Assam black tea - photo credit: The Tea Spot

So the saying goes, about “the strong one” – Assam tea is the one many of us wake up to. This brisk black tea is blended into English and Irish breakfast teas, and more than 400 different single estate Assams are available from this most prolific of all tea regions in the world.

Assam valley - photo credit: doniv

Everything about this tea is big – even the leaf. The larger leaves produce a darker and stronger tea, which makes it stand up well to milk and sugar. Local people love to drink spicy masala chai (brewed sweet tea with milk and spices) using Assam loose tea leaves. Amongst black teas, you can always pick out Assam by its distinctive malty aroma and honey finish to the taste. Even though it’s a very strong tea, Assam is velvety smooth.

The varietal of tea plant that comes from Assam is Camellia sinensis assamica, and its leaves are about twice as big as the Chinese varietal Camellia sinensis sinensis. Assam is one of only two regions in the world with native tea plants (along with Southern China). This very wet Himalayan valley extends over 500 miles along the Brahmaputra river. It gets 80 – 120 inches of rainfall annually, and parts of it look like a tropical jungle. Assam is home to the largest wildlife sanctuary in India, where you can still see the one-horned Indian Rhinoceros and the Asiatic Elephant.

One-horned Rhino - photo credit: Lip Kee

Assam tea steeps up into a beautiful dark liquor. Adding milk to the tea turns it to a characteristically ruby-amber hue.

The way to make a traditional English cuppa would be to put one teaspoon of loose leaf tea per cup into a warmed teapot. Fill the teapot with freshly boiled water and stir a few seconds with a tall spoon to “elevate” the tea. Let the tea steep for 3-5 minutes. The tea will get stronger and more bitter the longer it steeps. Many Britons add milk to their tea, a habit which began when tea was thought to be bad for your health. Milk was added, in an attempt to make it healthier. “Builders’ Tea” was inspired by British builders who would not work on a house without tea breaks as a way of structuring a hard day’s work. They prefer strong, smooth and mellow tea, like Assam, and drink it with milk and sugar. Builder’s Tea goes especially well with digestive biscuits, making for a hearty snack.

With the recent attention brought to my favorite tea type – Puerh – by Dr. Oz, I thought I’d give our fans some more perspective and reasons to love this most luscious, healthful and comforting tea.

Puerh Tea Bricks

All Puerh teas are made with sun-dried broad tea leaves from the southeast Chinese Province of Yunnan, where the tea-growing season lasts eight or nine months out of the year. This Puerh family of teas includes semi-green teas and dark-green fermented teas, which may be aged for many years. Puerh is often categorized as a black tea, maybe due to its dark red infusion, but it is not the same as a black tea. Puerh is substantially higher in caffeine than black teas, with about 60 mg per 8-ounce serving (as opposed to 40 mg per 8 oz serving, on average, for black teas). It’s a very unique tea. In both its fermented and aged forms, it has been through secondary oxidization done by organisms that continue to develop in the tea, which gives it strong antibacterial characteristics – like blue cheese, or yogurt, also well known for their antibacterial qualities. The resulting aged tea is mellow, very smooth and nourishing in its flavor. Puerh teas are often classified by the year of their production (like wine vintages). Their value increases with more aging. Puerh has even been purchased as an investment tea. On one of my first tea-buying trips, in Hong Kong I saw Japanese businessmen picking up Puerh tea cakes from their personal tea lockers at a very exclusive purveyor’s shop.

Steeping Puerh tea with Tuffy Tea Steeper

Puerh teas come in a variety of finished forms – from loose smaller-leaf teas, to very large leaf bulk teas, or tea cakes and bricks. The mini-sized bricks are called Puerh tuochas, and they’re perfect for travel, or for when you take your loose leaf tea with you camping. Personally, I’m never caught without my Puerh for the morning, so I carry either mini Puerh tuochas or a mini-tin of Bolder Breakfast tea and a Tuffy Tea Steeper with me on all my travels.

Tuffy Tea Steepers

According to traditional Chinese medical practice, Puerh tea has body-warming and digestive properties. Puerh is often taken to dispel or cleanse the body of fat and toxins. Many people drink Puerh tea as a detox tea, and feel that Puerh is the best cure for a hangover. Puerh is also very popular with many as a weight loss tea.

Only in the past few decades has Puerh made its way into the U.S. I was personally involved in selecting the Puerhs we offer at The Tea Spot – both the organic loose-leaf as well as the organic tuochas, which are my travel teas of choice. Our best-selling signature tea, Bolder Breakfast, which you may have already guessed has a good helping of Puerh as well as bold black teas and dark chocolate, is our top selling tea, so I’m not alone in being a fan of this warm, cozy way of starting my mornings.

Bolder Breakfast Chocolate Puerh Tea

Gaining strength daily…
Tea’s key to recovery
Taste of luxury :)

Some days are harder
That’s when you pamper yourself
Let’s have some great tea :)

Brewlux

The Brewlux™ product that The Tea Spot is distributing is a concept patented by my brother and me. The initial inspiration for the product, however, came out of a brainstorm that included his wife Karen and my daughter Laura as well. And the funniest part of the story is that Brewlux™ might never have come about if Ohio eisweins were more to my liking.

Ashtabula County, Ohio

My brother Alex lived midway between where my daughters were doing their undergraduate work, in Oberlin, Ohio and Rochester, New York. I liked to take the opportunity to visit them all in one trip, and particularly enjoyed our Fall gatherings in this beautiful, rural area of Northeastern Ohio. Two years ago, we were enjoying a gorgeous brisk and sunny day touring the wineries in Ashtabula County, who specialize in eiswein, which is a kind of extreme form of the late harvest wine. The grapes are left to hang on the vine long after the usual moment of harvest. But whereas late harvest wines are commonly brought in from the vineyard in the Fall, grapes destined to make eiswein are left until winter fastens an icy grip on the vines. This makes for an exceptionally sweet dessert wine.

Ohio Eiswein Vineyard

After our fourth or fifth winery stop, we stopped to get some pizza. I was so enjoying the wonderful pizza aromas emanating from the giant oven. But, they were offering eiswein to taste while you waited for your pie! I couldn’t take it anymore, and became almost desperate for a great cup of tea. Needless to say, that wasn’t an option at this pizza-wine barn. All I could do was complain and fantasize about my loose leaf tea…

Yummy Pizza

Being engineers, we started to scribble and draw up designs on a napkin. Our loose leaf tea would need to have sufficient volume to expand in, you should be able to brew it in a standard to-go cup, and it could not contribute to the landfill issue. Lots of ideas, more eiswein and a delicious pizza later, we were on our way home and stopped at a convenience store where we found a set of 10 styrofoam cups and lids. Drawing, cutting and designing into the night, we had a few concepts completed by the end of the weekend, and Alex got them into a computer-aided design model right away.

Brewlux Inventors

We have just been granted a Small Business Innovative Research Grant by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to do market research in commercializing the Brewlux™. And two years into the development process, and many iterations later, we’re still always working on optimizing the “next” generation model… but now fully able to serve folks a legitimate cup of loose leaf tea to-go, in our fully biodegradable Brewlux™ filters. Thank you Alex, Karen and Laura, and I should add – Ashtabula County, Ohio and the USDA.