In defense of the tisane

David Lyons responds to Ian Bersten’s post on the Sydney Tea Festival.

Pop online, and visit almost any internet tea company’s website. Or walk through the doors of most tea shops around the world today, and the variety of classic, blended and flavored teas along with the selection of tisane is truly incredible. This last decade has seen an explosion of flavors, with every conceivable blend of flavored tea or tisane being created. They’ve always been there but this is the age of plenty, the age of the consumer, and the tea consumer wants these sexy flavored teas.

Flavored teas and tisane are the fastest growing sector in the tea industry, whether being consumed as a hot or cold beverage. But like every kind of fashion are these so-called new ways of drinking our tea actually new or just recycled?

Each generation struggles with identity; they never want to be like the generation before them. Which teenage daughter wants to be like their mother, or which twenty-something-year-old man wants to replicate his father. None. Some may follow in the footsteps of their parents but they will push to do things their way. It’s an in-built part of our nature.

Fashion is, and has always been a form of difference between the generations, and the fashion of tea is no different. Throughout history tea makers have strived to create that point of difference, whether that be in the style of leaf, the manufacturing process, the production or even in the blending or flavoring of their teas. Tisane, a brew made from herbs or fruits in the form of flower petals, barks, roots, seeds, or fruits have been consumed for thousands of years. The blends of these tisane have also followed trends or fashions over those years. Human kind like other creatures have looked to nature to provide products that will aid a healthy existence, or assist in times of sickness. The use of different ingredients at various times and the names we give the tisane are either because of up-to-date health information or just purely a fashion twist that suits a particular point in time. Many who create healthy alternative tisane today are respected for their knowledge but at one time in Europe may have been burned alive as a witch.

Flavored teas have also gone through their own stages of fashion crises’ which would appear to start in China just before the turn of the new millennia. It’s believed in the centuries around 200BC that tribal people along the Yangtze River were brewing flavored tea. This tea was being made from the old style tea bricks which were roasted, ground into powder, mixed with boiling water, and brewed with sweet onions, ginger and orange peel. Even the famous Lu Yu, born in 733AD, during the Tang Dynasty (609-907), commented on the use of flavorings in his famous tea book, The Classic of Tea. Lu Yu, being a purist, denounced the use of flavorings with tea which at the time included sweet onions, ginger, tangerine or orange peel, dogwood berries, pepper, mint and jujube (ziziphus) but found the addition of salt acceptable. Later during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) there appeared the use of aromatic oils and flower petals along with the preference for black tea. Today we have the global fascination with India’s spicing of tea in the form of chai masala. Around the world there would be thousands of recipes in different countries mimicking the now iconic Kolkata street tea.

Many in the tea trade will worry and sometimes ridicule, what is seen as a new style of drinking tea. I believe we should not be nervous of future trends but embrace them; after all you still need tea to produce these flavored teas. And the person being introduced and enjoying a flavoured tea today will continue their tea journey past these initial introductions and on. They will experiment, taste and discover blended, classic and rare teas, along the way.

Some recent figures estimating the demographics of the incredibly popular Sydney Tea Festival lays evidence at our feet as to the buying tea public.

Age 15 to 35: 55% – 65% female, 35% male

Age 51 plus: 5% – 50% female 50% male

Women between the ages of 15 to 35 were the majority of attendees at the festival, and certainly to the pleasure of the stall holders in the tea market section of the festival. As these are the new tea drinkers on their journey of tea discovery and they are not afraid to spend. The tea workshops that were presented at the festival, had a similar attendance ratio.

So, has anything really changed? Young women purchasing what they enjoy, looking after their well-being and creating social interaction with like-minded people… To me it sounds like the European and colonial tea story is continuing in the same vein as it has for at least the last two or three hundred years. The tea bag generation, consumers of the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s who were sold the lifestyle convenience of the tea bag may look at these modern and outrageous ideas of flavored teas, as just a fad, a passing fashion, but it’s not.

Flavored teas have been around for thousands of years much longer than many of the styles of tea, even those that we call classic teas. I believe many modern tea drinkers like variety and will have a good selection of flavored and classic teas at home and work. In my experience the consumers who purchase the flavored teas are purchasing just as many black, green tea or white teas. For many the flavored teas are a treat, something special, a brew to make when friends come round, a conversation piece.

Fashions change, we grow older and those trendy flavored-tea-sipping young women of today will soon be the mothers of tomorrow and the grandmothers of the future. Allow them their moment to be the trend setters for now, allow them to manipulate and sculpt the tea fashion of the day. After all it is tea they’re drinking!

Always enjoy your tea, the way you like it.

Image credit: David Lyons, 1834tea.com

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