“A Tea Revolution Is Coming”

There is a revolution afoot in Scotland, not a political one but an agricultural one—with the stress on cultural. The Scots, and not the Sri Lankans, Indians or the Chinese, now make the best tea in the world, acco­rding to the keepers of the Salon du The Gold award, which to be fair is literally the gold standard for chai.

The Wee Tea Company, part of the Dal­re­och estate and the brainchild of Tam O’Braan, originally from Northern Ireland but who stuck around after studying in Scotland, walked off with the award for his company’s White Smoke strain—the finest leaf the judges had sampled this year, and with the price around £1,150 (Rs 1.15 lakh) per lb, also the second most expensive in the world. O’Braan and partners, Jamie Russell and Derek Walker, have 14,000 plants growing at 700 ft above sea level—enough to keep them in tea for the next 70 years. Their belief that tea plants benefit from altitude, fresh Highlands air and the pure spring waters that are the pride of the glens of Scotland—one of the factors that make their whiskey so fine—appears to have been a sound one. Saptarshi Ray caught up with Tam O’Braan, the unlikely chaiwallah of Caledonia.

What started your interest in tea?

Basically, it was to impress a girl. I wanted to speak to a shy young woman who I’d seen in the university library when I was studying at Edinburgh over 10 years ago, and (hopefully in a non-creepy way) followed her when she left for lunch. She nipped into a tea shop and I followed. I went up to the counter and asked for a coffee.... The room suddenly fell silent and as the tea connoisseurs all gave me scornful looks, I swear a tumbleweed blew across the room.

The owner took pity and made me a ginger chai latte, and it was superb. An evangelical beam of light hit me from the great God of Chai! That owner was Jamie Russell, now the head teamaker at Wee Tea, and the girl in question is now my wife and we’ve just had our 3rd and 4th children (twins). It was a pretty eventful day, all in all.

What makes Wee Tea so distinct?

It is the first tea grown in Scotland and against all the odds it has turned out to have an amazing flavour. That is all down to the “terroir” (as wine-tasters would say). It will not surprise many that Scotland is not a natural growing climate for tea but growing Camellia sinensis sinensis—the original tea plant, from China—is possible, mainly due to an evolutionary path that stems from the Himalayas as a mountain shrub.

As your readers will know (and is indicated in the names), Japonica is the variety of Camellia sinensis that is now indigenous to Japan. Likewise, the Assamica is that which we all know grows wild in India, or did before (mainly Scottish) plantation owners built an industry on the back of Indian labour. Going back 179 years, this relationship wasn’t fully accepted or maybe just understood in botanical science. Robert Fortune (a Scot from Berwick­shire) wrote a synopsis for the Royal Botanical Gardens of Edinburgh covering the likelihood of growing tea in Scotland. He concluded that “tea pla­nts...capable of withstanding the winter in Britain” were growing in India.

What teas do you like personally?

I’m still a fan of that ginger chai I had over a decade ago. Since I stopped drinking coffee, I can now appreciate the finer points of a Darjeeling.

Photograph by weeteaplantation.com

What’s the best way to make tea?  Milk first? Sugar? With ginger, spices?

Well, the best way to make tea is the way you like. Tea snobbery of the old grand tea room variety is either dead or dying. Yes, we all love the classics but the way it is being drunk now has nothing to do with any form of insistence upon bone china. There’s a tea revolution coming your way. For us, it’s a Scottish tea revolution but it’ll be about choice and new interesting formats.

How would you differentiate Wee Tea in a market like India?

After we both finished our Masters (me chemistry, my wife international business law), we married and left the UK to work in food security and growing crops in marginal conditions. I have worked in the Punjab, got research conducted by the Mumbai Agricultural College and travelled through Kerala. As such, I’m fully aware that India is not one market, in a business sense. One area can mix and match tea cultures, just like they mix and match languages. In fact, the most interesting thing is watching new ideas for tea being brought forward by young Indians—ways to drink it, grow it, produce it. They have started a revolution for tea that coffee has had over the past 30 years. Tea is also coming into a new phase of culinary recognition.

Where do you stand on coffee now?

It’s a great thing but no longer my favourite beverage. Mainly through poor lifest­yle issues, it is unfortunately respo­n­si­ble for far too many over-caffeinated diets. We need to watch it, the effects on our young people in particular. Tea is equal in every way, except the negatives.