The third and final part of my interview with Nigel Melican is now posted on Cha Dao. Excerpted:

Cinnabar: The attempts at growing one place’s regionally-specific tea in a different location seem strange to me, because if you’re taking a type of tea varietal and growing it somewhere else, with a totally different climate and different soil conditions, it’s not going to taste the same. It seems like the more reasonable approach, rather than trying to reproduce a traditional kind of tea in a new place, would be to figure out what works best under the new conditions, and represent the tea as a new type, but perhaps that’s not as marketable.

Nigel Melican: If you look at consumers, they often go for what they know. Someone who knows a Sencha will always, given an unknown tea or the old-fashioned one that they know and love, they’ll choose the one they know and love. But you’re right, that’s what they ought to do, and it’s what I push people in Africa to do, to take the plants that they were growing for CTC tea, and do wonderful things with it.

The fellow in the photo above is certainly a handsome little frog, but you wouldn’t want him darting among the young leaves of your tea plants. He is a Phantasmal Poison Frog (Epipedobates tricolor), one of the poisonest of the poison arrow frogs.

The photograph is from Wikimedia Commons. The reason that this post is accompanied by a photo of a frog will be evident if you read the last part of the interview.

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The second part of my interview with Nigel Melican is now available for you to read on Cha Dao. Excerpted:

Cinnabar: I guess there are really two focuses of organic farming. I wasn’t even thinking about how it affects the end product, because it seems like that’s not the same conversation. The impact on the land is quantifiable and obvious, but the land doesn’t know the difference between a molecule of nitrogen, whether it’s certified organic or not, right?

Nigel Melican: No the land won’t, but — and this is why there’s the argument — people say that organic meat tastes better than inorganic meat, and often it does, because the guy who grows organic takes better care of his animals, is a better animal husband, and that shows up, and it’s the same with plants.

C: And that’s clearly the case with tea. If you’re using practices that end up contaminating the end product with dangerous toxic chemicals, the end product is going to taste bad, so that’s not going to fly.

NM: Ultimately you’re right, but if you had — God forbid — tea contaminated with mercury you wouldn’t taste it, and similarly, many of the ways that you fertilize don’t have an effect on taste. Where you do have an effect with organic on tea is that you’re putting on less nitrogen. Nitrogen leads to fast growth, and fast growth tends to be more about kilograms than it is about quality … so slow growth, as in the spring flush. Everyone says, go for the spring flush. That’s because it’s growing slowly, and the quality is definitely better. So organic should come out with slower growth.

C: But in reality, the quality of a lot of product that’s labeled as organic tea is terrible.

NM: Yes.

The image above, of mercury on cinnabar is from a photograph by Parent Géry on Wikimedia Commons.

Note: Cinnabar is a compound of mercury, and I have a strong affinity for the toxic element in its liquid metal form as well. But I wouldn’t want my tea to be tainted with it!

Note two: For an additional connection of tea and mercury, milliners during the Victorian period often suffered from mercury poisoning due to the use of mercury in the process of transforming fur into felt for hats, thus we have Lewis Carroll’s “Mad Hatter” and his uproarious tea party. In addition to insanity, mercury poisoning produces hard looking red skin, which I would expect to result in those afflicted looking a little like they were made out of cinnabar.

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When I brewed the first cup of this tea I made the mistake of using too much leaf. This resulted in a cup that was a lot more like a brutal assault of bergamot oranges to the head than a strong, orange-scented, nice cup of tea. Subsequent tastings proved much more enjoyable when I was more careful about leaf quantity and I found that I really liked drinking it, particularly as a first cup of tea as I try to launch into the day.

Jing Tea’s online description of this tea states that they designed it to suit tea drinkers who prefer to add milk to their cup. It is certainly a tea with a strong personality, one that could hold its own even with a bit of taming by milk. Since I do not add milk to tea I brewed it a little weaker than the 1-2 teaspoon to a cup ratio that the company recommends on its packaging. This resulted in a rich and tangy brew, heavy on the bergamot, but not overpowering.

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As most tea drinkers know, Sri Lanka (Ceylon) has a long-standing and enormously productive tea growing tradition. But as many tea drinkers also know, a lot of the tea coming out of Sri Lanka and called “orange pekoe” is poor quality and blended from leaf grown in a number of different locations. Unlike these lower quality teas, Plucker’s Pick’s teas are unblended and grown on single tea plantations. So rather than a mixed up jumble of mediocre tea leaves, this tea has a distinct and precise flavor.

To my surprise I really enjoyed the taste of this tea. Its character is a lot different from the Chinese black teas I generally drink when I drink black teas, but it has a lovely rich taste that I can say unreservedly is the best Ceylon tea I have ever tasted. The look of the dry leaf is a little jarring, as I am accustomed to whole-leaf teas, but the finely broken up, very brown leaf pieces produce a lovely tasting liquor. The brew is also quite a pretty, rich shade of red.

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