Here comes the sun – and the iced tea!

This summer, enjoy the benefits of healthy and refreshing iced teas. Chilled teas and herbal infusions, enjoyed as they are or with a few simple ingredients added, make excellent alternatives to sugary or alcoholic drinks. There are many ways to prepare iced tea that offer new tasting experiences on long sunny days.

Served with an afternoon snack, an iced infusion will delight family and friends of all ages. Caffeine-free, thirst-quenching and with no added sugar, it’s the ideal beverage for a break. Come early evening, a single-estate tea brewed at room temperature is a delightful way to savour the last rays of sun. This preparation method brings out the tea’s complex aromas and preserves the subtly astringent texture. Before a meal, iced tea can be offered to guests as a delicious and healthy aperitif that connoisseurs in particular will appreciate. And there’s nothing to stop you from sticking with tea at meal time, when you can accompany every course with a cold-brewed tea. Get creative and have fun experimenting with pairings to suit your tastes: a Japanese green tea with iodine notes goes well with raw fish, while a black tea from Yunnan complements grilled red meat. Later, intrigue your guests by steeping tea leaves with melting ice cubes, a method known as koridashi, which brings out the tea’s umami intensity. A shot of iced-brewed tea is ideal to serve between courses. And when night falls and everyone has eaten, an iced infusion will bring the meal to a delicious conclusion.

Try, taste, savour, and remember that all teas can be served iced!

By François-Xavier Delmas

By Romain Hoarau

Contributors

François-Xavier Delmas

François-Xavier is the founder of Palais des Thés and one of the world’s leading tea experts. He has been travelling around the world’s plantations for more than thirty years.

Romain Hoarau

A tea sommelier with a passion for Chinese and Japanese teas, Romain loves advising customers in the Toulouse store.

By Laetitia Portois

Bénédicte Bortoli

Laetitia Portois

Laetitia is especially fond of Japanese green teas. She enjoys telling stories and is passionate about sharing her profession with others.

Malawi, Africa’s tea pioneer

For a long time, tea has remained the preserve of Asia. Today, on the African continent, you’ll not only find the world’s biggest tea exporter but, if you look hard enough, you’ll also come across small-scale production of quality teas. There are enthusiasts making remarkable teas outside the industry mainstream. This is an opportunity for Palais des Thés to bring rare teas to a wider audience.

By François-Xavier Delmas

For a long time I thought that tea only grew in Asia. I’m talking about really good tea, not broken leaves, dust, or anything else that ends up in mass-produced tea bags. It suited me to believe this, because even a lifetime isn’t enough to travel around all the different growing regions of this immense continent. Instead, I continued to journey from a Japanese island to the banks of the Mekong river, from the Himalayan foothills to the volcanic islands of the Indian Ocean, via the Shan, Naga and Lizu people. And year after year there would be another mountain, another valley, another community to get to know.

And then came Africa. It happened due to a chance meeting. Of course I knew that Kenya had become the world’s largest tea exporter. I knew that wherever the British had gone, tea was grown. I knew that many countries in East Africa, starting with the Great Lakes region in the Rift Valley, had been growing tea since the early twentieth century. I just hadn’t tasted any thing special from the continent, so I’d never thought of going there.

Strange bugs

But then a tea producer told me about Alex, and another one did the same. So I set out for Blantyre after stopping off in Addis Ababa. This time Ethiopia would have to wait, and I arrived in Malawi’s business capital, located near the southern end of this vast country that descends through Africa like a long scar from the Eritrean coast to the banks of the crocodile-infested Shire river. One way of recounting a trip is through the bugs you encounter along the way. There are millipedes so improbably large that at night, in Alex’s house, I would hear them crawling along the corridors, their countless legs tapping away on the floor tiles. I remember the sound of the millipedes and the bite of the ants, gigantic ants that don’t just nip but clamp on with their jaws and don’t let go. You have to pull them off one by one, forcing them to let go of your flesh, like removing a bone from the mouth of a hungry dog.

If you’ve ever accidentally sat on an anthill you’d understand the sensation of having hundreds of bugs suddenly crawling under your clothes and up your body and biting you all over. You have to clasp them one by one between two fingers, pull sharply, then quickly move on to the next. In China, you find strange bugs on your plate; in Africa, it’s the bugs that eat you.

Alex’s tea plants

It’s only an hour’s drive from Blantyre to Thyolo, enough time for Alex, who kindly met me at the airport, to tell me about the tea from the former Nyasaland, one of the first countries in Africa to start growing this crop, in 1878. Malawi is also the first country to have its own dedicated tea research Institute.

While Alex’s ancient jeep swerved between men herding cattle, ox carts, bicycles and a colourful crowd – it was market day – he told me about his grandfather, a pioneer who arrived with the British army to end slavery, and never left.

Two generations later, Alex is living an incredible life here with Anette, who took a road trip with a friend by motorbike from their native Sweden and decided to stay and settle here with him. Their life is unlike any other, their surroundings are unique. What strikes me when I arrive at Alex’s plantation is the rare, wild beauty of the landscape. Beauty as far as the eye can see, where the green of the tea bushes mingles with the colour of stone, rocks and mountain peaks. To top it all off, the camellias and the Abyssinian acacias are simply stunning.

Alex produces tea for the industry, he needs it to live, but as a true tea enthusiast he’s not content with that. He has set up various small workshops to make teas of all colours using traditional methods. He’s experimenting with green, semi-oxidised tea as well as white, dark and smoked teas. And while the machines that produce CTC tea (see “The CTC method” on p. 13) are running at full capacity, Alex can be proud that his tenacity, curiosity, and expertise mean that some very exceptional teas now make up more than five percent of his output. That outcome is all the more impressive because Alex has travelled very little. However, he has researched everything thoroughly and has shown incredible resourcefulness in finding machines, learning how to do things properly, and setting up the perfect factory – one that suits his land, his climate and his tea plants. It took him several attempts to make his first smoked tea and his first dark tea.

Southern Malawi is dominated by beautiful mountain ranges and high plateaus covered with tea trees.

A responsible approach

What I also really like about Alex is his consideration for others and his deep sense of doing the right thing by the villagers, all those who live or work at Satemwa, an immense estate of nearly 900 hectares.

To make these teas of all colours, he buys leaves from nearly two hundred small producers situated around the plantation, thereby significantly improving their standard of living. This approach has been recognised by accreditation schemes including Fair Trade and the Rain Forest Alliance. These farmers don’t just depend on tea for their livelihood, they also grow corn, spinach and tomatoes.

Alex is proud as he takes me around every plot on the plantation, every production building, around the school and dispensary. There’s a lot to be proud of, he’s a bit of a pioneer in Africa, one of the first to try to get out of mass-market teas, to make finer teas in smaller batches. He’s succeeded.

The climate challenge

Evening falls early in this part of the world. Alex comes to find me in what was his grandfather’s house where he’s kindly putting me up. It’s a charming single-storey cottage that Alex and Anette have turned into a beautiful space that they’ve opened up for tourists. The house is steeped in the history of three generations of planters. It’s as if nothing has changed for a century, everything is still there, as if Alex’s grandfather was watching over it. In his room, I can sense the life of the settlers.

Alex Kay has imported some of his tools from China and Taiwan. He makes his teas in his own way, on his own soil and with his cultivars.

In Malawi, most plantations produce industrial tea that is harvested with shears.

I meet Alex outside on the veranda. We might be at an altitude of over a thousand metres but it doesn’t cool down until later in the day. In the luxuriant garden, hundreds of birds celebrate the evening with their melodic song. While we sip a delicious, freshly squeezed garden fruit juice, Alex talks me through the plan for the next day. We’ll go to Mount Mulanje on the border with Mozambique, visit the research centre and experimental gardens, and look at the different cultivars. We’ll meet the centre’s director, as global warming is a major challenge for Alex and all the planters in the region. Scientists are working to develop more drought-resistant tea plants that can go without rain for six months. Time is running out. •

The Ctc Method

During the 1930s, the British developed the CTC – Crush, Tear, Curl – method in Assam. After the wilting stage, the leaves are chopped into tiny pieces and rolled into small, evenly sized balls. Originally intended to process low-quality leaves that couldn’t be handled using traditional methods, these types of teas are now used in massproduced tea bags, for which they are especially suitable. CTC teas turn the cup a dark colour almost instantly and don’t taste of anything interesting.

To learn more about Malawi’s teas, listen to FrançoisXavier talk about these highly complex teas (in French).