[Continued from part 1]
Processing Tea Leaves
By
processing is meant the steps that are taken to turn a freshly plucked tea leaf into a dried leaf ready to be used to brew tea. While there is considerable variation, the basic steps in processing are the following. General references are Pradeepkumar
et al. [pp. 723-28] and
Wikipedia.
- Withering (or wilting): This is primarily the natural loss of water that begins when a leaf is picked. To accomplish this, the leaves might be left in the sun or placed in a cool, breezy room (see picture). Sometimes the leaves will lose enough water in this step so that their weight is reduced by more than a quarter. A very slight amount of oxidation occurs during this stage. The taste of the tea changes depending on the degree of withering. The type of tea that is desired determines when withering is stopped.
- Disruption (or leaf maceration): Wilting is brought to and end when the leaves are bruised or torn. Disruption might be light in that the leaves are merely tumbled, or it might be heavy in that the leaves are kneaded, rolled, torn, or crushed.
- Oxidation (or fermentation): The step of disruption begins the main period of oxidation since it releases enzymes from the cells. (Oxidation means that compounds in the leaf react with oxygen to produce other compounds.) An important effect of oxidation is to break chlorophyll down into tannins, which are the bitter compounds in tea. The leaf darkens to a copper color as it oxidizes and the green chlorophyll is removed. The type of tea that is desired determines when this oxidation is stopped. As Wikipedia says, "Oxidation is highly important in the formation of many taste and aroma compounds, which give a tea its liquor colour, strength, and briskness."
- Fixation (or kill-green): This step stops the oxidation at the desired level by heating the leaves to about 150 degrees F, which de-activates the enzymes that catalyze oxidation. The sooner the oxidation is stopped, the greener are the leaves.Therefore, green teas are green because they are virtually unoxidized, and black tea is black because it is completely oxidized.. The pictures illustrate various methods of heating.
- Drying: To finish the processing, the tea leaves are dried in the sun, by baking, or in various other ways. The leaves darken further tobrown or black as they dry. This step adds new flavor components, especially in green teas. The leaves are now ready for sale, though additional processing might be used for some speciality teas. The first picture shows sun drying and the second shows drying by hot air forced through the grating on the floor.
The following diagram illustrates the flow of this process. Also pictured is the output of this process, namely the cured leaves ready to be sold and consumed.
It is important to recognize that the same teas leaves can be used to make different types of tea by controlling the withering, oxidizing, and other steps in the process. The kind of tea produced depends not on the tea leaves but on how they are processed. Here is a very short
summary of the processing used to make four leading types of tea.
Type of Tea
|
Degree of Withering
|
Degree of Oxidation
|
Comments
|
Green
|
Unwithered
|
Almost none
|
|
White
|
Withered
|
Almost none
|
|
Oolong
|
Withered
|
Partially
|
Bruised
|
Black
|
Withered
|
Fully
|
Sometimes crushed
|
The method of processing determines the amount of caffeine in tea. As Weinberg and Bealer [p. 228] explain:
The longer the leaves have been fermented [oxidized], the greater their caffeine content. Green tea, which is unfermented, has the least caffeine; oolong, which is partially fermented, has about 50 percent more; and black tea, which is fully fermented, has three times as much.
Just as we saw with chocolate (16 May 2015) and coffee (18 Jul 2015), different teas are often
blended, with the goals being better taste, more consistency, or higher price.
The processed tea often retains
odors, and
additives are used to mask these odors. For example, we have seen that bergamot is an additive in Earl Grey tea (e-mail of 17 April 2015), and vanilla (e-mail of 22 May 2015) is also sometimes used.
Brewing Tea
The usual method of preparing tea is to create an infusion. That is, pour near-boiling water over tea leaves, let the mixture sit, i.e., steep, for a while so that the hot water can draw the flavor out of the leaves, and remove the leaves from the mixture. Since a single infusion does not remove all of the flavor from the leaves, the same leaves can be used for multiple infusions. If you want stronger tea, use more leaves rather than increasing the steeping time. For several popular teas, the table below shows the recommended water temperature, steeping time, and number of infusions that one can typically get.
Type of Tea
|
Water Temperature
(degrees F)
|
Steeping Time
(minutes)
|
Number of Infusions
|
Green
|
167-176
|
1-2
|
4-6
|
White
|
149-158
|
1-2
|
3
|
Oolong
|
176-185
|
2-3
|
4-6
|
Black
|
210
|
2-3
|
2-3
|
You don't need to trust this table since you can determine empirically how you like your tea. As Wikipedia states, "One way to taste a tea throughout its entire process is to add hot water to a cup containing the leaves and sample it every 30 seconds. As the tea leaves unfold (known as 'The Agony of the Leaves') the taste evolves."
Wikipedia also describes how the successive infusions are traditionally treated in China.
Historically in China, tea is divided into a number of infusions. The first is immediately poured out to wash the tea, and then the second and further infusions are drunk. The third through fifth are nearly always considered the best, although different teas open up differently and may require more infusions to produce the best flavour.
Dried tea leaves are three percent
caffeine by weight. The method of brewing strongly affects the amount of caffeine that is extracted from the tea leaves. As Weinberg and Bealer [p. 228] explain:
The longer tea is brewed, the more caffeine is present in the final drink. A cup of black tea infused for three minutes has 20 to 40 mg, while black teas infused for four minutes has 40 to 100 mg.
Unless otherwise stated, this entire section, including the quotations, is taken from
Wikipedia.
Tea as the Key to the Rise of Civilization
Water is essential to life, and it is cheap, but it has the drawback of being a delivery system for a host of water-borne illnesses. For the first tens of thousands of years of human existence as hunters and gatherers, this was not a problem since populations were low and always on the move. With the rise of cities, however, water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, and dysentery became an important source of mortality; cities a few hundred years ago had such a high mortality rate that they could only maintain their populations through constant immigration. In short, civilization required cities, which in turn required a drink to provide the human body with water but not with water-borne diseases. Of all the possible drinks, tea best fits the bill. Tea is cheap since it can be grown in a wide range of climates. Just a few leaves are needed to produce a pot of tea, and they can be reused. Tea leaves are light and easy to store. Tea is easy to prepare. Tea tastes good (to many) and provides a jolt of caffeine. Above all, tea is safe since the water is boiled. These properties allowed tea to conquer the world and make the earth safe for civilization. It was only with the rise of public health measures in the 19th century that cities could have self-sustaining populations without tea.(This paragraph is an exposition of the views of M&M [pp. 32-39, 168-77, 258-59, 269], except for the comment on early cities not being able to maintain their populations, which comes from my fund of general knowledge.)
It should be noted that, roughly speaking, the spread of large cities in China (8th century A.D.) and Japan (14th century) began when tea became the standard drink in those countries [M&M, pp. 168-72].
If this claim that tea gave rise to cities might seem extreme to you, be aware that it is not the only extreme claim. Weinberg and Bealer claim that the caffeinated beverages, mainly coffee and tea, were critical enablers of the modern economy. They point out that the minute hand became standard on the clocks of England around 1600 [p. 125]. This meant that the need arose for people to be alert and regimented, and they state that the clock and caffeine together accomplished this. As they state it, "The only suitable analeptic, one easily available, well tolerated, safe, and effective, is caffeine" [p. 126]. (An analeptic is a stimulant to the central nervous system.) Their theory is as follows [p. 126].
Caffeine, therefore, in the vehicles of coffee and tea, fostered the productivity gains that a newly competitive environment demanded, and did so in two important ways. First, caffeine helped large numbers of people to coordinate their work schedules by giving them the energy to start work at a given time and continue it as long as necessary and, in some cases, even increased the accuracy of their work. This meant that people could work longer hours and accomplish, proportionately, even more than they had before. Second, the caffeinated beverages, by displacing the heavy consumption of alcohol, markedly reduced one of the endemic impairments of medieval industry. Sober workers always produce more and better work than drunken ones.
Their conclusion is that the modern world
... has been made possible only by a general ability of people to, in certain limited ways, function together like parts of a great machine. Without caffeine, many of the complex and far-reaching achievements of modern civilization could not have been realized [p. 356].
This theory does not seem well founded to those of us who don't drink coffee or tea.
Highly Selective History of Tea
- The tea plant apparently evolved in the area where northern Burma meets southwest China, i.e., the provinces of Yunnan or Sichuan [Yamamoto, p. 4]. By the beginning of historical time it had expanded its range to include most of eastern and southern Asia.
- Monkeys are known to chew tea leaves, and the first human use of the plant probably was to imitate monkeys and chew these leaves to take advantage of the caffeine. In fact, some tribesman still chew tea today [M&M, pp. 41-42].
- It is thought that tea drinking began in China with a medicinal purpose in the Shang dynasty, 1766-1050 B.C., and then transitioned to being a stimulating drink. The earliest recorded drinking of tea is in the tenth century B.C.
- Shortly after tea was introduced in China, Buddhist monks took it up since it overcame sleepiness and increased concentration during meditation. In fact, tea became one of the four ways of concentrating the mind, with the others being walking, sitting quietly in thought, and feeding fish. The monks took on the work of domesticating the tea plant, i.e., transforming it from a tall forest tree to a short bush that could be easily harvested. Until the fifth century A.D., tea was mainly spread via monastic gardens [M&M, pp. 44-45]. During this period tea was primarily seen as a medicine and an aid for monks. Recall that coffee (e-mail of 18 Jul 2015) also was first used to keep monks awake.
- Around 593 A.D. Buddhist monks took tea from China to Japan. Drinking tea did not become widespread in Japanese culture, however, until the 13th and 14th centuries. The ideal was that every home would have a few feet in which to grow tea bushes that would constitute an attractive, consumable hedge [M&M, pp. 52-55].
- During the Tang dynasty (620-907), tea's possibilities as an everyday beverage were realized, and it became widely popular through much of China [M&M, p. 45].
- The West first became aware of tea in the sixteenth century A.D. when Portuguese traders and priests in China encountered it.
- Around 1610 the first tea appeared in Europe when the Dutch East India Company brought tea leaves to Amsterdam from China [M&M, p. 66].
- In 1657 tea first came to England [M&M, p. 66]. Tea was, however, mainly an expensive curiosity and was not widely drunk by the English, who preferred the cheaper coffee, which had arrived in England at about the same time as tea [M&M, pp. 69, 73, e-mail of 18 Jul 2015]. Samuel Pepys had his first cup of tea in 1660 [Labaree, p. 3].
- In 1717 Thomas Twining converted his coffee shop into the first teahouse in London [M&M, p. 81].
- After 1730 the price of tea fell considerably, consumption in Britain skyrocketed,and tea became the common everyday drink for all social classes (see below for the cause of the fall in price) [M&M, pp. 69-75, 95, Labaree, p. 3].
- England exported a considerable amount of tea to America, where the colonists if anything drank more per capita than the English [M&M, pp. 73-74], though perhaps three-quarters of it was smuggled from Holland to avoid paying indirect British taxes [Labaree, pp. 6, 7]. The Tea Act passed by the House of Commons on 10 May 1773 roused the anger of the colonists since to them it represented direct taxation without representation [Labaree, pp. 73, 96, 102]; the colonists were always quick to stand on principle when this meant resisting a tax. This act fueled their general unhappiness with the British government and led the colonists to boil over, and on 16 Dec 1773 the Boston Tea Party was the result. After the tea was dumped into Boston Harbor, patriots were expected to switch from tea to coffee. The inducements for this change varied from violence to arguments such as that tea was poisonous, bred fleas, and was packed into chests by the dirty bare feet of Chinese coolies [Labaree, pp. 161,164]. The resulting decline in the consumption of tea is captured in a letter that John Adams wrote to Abigail Adams on 6 July 1774 (exactly 170 years before the birth of Mike Nienhaus):
I believe I forgot to tell you one Anecdote: When I first came to this House it was late in the Afternoon, and I had ridden 35 miles at least. "Madam" said I to Mrs. Huston, "is it lawfull for a weary Traveller to refresh himself with a Dish of Tea provided it has been honestly smuggled, or paid no Duties?"
"No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I'le make you Coffee." Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better.
Coffee has ever since remained more popular than tea in the United States. (For a good treatment of the large-scale tea smuggling into the American colonies, see Labaree [pp. 6-12]. This widespread smuggling constituted a breakdown in law and order that made resistance to the British seem like a natural, everyday activity, and thus paved the way for the American Revolution [Labaree, pp. 13, 56-57]. Thus, while coffee is usually thought to be the beverage of revolution (e-mail of 18 Jul 2015), even the genteel beverage of tea has had its moment in the radical sun.)
- Around 1850 India started producing significant amounts of tea; this allowed the British to break the Chinese monopoly on tea (see below).
- In 1837 Joseph and Edward Tetley set up as tea merchants, and they were eventually the first to sell tea bags in Britain. This brand is now owned by an Indian company, Tata Tea.
- In 1890 Thomas Lipton, wanting to lower the price of tea in his chain of grocery stores, purchased a tea plantation in Ceylon. He packaged the produce of this plantation as Lipton's Tea. This brand is now owned by Unilever.
- Serious growing of tea in East Africa only began after World War II [Clowes, p. 140]. Kenya is now the third leading producer of tea in the world, behind China and India and just ahead of Sri Lanka.
- While tea remains the leading British drink, in 1956 when commercial television came to Britain, the commercial breaks were not long enough to allow a cup of tea to be brewed, so there was an movement toward instant coffee [Pendergrast, p. 243].
Britain, China, India, and Tea: A Case Study of Imperialism
Prior to about 1730, tea in Britain had been fairly expensive and was mainly restricted to the wealthy. After 1730, however, tea began to surge in popularity mainly because of lower prices that were in large part due to advances in transportation; improvements in ship construction, maps, cannons used to ward off pirates, and sextants allowed a direct route from China to England to be opened [M&M, p. 74]. The resulting lower cost of tea combined with promotion of tea by the British East India Company, rising incomes, and the ease with which tea could be smuggled led tea to become the common, everyday drink for all social classes [M&M, pp. 69-75, 95]. Britain became a tea drinking country.
As tea evolved into a necessity for the British, they grew restive over what seemed to be unnecessarily high prices for tea from China. They saw two problems. First, production in China was highly inefficient. Methods had not changed in a thousand years, and China took no notice of the Industrial Revolution, then in full swing [M&M, pp. 101-105]. Second, China had a virtual monopoly on tea and, thus, no incentive to undertake improvements or lower prices.
Exacerbating the situation was that not only did Europe want tea from China but also other products such as porcelains and silks.Since there were no trade products from Europe that appealed to the Chinese, the Chinese government imposed the requirement that silver be used to pay for tea [M&M, p. 75, Hanes and Sanello, pp. 20, 21], and between roughly 1757 and 1817, the British and other European countries sent
28 million kilograms of silver to China. To deal with this ruinous balance of payments deficit, in about 1773 the British started exporting opium from India to China [M&M. p. 110, Hanes and Sanello, p. 21]. This strategy succeeded for the British since in the early 19th century the value of the opium exported to China roughly equaled the amount of the tea and other products imported from China [M&M, p. 110, Hanes and Sanello, p. 22]. This did not work out so well for the Chinese, however, since they experienced a devastating rise in drug addiction. Addicts, often in the prime of life, "...were loading opium pipes and drifting off into weeklong escapes from productivity, responsibility, and consciousness" [Hanes and Samello, p. 25].
The equilibrium between imports and exports was disturbed by two factors as the 19th century unfolded. First, as mass production took hold, the cost of British textiles plummeted, and demand in India for them soared. India needed a way to pay for these textiles and the easiest solution was for India to grow more opium [Hanes and Sanello, p. 22]. Second, the British East India Company, which had a monopoly on trade with China, had controlled the opium trade and kept it to a low profile. In 1833, however, Parliament abolished this monopoly, which meant that private traders were free to buy the opium now being grown in India and sell it in China, which they did without compunction and with great success [Hanes and Samello, p. 24].
When the amount of opium flowing into China increased fivefold between 1821 and 1837, the desperate Chinese government, whose actions to control the trade had failed, in 1836 took the extreme step of completely banning all imports of opium [Hanes and Sanello, p. 33]. This ban, which threatened the flow of tea, and the disruption caused by the attempts to enforce the opium ban, were the proximate
cause of the
First Opium War (1839-1842), with two enabling causes being the arrogant and rigid attitudes of the British, and the arrogant and rigid attitudes of the Chinese [Hanes and Sanello, p. xii]. When Britain sent warships to protect trade, the thirty year-old William Gladstone, in a career-making speech, roared, "... a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with permanent disgrace, I do not know and have not read of.... [Our] flag is become a pirate flag , to promote an infamous traffic" [quoted by Hanes and Sanello, p. 79]. In large part because the Chinese were using 16th century weaponry while the British were using 19th century weaponry [Hanes and Sanello, pp. 65, 70, 93, 97], Britain triumphed in this war, and, among other things, perpetuated the opium trade [Hanes and Sanello, pp. 156-59] and got Hong Kong [Hanes and Sanello, pp. 120, 122, 155]. Continuing the opium trade, though condemned by British moralists, was highly popular since it balanced the British budget by providing ten percent of the tax revenues [Hanes and Sanello, p. 157]. While the Chinese were physically addicted to opium, the British government and businessmen were financially addicted [Hanes and Sanello, p. 163].
The Second Opium War (1856-1860) is not covered here since tea had a very low profile in this war. At the end of this war, a present was made to Queen Victoria of a small dog that the Chinese had bred to resemble the Chinese heraldic lion. In this way, the Pekinese dog entered Western consciousness [Hanes and Sanello, p. 291].
Britain's victory in the First Opium War only took care of the short run problem, namely the ban on opium trading. The long run problem of China having a monopoly on tea still left the British highly vulnerable. The solution was to grow tea someplace else that the British could control. In 1835-1837 the British discovered that wild tea grew in Assam [M&M, pp. 129-39]. Years followed in which growers gradually figured out, at least in part, how to deal with the remoteness of the area, the bugs, the diseases, the tigers, and the labor force, and by about 1850 tea was being successfully produced [M&M, pp. 144-48]. Later, tea plantations were also established in Ceylon.
It was necessary, however, to produce the tea more cheaply than the Chinese. Therefore, the British employed the techniques of the Industrial Revolution. The steps of planting, cultivating, and picking the leaves have resisted mechanization to the present day, but the British did improve efficiency by studying each step of the process.
Exactly how much space should be allowed between each bush; what land was best; how carefully must the rows be planted for optimum picking; how many shade trees and of what kind; what were the best seeds and how were the nurseries to be tended--all these had to be carefully planned. Once the bushes were planted, a further set of experiments and instructions related to the frequency and the nature of the pruning, the application of fertilisers and the use of sprays and pesticides to protect the plants against various diseases....This constant experimentation with and application of ever-improving methods could not be achieved by the Chinese small peasant [M&M, pp. 192-93].
In addition, workers were housed in tiny huts similar to barracks, division of labor was used so that each worker repeatedly performed some small and well-defined task, and the workers toiled without relief through long days [M&M, p. 193]. Each child was given the task of collecting twenty pounds of caterpillars per day [M&M, p. 199].
Once the leaves were picked, mechanization could be brought into play, and the British invented rollers, hot-air dryers, sorters, and packers so that the processing from freshly plucked tea leaf to boxed tea ready for shipment could be almost fully automated [M&M, pp. 195-96]. Finally, steamships and later railroads allowed the boxed tea to be cheaply transported to port [M&M, p. 197]. In this way labor organization, science, machines, steam, and capital created an industrial empire on the banks of the Brahmaputra that was able to significantly undercut the Chinese prices.
The problem of where the British would get their tea was solved. The winners were the British investors, merchants, and tea drinkers, and the losers were the Indians, who were exploited as wage slaves [M&M, pp. 203-216], and the Chinese, who lost a major market [M&M, p. 199]. The effect on the Chinese is described by M&M [p. 201]:
Many hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants and middlemen, already living in great hardship, were suddenly deprived of their supplementary cash income. All along the supply line, from the tiny growers, through those who ground the tea in the factories, the toilers on the tea trails, the workers and merchants at the ports, people were thrown out of work. The effects were catastrophic and added to the instability of China in the later nineteenth century with its widespread political and religious turbulence.
As Joseph Schumpeter would say, this example of the old making way for the new is just another instance of the perennial gale of creative destruction, which is a leading feature of capitalism. (The concept of creative destruction is introduced in Schumpeter [p. 83], and the phrase "perennial gale of creative destruction" is used as a repeated catch phrase [e.g., pp. 84, 87].)
Miscellany
Russia was an early convert to tea drinking. By 1689 a
caravan of hundreds of camels was exporting tea from China to Russia on a year-round basis.
Bricks of tea came to be used as currency in China since it was a suitable unit of account, a medium of exchange, and a store of wealth. Unlike most currency, tea had the unusual property that it became more valuable as it got further from its source [M&M, pp. 49-50]. In addition, tea was also used as money by the Russians [Weinberg and Bealer, pp. 308-309, 319]. The picture below shows a brick of tea used as a currency by the Russians. Recall that the Aztecs used chocolate (16 May 2015) and the Islamic world used coffee beans (18 Jul 2015) as currency.
In the 19th century China tea was successfully grown in South Carolina but was abandoned because high labor costs made it uneconomic. Wild tea plants can still be found in the area [Weinberg and Bealer, p. 249].
The flavor of tea depends on the
height from which it is poured since this results in different degrees of aeration. This practice of pouring from altitude is common in Africa, and in some countries different names are used for tea depending on the height from which it is poured. In Southeast Asia tea is poured several times from a height to trap so many air bubbles that a froth is developed. Moreover, there is a dance in which a dancer repeatedly pours tea into a container held by another dancer. This dance demands great skill and precision from the dancers. Perhaps we will be able to persuade Michiko to do this dance for us. A number of videos showcase the artistry involved in pouring from altitude. This
video from China combines classical dance with baton twirling. This
video from China shows acrobats performing a tea pouring dance (see picture). This
video from Malaysia starting at 1:42 shows a contemporary tea pouring dance (see picture below of synchronized tea pouring from altitude); it even features blindfolded tea pouring (see picture). In a more popular setting this
video and this
video, both from Thailand, picture street vendors showing off their moves. Perhaps tea pouring from altitude could become an Olympic event. (Recall from the e-mail of 16 May 2015 that the Mayans and Aztecs liked a froth on their chocolate drink. I neglected to say in that e-mail that they achieved this by repeatedly pouring the chocolate from a height; see the picture below of the Aztec woman pouring chocolate.)
The
shelf-life of tea depends on various factors. For starters, tea must be stored at room temperature but away from heat, light, air, and moisture to avoid mold. Black tea will keep for perhaps two years and green tea a year. There is tea in my cabinet that I stock for guests that has been there for maybe twenty years. It looks like I have not been a good host. Note to Dave Robinson: You really should have complained.
Tea leaves contain vitamins and nutrients such as potassium and magnesium that are lost during straining. To keep from losing these nutrients, you might want to follow in the steps of the Tibetans and mix the leaves with flour, butter, and sugar to make a soup [M&M, p. 51].
In the novel Elephant Walk by Robert Standish, one can read [p. 8] of the havoc that was caused by the destruction by disease of the coffee crop in Ceylon in 1869. You can also read of how that spelled doom for the cultivation of coffee on the island (e-mail of 18 Jul 2015) and of how this caused plantations to switch to tea. The novel as a whole gives a picture of life on a tea plantation in Ceylon in 1913-1918.
Tea and coffee were the first global products [M&M, p. 32]. In the 17th century they both came to be grown, consumed, and traded around the world.
Party Tip
Instead of your party featuring the same old dances that your guests have been doing for decades, introduce them to dancing while pouring tea from altitude. Show them one or two of the videos mentioned above so they can get the hang of it. Hand each dancer two containers, one to pour the tea and one to catch it, then turn on the music. Be sure to video the event so that the hilarity is preserved for all time. I suggest that you set the dance floor outside. Have extra towels on hand so your guests can shower after the dance is completed. Good fun.
Disclaimer
I don't care for tea, though, unlike coffee, I can choke it down if necessary. About the only time I drink tea is if I am in a social situation where it would be awkward to refuse it.
Rick
References
Clowes, Michael St. John, "
Camellia sinensis," in Abraham H. Halevy, ed.,
Handbook of Flowering, Volume VI, CRC Press, 1989, pp 139-45. These pages are available at this
site.
Hanes III, W. Travis, and Frank Sanello, The Opium Wars; The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another, Barnes & Noble, 2002. This book is an engagingly written exposition of the First and Second Opium Wars, but its sloppiness (internal contradictions, incorrect dates, careless editing) means that it must be used with caution. I had access to this book in hard copy.
Labaree, Benjamin Woods, The Boston Tea Party, Oxford University Press, 1964. This has long been the standard work on the Boston Tea Party, and it has been in my library for more than a quarter of a century. I never opened it, however, until I came to write this e-mail. (This illustrates my philosophy of book-buying, which is, when I see a first-class book that I will want to read, I buy it. Eventually, the time to read it will come, and I will have it handy on my shelf. Perhaps this philosophy made sense in the 1970s and 1980s, but the ready availability of almost any book over the Internet now makes this philosophy obsolete. It is this philosophy that has made my apartment into a warehouse for books.) I found that this book deserves its reputation, and I highly recommend it as one window onto the coming of the American Revolution.
[M&M] Macfarlane, Alan, and Iris Macfarlane,
The Empire of Tea, Overlook Press, 2004 (first published in England in 2003). This is a leading authority on tea, so I have quoted it in preference to other sources. I had access to this book in hard copy. PARENTS TAKE NOTICE: The publisher of this book, Overlook Press is to be honored for reprinting the complete series of
Freddy the Pig books, which to me is the number one series of children's books. Moreover, these books retain their interest for adults. I still read them.
Maltin, Leonard, ed., Leonard Maltin's TV Movies and Video Guide: 1988 Edition, New American Library, 1987.
Pendergrast, Mark, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed Our World, Basic Books, revised edition, paperback, 2010 (first edition 1999). For a description of this book, see the e-mail on coffee of 18 Jul 2015.
Pradeepkumar, T.,
et al.,
Management of Horticultural Crops: Part 2, New India Publishing Agency, 2008. Selected portions of this book can be found on-line at this
site, which is the only access I had to this book. As it turns out, most of the chapter on tea, pp. 691-753, appears in this on-line version, where the omitted pages are 714-16, 718, 726, 729-32, 734, 736, 740-53.
Schumpeter, Joseph A.,
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, third edition, Harper Torchbook paperback, 1962. (First edition published in 1942, second in 1947, and third in 1950.) This is a classic book on the nature of capitalism. On p. 83 Schumpeter states that the ".. process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism." Right-wing
thinkers have latched onto this concept. If one believes that this process is desirable, it can be used to justify just about anything. I had access to this book in hard copy.
Standish, Robert, Elephant Walk, MacMillan, 1949 (first published in 1948). This novel has been in my library for nearly forty years, and, until I researched this e-mail, it was the source of all of my knowledge of tea growing. It was made into a 1954 movie of the same name with Elizabeth Taylor, the replacement for Vivien Leigh, who can be seen in some long shots. I believe that this was the first movie I ever saw. If you are wondering about the quality of this movie, Maltin [p. 282] only gives it two stars and says, "Pachyderm stampede climax comes none too soon." This stampede is all I remember about the movie.
Weinberg, Bennett Alan and Bonnie K. Bealer, The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug, Routledge, 2002. For a description of this book, see the e-mail on coffee of 18 Jul 2015.
Yamamoto, T., M. Kim, L.R. Juneja,
Chemistry and Applications of Green Tea, CRC Press, 1997. The page that I quote can be found in the
Amazon preview of this book, which is the only access I had to this book. As an aside, the publisher of this book is also the publisher of the book in my library that I have owned the longest. I bought the
CRC Standard Mathematical Tables, twelfth edition, 1964, in high school, and, marvelous to relate, it has been in intermittent use for half a century. I keep it on my desk and frequently refer to it. Over the last half century I have looked up the quadratic formula hundreds of times (I have it memorized, of course, but I look it up just to make sure that I don't blow a sign) and the formulas for the area and volume of a sphere almost as much. The pages containing derivatives, integrals, trigonometric identities, and series are well-worn. The other purchase that I made at the same time, a slide rule, has not proved to have similar staying power. I haven't used my slide rule since the 1970s and, in fact, I threw it out a few years ago during one of my rare cleaning frenzies.
