History
The Green Tea Revolution
Ancient China, Japan, and Then the World!
For thousands of years, tea has been baked, boiled, steamed, blended, filtered, steeped, and poured in a myriad incarnations. The distinctive “liquor” from the evergreen plant Camellia sinensis (and variety assamica on the Indian subcontinent) has not only been long sought after for its healthful properties but also simply enjoyed for centuries as a refreshing and stimulating beverage. Tea comes in many forms, but only leaves plucked from the species Camellia sinensis can be officially called tea. Furthermore, how those leaves are processed and prepared after harvest determines the type of tea. And while some varieties of the tea plant are better suited for a particular final product, all tea plants could potentially end up as one of the many types easily recognizable in the store today: white, green, oolong, and black.
The type of tea called “green tea” has long been consumed by the Chinese and Japanese almost exclusively, with cultural ties dating to the first millennium A.D. and, in particular, to tea ceremonies from the twelfth century. Gradually, green tea has become more widely consumed in the West, where black tea remains the most popular type. This increase in green tea’s popularity is due in part to the special heath characteristics that have become more widely known through extensive scientific study. Green tea is minimally processed and has a long tradition of consumption in the East. In the West, however, tea has competed with coffee for a place in the mug for a long time and, like the surge of interest in specialty coffee of recent years, the specialty tea industry is currently undergoing a revolution of its own. In particular, American interest in loose-leaf tea has spurred an influx of high-quality and exotic-sounding single-origin teas and blends, hand selected by specialty producers and tea sommeliers of the modern teahouses.