)
-length of time and relationship the vendor has with each farmer/processor
Its fine if a vendor says they don’t know something, never used a processor before, first time to a mountain, because when they admit they don’t know something then I’m then more likely to believe them when they do say something. Ignorance and honesty are also transparency. This all builds trust.
I’ll update as I think of more parameters.
What I really like is the integrated blog and shop. Hojo Tea, Essence of Tea, Crimson Lotus, these are good examples. Its just as much education, as it is journey to the tea mountains through the eyes of the vendor, as it is drinking the tea.
After tasting so many teas, from so many various vendors, of all ages and varieties and storages, you build up a mental database and given the above parameters I listed, you can determine if what you bought is legitimate and naturally, if the vendor is legit. Whether the vendor was honest or not, you get an idea of their wares.
Knowing said parameters allows you to tailor your purchasing and doesn’t make you reliant upon the online reviews. After all, the really good teas will sell out by the time the reviews come out. You think someone’s going to post a review BEFORE they stock up on that awesome tea? Nope.
I don’t like W2T’s methods, its too distracting. I appreciate it, its refreshing actually, but with 10,000 options its just more clutter. I bought a bunch of samples I working through and some are good, some I felt misled by the label (most notably poundcake).
Unfortunately you will almost never get all that information about a tea. Some companies give you a lot of information about their teas. Yunnan Sourcing gives you a lot of information about their raw productions that they do themselves. I don’t think I know of a single tea where all of that information is offered.
Well the question was “What do you want when you say transparency?” so I listed what I wanted. But I disagree with you, because most of the vendors I buy from all provide this info and much more. If they don’t have it on their website, I simply email them and ask. Every single vendor has replied to my emails, which says a lot about the tea world, good folks.
Who do you buy from that provides ALL that information. I don’t know of a single website that lists all that information. Perhaps they gave it to you with an email but no one I deal with and I have bought from many sellers and websites offer that much information. I have bought from Yunnan Sourcing, White2Tea, Crimson Lotus Tea, Chawangshop, Berylleb King Tea, King Tea on Aliexpress to name a few and I have never seen that amount of information in a website listing. All of those vendors offer some of that information but I have never seen it all offered.
You seem indignant, like you’re offended. I hope I’m misinterpreting your posts. But perhaps you missed just above where I said “If they don’t have it on their website, I simply email them and ask. Every single vendor has replied to my emails”.
@AllanK Verdant gives you as much information as possible. And they will give you any other information you ask for if you email them. I do not order specifically from some of the places you mentioned because of their lack of information. White2Tea being the most obvious, probably why it was mentioned in the original post.
Short of “teamaster involved in processing/picking/mixing” (revealing names could be sensitive information in terms of source, plus probably irrelevant to anyone else), anyone who sources and presses their own tea should be able to have all that information easily, although yes, it is unlikely that all of it will be present on a webpage. Even if a vendor didn’t include or know one of these details, it’s easy to send the farmer a message on Wechat and quickly ask, then reply to any customer inquiry. And if something remains an unknown, but you’re sharing as much as you can, I don’t think it’s a fault to admit that.
@Netherhero As to information from Verdant I generally don’t trust Verdant. Not too long ago they were selling puerhs with fake inflated ages of the trees. They were selling a tea they claimed was from 1800 year old trees. Their argument that they were telling the truth was pretty much blown away by the arguments of tea professionals on this site. If they were willing to blatantly lie about one of their teas, why should I trust them on the rest. This being said I have tried some of Verdant’s teas and liked them. I just am not likely to trust them real soon.
I am not indignant. But I am doubtful that you have found more than a handful of web pages with that much information. By limiting yourself to only teas that you can have that high level of knowledge about you are seriously limiting your tea choices. I also doubt most vendors even know that much about many of their teas. There are a handful of exceptions to this perhaps but the general rule is you can’t get that much information about a particular tea. The only exception to this is a tea crafted for a particular manufacturer such as a Yunnan Sourcing production or a Crimson Lotus production. If you go to the Yunnan Sourcing website you will only come close to this level of information about their own productions and usually then not to all your specifications. And I saw you said you email them. But most vendors will not know that much about the tea they are selling. So if they give you that much information they are probably lying. Most teas sold by most vendors just don’t come with that level of information. If the tea wasn’t made for them they won’t have all that information.
Like others have said, large vendors simply can’t know EVERYTHING about every tea they offer and that’s fine. If a vendor lists details on house offerings, but also is willing to own up to “I know nothing about this tea but it’s delicious” on some I’m going to trust them much more than if they list all kinds of info on everything or remain vague on everything.
I agree the larger vendors won’t know everything about all their products. But a house label should know these things easy.
I don’t view vendors as webpages, I see them as people who share the same passion as me, but just took it farther and opened a shop, sourced their own tea, etc.
The large vendors and small boutique vendors all have their place and fill a niche. There are a variety of teas to suit the variety of tastes, and there are a variety of vendors to suit the variety of needs. So I don’t feel limited in any way using a handful of trusted vendors, as you suspect. I’ve spent a lot of time and money to find them, sorting through many samples and offerings, so I am quite content. I’ve done my due diligence with them. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
Btw…never heard of your “general rule” (of ambiguity). If the consumer is content with not knowing why they’re paying $1/g on a tea with no information at all about it…that’s their choice and that’s okay, its their money. There are plenty of vendors for those customers. But this ‘general rule’ opens the doors to unscrupulous vendors who would take advantage of that general rule…that’s the point of this entire discussion topic isn’t it? To avoid unscrupulous vendors…by increasing transparency? This general rule encourages those types…
I think this has already been said in a few different ways, but at some point you have to trust someone, and by the time the tea gets to you, this chain of trust is probably at least 3-4 people long. It is almost impossible to verify all the information about any particular tea unless you are the farmer and processor of that tea. Even then, how do you verify altitude if your garden spans hundreds of meters? Even if all of your plants come from cuttings, how do you verify the genetics and ancestry? Even if you could, is that what farmers want to spend their time doing? The fact is, most farmers are busy trying to make tea and are not keeping track of every minute detail. Lots of factories are also buying raw material from many different farmers. They can tell good from bad quality, but they may not be able to (nor do they care to) verify every detail. As we go down the line, wholesalers buy from factories that they trust, and retailers buy from wholesalers they trust, and consumers buy from retailers they trust. This holds true regardless of whether you are buying from a local retailer, or a website based in the country of origin. The best advice I can give is to find a vendor that seems to be asking and, in turn, answering the questions that matter to you. Hopefully that is happening straight down the line. Unfortunately, you will never know if someone has lied in that chain.
This push for transparency is mostly coming from western consumers, and at least for the time being, the west is a relatively small market compared to markets in Asia, so many farmers, producers, and vendors have little incentive to do the leg work required to verify all the transparency claims. They may end up lying, or filling in unknown information, to appease certain buyers. Especially in east Asia, its might be considered loosing face to say, “I don’t know.” Its not necessarily malicious, they just may not think its as big a deal as we do to make an assumption without verification, and they are just trying to make a deal. I’m not defending this practice, but it is often the reality.
I don’t want to say that transparency is impossible, because it isn’t. But it is certainly more difficult than many realize.
I think that was well said. You do have to simply trust vendors. Sometimes that means going out on a limb when the vendor is new to you. There is a new vendor on EBay I have been buying from lately. It is still up in the air as to if he sells good tea or bad. But I like trying new teas so I have to take a risk sometimes. In a few weeks I will either recommend the vendor or not recommend him. For know I don’t know as I have only tried one of his teas. When you want to try something new it means sometimes taking a risk that you will end up with something bad.
One thing that should help consumers and transparency: vendors that educate buyers about the teas they buy.
Another trend that will hurt transparency: labelling that copies a regions known product. A little while back, I bought a sencha that was made in China. The packaging did not say where it was from. Only after I looked it up online, did I find out where it was from. I didn’t get a refund in cash either, only a store credit. Grrr.
I think the best thing you can offer is an ethically brand with good customer service. As others have said if the tea is good it will be obvious. Perhaps where transparency comes in is knowing that the brand offers something back to the origins of the tea in an ethical way so that the customer knows the tea is both top quality and doing good rather than exploiting workers.
Great customer service is also key! Offer some 1 cups samples, provide information leaflets, create your own tea recipes etc for added value :)
Login or sign up to leave a comment.