"Jaysus, I never realised tea was such a complicated business" said I as I entered the small meeting room and surveyed the 15 or so boxes of tea on the table before me. I caught a smirk on the manager's face as he half-turned to see who spoke before returning to his business fiddling with some wires. A white haired man with a neatly trimmed beard tilted his head and eyed me suspiciously for a moment before loudly replying in nearly perfect English: "Ah, but it's not complicated at all. No more complicated than wine!" I was momentarily stunned by his volume and the vehemence in his voice. "Right... I suppose... in spite of all the names for wine... [here I struggled vainly to think of some pertinent wine term I knew] you only ever end up drinking it." I murmured in response.
Thus transpired my introduction to my first ever encounter with that most rare of beasts: the genuine snob. Perhaps it was on account of the time I've spent in France that I always suspected that such a being would enter my life in the form of some improbablly eccentric figure bearing a mad, overweening passion for wine or cheese. Tea though? Uncommon, aberrant cases like lovers of "herbal infusions" aside, surely there's nothing more universally pedestrian, particularly for the Irish, than tea? I was about to find out that the answer to this question was a resounding no.
The white haired man with the loud voice was Bernd, our tutor from the Ronnefeldt Tea Academy, a division of the Ronnefeldt Teahaus, and it was he who was to lead our afternoon tutorial (a training module for my new job working as a waiter in the lobby of a pricey Dublin hotel) on tea preparation. This began with a tour of the major tea producing regions. Familiar names in unfamiliar contexts flashed up on the power point presentation: Japan, China, Darjeeling, Assam (both in India), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Georgia, Rwanda, Cameroon, Vietnam, New Guinea and Iran featuring amongst others. Bernd patiently navigated us through the tortuous straits of the international tea producers map by explaining that Ronnefeldt (purveyors of quality teas since 1823) only selects the highest quality tea products for its customers. Thus many of these regions were to be discounted as their "qualiteas" did not match the standards laid down by his employer's exacting tea tasters in Frankfurt. For their purposes, only the major tea producing areas of Sri Lanka, India, Taiwan and China mattered. The whistlestop world tour ended, we then focused on the actual production areas Ronnefeldt used. We learned about the differences between English and Irish breakfast teas (the first milder tea comes from the Darjeeling region where tea bushes grow on the side of mountains and the sun's rays are weak while the second comes from the lower altitude Assam area) and that Earl Grey tea comes from Sri Lanka where the climate is not as extreme as that of Darjeeling.
On the actual plantations the orthodox production process for high quality teas begins with the harvesters who are, in the interestes of quality, ethically employed. These apparently happy workers pluck only two leaves and one bud at a time from one shoot of either the tea sinensis or tea assamica bush. This picking process is then followed by withering (the harvest is exposed), rolling (the harvest is rolled in a machine to ensure it is oxidised), fermentation (green tea does not go through this stage), and drying. It is then classified in descending order of quality (based on the size of the leaf, which correlates to the strength of the aroma) from " fine leaf" to "broken" to "fanning" to "dust". In a pleasingly esoteric twist these classifications all have their own arcane descriptive accronyms; fine leaf's, for example, is FTGFOP: fine, tippy, golden, flowery, orange, pekoe while that for Fanning's is TGFOF: tippy, golen, flowery, orange, fannings. In contrast to the orthodox method, which takes 20-24 hours to complete, is the altogether more violent sounding CTC (crushing, tearing, curling) process which takes 8 -12 hours. Endearingly, while stressing that Ronnefeld have never entertained the possibility of utilising CTC (and never would) Bernd actually began to sound quite horrified by the thought of such a suggestion.
Moving on from the production process we arrived at preparation, a section of the tutorial that had earlier promised to distress Bernd even more as he contemplated common Irish attitudes to tea. With a heavy heart he adumbrated the do's and don'ts of high quality tea preparation while lamenting the fact that few people (including some management figures at the hotel) ever heeded his advice. He ploughed on regardless. Green tea should be brewed in hot (not boiling) water for no more than 2-3 minutes while black tea should brew for no longer than 3-4 minutes. Milk should never be used in green tea and lemon should never be used in any teas at all. Only white sugar should be used as brown sugar has a taste of its own that can distort the tea's aroma. For herbal and fruit infusions, which are not technically teas since they are not derived from the tea bushes, the brewing times are a minimum of 5 and 8 minutes respectively. At one point in this section Bernd struggled to agree with us (myself and some colleagues) as we tentatively suggested that, regarding consumption preferences anyway, the customer was always right. "Yes", he agreed, "but... the tea's aroma..." and he seemed to trail off wistfully, seemingly overwhelmed by an immense imaginary expanse of used dust containing tea bags daily discarded in Ireland.
Before concluding the tutorial a tasting session was convened. This, I'm sorry to report, made little lasting impression on me as unfamiliar names (like Pu-erh, Lapsang Souchong, Rooibos, Morgenthau, and Granny's Garden) heralding exotic tastes passed me by in what can only be described as a diuretic haze. Perhaps my palette just isn't sophisticated enough, or perhaps it's been coarsened beyond all recovery by my years of drinking dust or perhaps asking me (or anyone else for that matter) to pay full attention to a discourse on tea for three hours was just too much of an ask. Regardless of the answer to this question my naive belief that tea was a rather straightforward Irish affair, unlike the altogether more complicated matters of cheese and wine, has now been shattered. Indeed sometimes I'm even moved to view Bernd as being similar to the IMF in the way that both are trying to force us to face the harsh realities about how the world beyond our shores operates at variance from how we live here. Is this too laboured a point to make? In all likelihood, yes. Then again though, perhaps listening to a knowledgable individual speak passionately about a global industry where they work to provide material goods to a devoted and discerning customer base might just have some relevance for Ireland after all.
