TFA Presents: Beyond Kombucha: Pu'erh, Jun, And Dark Tea

welcome everyone to the fermentation association's webinar of beyond kombucha huawei june jun and dark tea i'm emilia nielsen stole editor of tfa we are a trade group that was launched to support producers who use fermentation to create delicious and often healthful food and beverages our goals are to help educate consumers about fermentation and its benefits support scientific research into those health benefits and work with food safety authorities to establish clearer and more appropriate regulations in regards to fermentation today we bring you three great speakers dan bolton founder editor publisher of t-journey magazine and joining dan today are two international tea experts jeff fuchs canadian explorer and writer and brendan mcgill a chef at hitchcock restaurant group in seattle we have many questions already submitted and reviewed with our speakers if there are additional topics you'd like to see addressed please enter them in the chat below and we will try to get to them i will come back at the end to ask some of our audience questions but for now i will turn it over to you dan thanks so much i'm so excited to be here and especially with two amazing people who i want to introduce now jeff lukes is enjoying himself in hawaii as we speak jeff's a t procurer an award-winning himalayan explorer and an author i've read every one of his books watched his documentary on the tea explorer and traveled in his footsteps for a short distance on the the tea horse road jeff lived in yunnan providence for more our promise for more than a decade and he became curious about the trade routes uh that were used in ancient times to transport tea from china to tibet he eventually became the first and only documented westerner to travel the main strands of the tea horse road today he authors the t sessions column for the outpost magazine he's led and been a part of more than 30 himalayan expeditions and was recently voted as one of canada's 100 greatest explorers you'll see why the co-founder of jealous jeff understands aware and dark tease his understanding of these teased is rooted in his love for the people who craft these extraordinary beverages he spends time with the people understands the process intimately and then after jeff's presentation uh brendan mcgill is joining us today a native alaskan with a lifetime love of cooking fishing and farming in 2010 brendan opened hitchcock and seattle a restaurant with seasonal fare and pork from his own farm and he's since expanded to bainbridge island where he's speaking to us uh today where he uh created cafe hitchcock voted uh people's best new chef by food and wine magazine in 2018 he's a james beard nominee and has been recognized by eater and star chefs a fan of humanity for decades this year brendan launched jumbo uh kombucha today we're going to learn that tea isn't just as good as it could be without fermentation there's a striking uh finding uh in the past a month by chinese researchers who discovered that uh it's actually a fermentation that leads to some of the refinements and some of the most sophisticated uh aspects of tea they did a novel experiment in which they sterilized the leaves of tea plants by dipping them in bleach and rinsing them and then producing the tea on exactly the same machinery from the same plants in exactly the same sequence against routine tea that had not been sterilized and through the withering rolling oxidation and drying processes you see here on the screen we saw significant variation in the uh you know amount of fungi and microbiome and microbes the sterilized side then yielded significantly higher theanine which is the buffered caffeine aspect of tea that makes it quite distinctive and as you can see on the left here uh total uh catechins it's a remarkable finding because for certainly for the last century or so there's been a lot of discussion about whether uh fermentation plays a role in uh you know the production and processing of tea and in fact uh with black tea it does but the findings above did not apply to green tea so in other words the drying process associated with green usually it's sun dried or dried quickly after it's plugged prevents some of the fermentation that you see with black but black tea is is actually a process of the fermentation and oxidation if you just do the oxidation you get tea but it's not as good as if you do an oxidation fermentation two quick words about tea uh consumption's on the rise it's been uh steadily increasing over the last uh 40 years certainly in the last 20 we've seen it also what we call a premiumization of t it's really become a much more valued product in canada where i call my home uh we have spent more in the last eight years consecutively on specialty tea than on commodity tea meaning that uh you know the people who enjoy the tea are willing to pay more for it and are looking for unique characteristics and flavor and aspects of the tea that are often called specialty so consumption though globally is really being driven by people in the uh producing countries places like india and china and many of the asian countries are substantially increasing their intake on uh tea and uh we're talking specifically today about blair and dark tea i'll let jeff explain all of that in detail but just for perspective of the column on the on the tall column there is the green tea that's produced in china china is the largest producer of tea in the world and most of the tea that china produces is green tea at the bottom you see uh exports so uh china exports about eight percent of the tea that it exports is black tea about uh five percent is is wulong t about two percent is herbal tea and just a little tiny fraction is uh where which uh represents about uh uh three thousand five 500 uh metric uh metric tons last year what's surprising though is is that uh black tea is as we'll call it is actually second to dark tea which is the poer and dark tea categories so in other words the chinese never let it leave their country they drink it all they have a substantial percentage of tea produced there about 378 uh a thousand metric tons that'd be 3.8 uh 1 million 100 million kilos that t is exported in small quantities so about 10 is exported and 90 is kept and uh that trend has continued for two reasons uh polaris is wildly popular as a flavor a t it's very efficient tea it makes a lot of pots of tea from a limited amount of product because of compression but beyond that it's it's recommended by doctors and uh it's actually prescribed as you would lipitor here in the west or many other uh drugs all right so there's a picture of dark tea and here's a picture of where this circular is called the bincha and this is referrals of tea being made in what they call pile fermentation there was a question among our listeners about how much quantity is made and uh it's substantial uh 378 uh million metric tons so uh jeff let's take it from there great um i i did look through some questions and i thought it would be a great place to start just defining a little bit about what is because i think it's a it's a t that certainly i think it's been deliberately mystified to some degree i think there's been a lot of uh hype uh so i'm going to use a quote from mr law nene law who's a tea scholar he's basically spent half of the amount of time i've been on the planet in school and teaching about what puerto is and he defined it very simply and i like this definition because it it kind of cuts into the middle um he basically said it has to have the flavor or taiyang which is literally translated into a flavor of the sun it has to be the big leaf material camellia asamika and it has to be cultivated and produced in yunnan those three points are kind of the his sort of defining points of what pooh is when we get into this conversation about the fermented aspects the facial the oxidized that's sort of an element that's tapped on to the t's um after these facts but i think it's nice to start with three basic points from the heart and soul of where it's grown and cultivated um and i also think it's important to to explain a little bit and again i wish there were people from yunnan that i've sort of interviewed over the years here to explain it because they do more justice to explaining some of these processes and the basics of tea they do it more credit in one sentence than i've seen articles on they get right into the minutia of it so this whole fermentation the business of fermentation the business of deliberately accelerating the age is something that was it's relatively it's a relatively young thing but a lot of it is based upon what went on on during the trade route times where you'd have these big leaf materials being transported by mule by yak for five six months to all points of the compass the t horse road and specifically went to lasa and beyond but you'd have these you had the body temperatures of the animals you'd also have the rise in altitude elevation gain you'd have all these elements affecting tea creating these intense composts of tea which in effect turned a lot of them into pungent messes but also a lot of this aging component which hong kong adopted in the the 50s and 60s and 70s the idea of age deliberately aging and introducing asper the girls the bacteria it brought down some of the green tea edges because puerte at its core is still a green tea in it in essence it's harvested it's withered it's pan-fried it's dried so if we're just looking at the core of poor i think it's really important to just think about it in those very simple terms after the initial dry that's when some of the manipulation comes in or not you have the raw pooers um which age naturally they're they don't go through any accelerated manipulation and then you have the show the ripe the cooked which in hong kong they discovered by applying bacteria microbes increasing the humidity drastically you could bring down some of those sharp green tea edges which i actually happen to love um so you had a bit of that that element and just from a historical point of view and i think it's great to bring in the indigenous groups in southwestern yunnan um also the mongolians who did what they did in so many parts of the world they they not only conquered they were masters of bringing in dna food so a lot of the fermentation culture were actually was actually introduced into yunnan not only via the ethnic minorities these incredibly rich cultures of southwest yunnan which buried tea leaves into the soil and aged them there but also when the mongolians took yunnan into the han chinese fold into the what we know was china now in the yuan dynasty their turkic armies who subdued yunnan also brought with them fermentation culture more in vessels in ceramic vessels so you had an existing fermentation culture there in yunnan and you had this these swaths of the mongolian-led turkic armies of conquered peoples who not only brought fermentation culture in a little more of an elegant way they also brought another sort of phase of eating sour foods of eating fermented foods and so from a historical point of view i think it's it's interesting that you have this very simple raw material green tea that becomes in time and it is now arguably one of the great boutique commodities um and i think it's arguable to many whether the fermentation the the ripening the aging of the poo air increases its value increases the attractive flavor components um many people believe that and and i i might even subscribe to this myself that the the natural aging uh components of a raw green puree is actually a little bit more of where they want to be heading in a flavored direction just to add here again it's i think it's important to see that it was in fact places like hong kong places like taiwan singapore that actively pushed actively asserted this desire for these artificially aged teas these fermented teas and that in yeon itself and up until my days living there in 2015 the locals still prefer tea to be what they call a little bit bitter and locals rarely drink in fact the fermented version of puerto of chop where the ripe cooked in yunnan to go to the villages that produce some of these recklessly good teas parts of the region of jingmai if you go into these regions you will seldom see fermented teas being consumed that's more of even for them something a little bit more that the international community is interested in so some of the teas that they're consuming are these pungent explosive uh flavor profiles as opposed to these more gentle earthy and slightly bizarre um ripe and cooked flavor profiles that the the the sellers and the dealers in hong kong taiwan and singapore would offer up uh so i i like to juxtapose the modern world with a little bit of the historical context um from which all of these fermented foods come from um the microbial activity in artificially aged ripe and these these cooked pooers also comes with the caveat of a warning a lot of the microbes that that grow and are artificially promoted to grow within these ripe teas can actually increase yield yeast and microbial content in in ways that aren't good and this isn't to poo poo anything here it's just a little reality check that as always i think it's i think one of the understated aspects of all tea sourcing is to make sure that you're buying from people uh sources and it sounds obvious but that you trust because storage wet storage dry storage who stored it where um these are vital components and a lot of the t world has become sort of locked onto the idea that the older a t is um regardless of how or where it's been stored uh the better it is and and i would one little cautionary tale i think is that uh the longer a tea has been stored outside of your own life inside outside of your own home or sort of controlled humid reading room the longer it's been stored somewhere else you don't know the storage necessarily so i just warn against and just maybe words of caution against um dropping huge amounts of money on reputed 30 40 year olds tea cakes with perhaps questionable providence and that young teas are in fact i think making a bit of a bit of an assertion in the tea world right now because they represent a closer line to the terroir a closer line to the origin point there's an amazing amount of misinformation i find and every time i'm back in china i find that there's even in china they have started rehashing some of the misinformation that we in the west started either through ignorance um but i also think there's been deliberate hyping and mystification of a lot of the of a lot of the the world of aged teas um and i know there was a lot of um i know there was a lot of questions about uh caffeine for poor and some of the comparative studies i'm not going to get into that too much here because i don't think from a time perspective it's um it's a it's a great use of time but i will suggest there's a lot of research now there's a professor named selena ahmed she's doing tremendous works on the chemistry the actual chemistry within t specifically raw and ripe pure she was at the university of montana phenomenal sources of that technical information um one thing i will be doing at the end of this talk is providing a slideshow for those of you interested i didn't want to take up too much of the time with images because i'll go down a rabbit hole and you won't see me for a couple hours i'm going to provide a slideshow at the end of this talk with some shots photographs um at some of the origin points of puer with some of the bulang people's traditions of burying tea much like they do in burma the left tradition i think it it might give some context to some of the origins of puer and how they treat the leaves i also have provided some some imagery of the trade routes specifically the tea horse road where tea was the main commodity and just to maybe sum it up i don't want to go on too much but of course i do um there is a gentleman in the slideshow and i urge you to take a peek at the slideshow um afterwards but he he was one of the legendary tea traders and he kind of summed up the world of tea i feel really nicely in one little sentence he just said um on these journeys which took in thousands of kilometers by foot the t's took journeys all over the all over the himalayas into pakistan into afghanistan from southwestern yunnan he suggested to me when i asked what do you need on these journeys and he said well i need the flavors and i thought it was an odd answer to the question and basically he explained that he needs sweet he bought a little leather satchel of sugar he needs sour he brought a cheese a tibetan cheese from yak yak mail called churra he also brought a small satchel of fermented tea leaves for the body and he talked about of course salt being needed and the flavor component of bitter and i just i add that into the the conversation because that when i asked that question there was nothing about i need meals i need equipment he talked about the flavors that he used on his great journeys across the himalayas and i think it was uh i think it was one of those really short answers that sort of summed up a lot of the food world generally and and perhaps the understated value of these of these flavor components from not only in a commodity perspective but in a medicinal way so i will leave it there before i rant too much but look forward to questions afterwards and again i will be providing a slideshow at the end of this of this talk to the fermentation association and they'll provide a link for the images thank you so much jeff that was great i'm uh showing on the screen on june t uh our topic today is beyond kombucha and uh brendan will follow with a conversation about this remarkable brew brendan hello hi so um welcome i'm excited to discuss um my history relationship with this uh this very special style of kombucha that uh just resonates a little bit better for me and um you know i think first and foremost there's there's a lot of discussion about what makes what's real kombucha and what isn't and um whether jun or jun qualifies and i i like to kind of think outside of the box of um the historical relevance in most of my research um it you kind of hit a dead end and i feel like maybe jeff or um you know some of the other sort of tea based experts can speak to this better than myself but it shrouded in mystery where these cultures originated and um what we do know is how they've been developed and manipulated and you know fairly recent history um almost all cultures seem to have been discovered by some sort of happy accident and the kombucha starter culture um you know reportedly much like a blue cheese um you know when you if you're cooling some sweetened tea in a cave and this uh sort of magical combination of of yeast and beneficial bacteria um you know landed in your beverage inoculated it and began to turn it into something that was acidic and enzymatic and then grows a a biofilm or the scoby on top um then people were able to capture that and start replicating it outside of whatever environment that that culture was living in so um i guess to my point what we make is just specific to uh what we enjoy and i definitely don't claim any um any special cultural authenticity in fact uh one of the uh one of the joys i've had with this is just being extremely creative because i found that while uh the fermentation isn't necessarily a delicate process it has allowed us to modify and use a lot of different inputs that um it's actually a pretty robust fermentation process so um i started making this at home in 2009 this was back when uh most kombucha could be found on in uh boutique health food stores in seattle is sort of one of the i guess epicenters of uh of western kombucha culture if you get enough people who are interested in health and wellness together you start to see it's very common to see a kombucha or fermented you know june style beverage on a on tap in a bar or in bottles at your grocery store and um i uh we started making this as a way to have a replacement for beer and wine that i think was really nice to have a sparkling beverage that was refreshing and kind of bioactive it made you feel good and a little bit um uh you know your your metabolism is activated um and it turned out to be a great carrier for the adaptogens and the uh the additives that i used in our secondary fermentation to give it the flavors that it has which we'll i'll get into here with our process um there's a lot of talk about the health benefits of honey and and green tea and um you know i i wouldn't bore you running all those down most of them are are well stored and pretty obvious rich in antioxidants there's a nice little boost of mix between caffeine and theanine and the green tea which is kind of that happy upper and downer at the same time but promotes sort of this zen-like almost like assertive calm and then when you add them together the fermentation they can put it under you know a laboratory analysis and show all these other compounds that are created that are highly nutritious and beneficial for your body probably none more important than their gut biome the digestive benefits of drinking kombucha are probably the ones that people notice first as it just adds a really healthy shot of probiotics into your into your system which just kind of keeps everything moving and will generally make you feel better than uh than you know say a cold beer so um i founded this company when i was in lockdown in uh on maui just right across the pond there from jeff and we were about 100 yards from a beekeeper who had wonderful raw honey so in your list of sourcing that's going to be very central to everything that i do you want to get a raw honey which means that it has not been pasteurized because the enzymes in the honey and the natural yeasts that occur i want to preserve those just as if i was making mead because this fermentation is a combination of a traditional alcohol fermentation with yeast but then the beneficial bacteria jump in with what's called ethanol metabolism and they basically eat the alcohol that the yeast produces and expel delicious acidic enzymes as well as probiotics and a host of other you know byproducts that that make the composition of the finished product um so once you have located your um your raw honey then you're going to want to buy great tea and my experience in sourcing tea is rudimentary compared to some of the tea experts on our panel today what i do is i go to the local store that is owned by someone who loves tea and cares a lot you probably have a health food store in your community here on bainbridge island we have an outfit called willow tree in up country maui i would go to the dragon's den frequently these are apothecaries that have all sorts of you know holistic um herbs and uh and adaptogens as well as these teas so i prefer an organic sencha a japanese green tea for its very mild flavor and as when i get to the formula you'll see that it although this is obviously a sweet tea brew it doesn't have the same concentration of tea that you would have if you were just having a glass of tea so that uh formula i'll give you right here as a way to get started this is very sort of colloquial just very easy um one gallon of water that's been purified in some way when i started the company we were capturing rain water and using a berkey filter to make sure that it was you know pure but it's quite important to not use like city water that has chlorine in it because as that is the chlorine's function is to kill bacteria so we don't want to kill the bacteria in our culture and our brew and uh then the fine honey that we were talking about you get yourself some good tea and a scoby and the ratio is going to be one gallon of water and i would brew that with two tablespoons or so of a nice green tea of your choice one cup of honey and one cup of starter so this is a very simple like one one one ratio that is is very easy to follow and scales very well whether you're making one gallon or a hundred gallons uh what i do is i steep my tea at 160 degrees as you would normally expect for green tea it's in fahrenheit for about five minutes which is kind of the tail end of how long you'd want to steep a green tea and i steep mine at double strength so if i'm shooting for two gallons of finished of kombucha to start then i would steep it this amount into one gallon so that once i strain the tea out i'm able to add in some cold filtered water and or ice to crash the temperature down closer to the optimal temperature for adding the honey and the starter because you don't want to add the honey and unlike black tea kombucha where you would dissolve the sugar into the very hot brew with this i want to let the whole tea brew come down to about warm body temperature just over 100 degrees before i would add the the honey as i don't want to kill the the live enzymes that are that are prevalent there um and then also the starter i don't want to kill the the starter as well so i add that to my sort of warm body temperature base of water brewed with tea and then i have a a not very scientific aeration technique that works great when you're making like less than 10 gallons where you get a long whisk and you do like get a good vortex going with it and then immediately reverse so it'll start to get sudsy and you're getting as much air as possible all of that oxygen is going to feed the starter and feed the metabolism of this culture once that's ready to set aside i lay one fresh scoby on top and we'll talk a little bit about propagating your scobys and then just you know we put like a piece of cloth over the top or something so that it has as much oxygen as possible you want a large opening on the top of your fermentation vessel sort of like the first step in in making wine as opposed to a carboy that's restricted because we want as much oxygen as possible to be available in the primary fermentation i give that about seven days at 70 to 75 degrees sometimes that happened a little faster on my kitchen counter on maui here in the northwest i have a hot room in our production facility that is just temperature controlled and that keeps it right there takes about a week at that point we're about three ph which is when i harvest it and uh we tap that off from the bottom of these vats you don't want to shake it and disturb it all of the leaves will fall to the bottom a lot of yeast and sediment settles down that can actually be really handy if you want to make some nice sourdough bread that's a great starter for it and then the secondary fermentation happens if you're making it at home you can put it directly into a flip top bottle and spike it with something else that's sweet adding a little more sugar so that it will convert that into yeast and or the yeast will convert that into alcohol and co2 carbonate your bottle and in a commercial environment where we can't have the alcohol production that goes along with doing a f2 in an enclosed container then we do the infusion and carbonation in a bright tank which crashes the temperature so that it um it really retards the the process of the fermentation and uh still allows the flavors to infuse from like a second tea bag that we might make that has all of our flavor components so for our root beer all of the traditional root beer spices and and bark and um you know sarsaparilla and sassafras also like chaga mushrooms from alaska and matsutake mushrooms from the olympic peninsula we go in with all that as well so um i'm about at my time here but there's so much more to talk about as it relates to uh kombucha making and making june we're selling these on tap at uh our cafe hitchcock on bainbridge island and then soon to reopen our our cafe hitchcock downtown in seattle um so if you want to learn more about what we do and get some visual aids and uh and go deeper down the rabbit hole junebug.love is our website and it's got visuals more information and where you can buy this and i would love to take questions as we get into the next phase here i'm i saw some good questions from from the panelists and i see some coming in so when we get to that that part of the webinar i'm all yours all right are you guys ready for some questions uh let's start you know what brendan let's start with you um so we had a question from a beekeeper they said honey and sugar have similar percentages of fructose and glucose is it the trace minerals and pollen in honey that is essential for jun um i would say that uh all of the wonderful aspects of honey are what make jun more uh more of a health focused beverage for me than starting something with refined sugar but you can make anything sweet and you can kombucha almost any sweet medium uh you know a lot of work in this space has been done recently by renee red zeppy in in copenhagen at the noma restaurant and they they published a fantastic book about their fermentations that um uses this this process to sweeten damn near anything or to to kombucha almost anything that is sweet so um it leads us to another question someone asked about transitioning from black tea to green tea and training your scoby and i've read a lot about this if i was starting a green tea and honey scoby i would i would seek out one that has been already trained that way uh you can either kind of find your neighborhood uh happy hippie um you know market and and see if they have one or you can mail order them pretty successfully as as this doesn't seem like really the optimal way to find anything because we did need a certified organic source for our commercial production i mean you can they can send them to you from amazon from big t companies and then when you have an active scoby and some starter let's say you just had some fruit juice and you wanted to kombucha that no there's no sugar or honey added the first generation will work well with an active starter and a healthy scoby it's just that if you tried to keep doing that over and over it would probably slowly die and i've experienced this trying to with our experiments like you know certain things kill the scoby so you might have some success transitioning by adding in um smaller amounts you know do like half green tea half black tea or you know a quarter at a time and and to to shift it over to a different medium but the first round seems to work really well with almost anything so if you stack your scobies you have what we call a scoby hotel and you keep adding sweet tea to that and draining out the liquid as it gets too acidic i can take a nice cup of starter and put it on a gallon of anything that's sweet along with a healthy scoby and it will be successful for at least one generation okay we had a question about where you source your scoby right so uh for this project i started with a a gun producer on maui and i she sold her scobies at the farmer's market so um that was sort of the the first step and then depending on where you're at in the world as much as i try to avoid um using the mail order giant usda certified organic live scoby and a cup of starter in a packet can come refrigerated off of amazon prime for like you know 10 bucks or something probably the most accessible way for anybody to get this going how does the bacteria in jun differ from like a regular kombucha you know uh i i'm not sure to to be honest you know we uh i've read a lot of the scientific explanations breakdowns and as i want to try to message that in our company to to the consumer i start to get kind of bogged down trying to be very specific about what has been proven um and what are just health claims and i think what i've settled is that it makes you feel great and it tastes good and as a um as a as an alternative to having a alcoholic beverage it just seems to always be a better choice for me to reach for and so um that you know that could be probably a better question for somebody who is is doing the sort of after studies in in the lab i know that honey has a tremendous amount of beneficial bacteria as um as well as green tea and the uh and enzymes and the systems that we use to make this maintain that raw nature because i introduce it into our brew when it's at not at a high enough temperature to accidentally pasteurize or sterilize those items so anything that's in your raw honey and anything that's in your green tea will still be in the finished product we just had a question uh do you use herbs in it what kind of what kind of things are you adding to it i know you have a lot of unique flavors on your website like a root beer flavor what kind of things are you adding to it you know uh when i first started doing this uh well most recently when i started this this iteration of it on maui last year i grew a little botanical garden and i found that i could uh you know i could grow my own bergamot and uh it's an orange mint right that we all know as the kind of main flavor in earl grey that seemed very appropriate and i would just float a little sprig of that along with uh whatever my sugar additive was maybe a ripe papaya from the tree or some fresh coconut water from the farmer's market or you know a little puree of mango some fresh fruit lily koi and then that would go into the bottle for the secondary fermentation so um for our root beer for instance we grow chocolate mint um there's a serious eats food blog by a scientist named kenji lopez who is very um he's on top of this stuff and his uh root beer formula included chocolate mint which was something i hadn't seen before so i ordered out for seeds we grew the herbs in our window over the winter now they're outside we're harvesting them they're going fresh into these brews so i would just say experiment have fun keep in mind that they really expand we had a bush of jamaican mint and i i ruined a batch of kombucha on maui with that at least for my family and you know if if you're brewing with your for your with your family something that my kids really enjoy doing is just tapping it right off of the the tap and i've enlisted my six-year-old as our head taster i'm talking about oh you take it down when it's you know 3.0 ph well he'll just taste it and say it needs to go a little longer dad you know and i think that um you can kind of zoom out from some of the scientific aspects of this and then sort of just focus on you know if you like it with a little more residual sugar then harvest it when it's still a little sweet and if you want it to be you know bracing bring it down to whatever 2.7 ph and you know you'll have like this tonic maybe you will drink four ounces instead of 16 ounces that sounds very fun to experiment with okay do you think we see so much kombucha out in you know our our stores today now compared to five ten years ago do you think like a classic kombucha will survive the market or do you think it's going to be more of these unique tea variations and new new flavor combinations i i feel pretty confident that com you know regular kombucha i mean um you know synergy brand has minted the kombucha space's first billionaire right so i think that they've got a pretty good share of the market and i don't think that the um the new variations are gonna you know disrupt everything um but i you know one of the reasons why i started drinking more kombucha was to drink less alcohol and a lot of that had to do with a candida and a general desire to drink less sugar for my own health and so i know that while the metabolism eats the sugar on regular kombucha starting with a big cup of you know c h white granulated sugar and dumping it into my my drink it feels uh like not the direction i want to go so i think that if you're brewing at home and especially if you're doing this for your health and just to have something enjoyable to drink i mean why wouldn't you use honey i don't i don't have a local delicious source of white sugar but i have so many sources of honey available to me because everywhere people keep bees everywhere and then you get flavors from those honey so if i brew for fireweed honey versus buckwheat honey or a general wildflower honey and now that i'm falling down the rabbit hole i mean you can get white sage honey from you know the southwest or like an orange blossom honey from florida california fascinating ways to keep layering flavors into your beverage and support direct you know you can buy them from the people who make it okay jeff moving to you do you think we'll see more of these dark teas in north america and as more westerners enjoy it enjoy it how important do you think it is to understand the story and the the culture behind these teas um in reverse order because culture is very important to me yes hugely important because i think i think it credits the whole line into the cup or the glass i also think refer back to the statement i made earlier on about at the source regions a lot of the formal education a lot of the chemistry isn't available to the locals but they'll tell you by looking at the clay that this year is good they'll tell you that the weather the drought will actually increase the yield of certain drop field of others and i and i think those little snippets help to sort of put an intravenous unit right into the heart of of farm to table food to table origin to the table dark teas i think will be i think dark teas will definitely come into the they'll come into the sway more and they'll remain i i see bartenders experimenting with teas some not so good um but i see incredible results to some of the the drinks you know there are gen bars i've been to where they're actually using smoked oolongs and the idea that they can play with these these these flavor compounds i think is exciting and i also think it's really important you know one thing that's really nice to be able to do is go to the source regions and explain how to a villager who only knows how to cultivate and produce this magnificent tea to explain to him what's happening in the western world or in the worlds where his teas are ending up and showing him because you know there is um there is that dip of generation you know the next generation cultivation of tea is not easy and i think they need to excite their own people they need to keep this stuff in the family rather than sell it off to middlemen who live in you know just in cities we got a question that just came through is puerte is it a flavor that you think is sustainable for western tastes that's my thoughts um i've had some decrepit uh puerto that is sold you know for a couple thousand a cake which i know for a fact has not been stored properly but there's enough hype behind this sort of mustiness which i don't think we fully understand i think there's enough hype that there will be a phase of time where people get into it and and like to compare notes i'd like to see people just buying better tea and by better tea i don't mean the the outrageously priced teas but just simple teas understanding what contributes to the flavor profile um yeah i have yeah just sort of both sides of the fence there i love to see tea being used for cooking i love it being used in drinks but i also i worry that sometimes these are mechanisms to get really bad product sort of hidden in another flavor compound there's a lot of bad tea out there and i think it's really important to understand how it's stored again going back to the source so the answer is kind of a i hate to do it i'm going to go middle of the road but it is kind of i think it'll i think it'll stay i think it will stay i was fascinated looking at your website jeff i'll put this in the uh chat too that am i pronouncing this right gillam tease yes yes okay i was it's so interesting there's a new tea for each month we had a question come through about like the seasonality of teas is there appropriate tea for each season in each condition how do you balance that you know uh brendan said something uh important and i hear this a lot in the foods you know yes there's appropriate and yes there's just plain good appeal to the palette um and i think it's nice to not worry about the season so much i think it's nice to know what the season contributes because just as an example um thane caffeine and tea a lot of that is imprecise um i think the japanese are very precise when they're producing it but season to season the caffeine will differ you'll have wild fluctuations in caffeine not because of the production technique just because of the seasonality spring teas are the vaunted coveted teas often very overpriced a lot of the reasons for that just have to do with the fact that over the winter time the lower temperatures all of these really brilliant bits of the flavor profile wheel have a slower and more muscular sort of introduction into the plant matter i don't get worried about the seasonality so much i just try to pick teas that are interesting that you can sort of take a pallet journey but yeah i would urge don't get caught up in buying spring and spending three times the amount of money there's brilliant autumn harvests superb summer harvests and again i think just finding out what our own temperamental palates go for is is kind of the key we see so much of you know in fermentation these days is experimentation you know brendan mentioned noma earlier and all the fascinating projects they have coming out of there have you seen jeff in your travels and studies of tea has the practice of aging or fermenting dark teas has it evolved from the traditional practices to explore more experimental applications yes i've seen some some fascinating things we actually had a friend of ours who buys our tea he left his tea in a sealable bag for me it was just like listening to something like a horrific core show because i think oh my god no oxygen flex um but yes i'm seeing people experimenting leaving it in airtight containers generally the best storage for poo air i'm going to put it out there might take some flat dry dry storage open aeration tea needs the aeration to to evolve this friend of ours just put it into an airtight uh bag it was awful to look at awful to listen to but the results were were kind of fun i'm not into sour but this tea was off the chat or off the charts sour i've often seen um in southwestern yunnan and in burma and parts of the northeast of india they bury their tea in these bamboo cylinders all they do is they harvest their leaves raw there's no production they boil it they jam it into these bamboo cylinders and they bury it in generally cold clay soils and they dig it up and it is a composted dish like no other it feels like you could scrape the enamel off of your teeth after eating it but they add it to rice and so the longer that the the cylinder is underground the more punch and explosive it becomes the more coveted it is it's more rank and the elders will you know when you talk about the cylinder that's been you know in the ground for five years you can just see the elders they go into almost an ecstasy and you taste it and it is rank pungent memorable your palate never forgets it but i i actually think a lot of those old you know going back to something about the history and the people in the culture i have a feeling the exposure that we have in the outside world to a lot of these really simple fermentation aging manipulation techniques i have a feeling they're going to play a role in where we go because there are things we can do at home i mean within limits and and i think there is that sort of self-curation ability to to to play thank you so much jeff that was that was fascinating okay dan we had a few questions coming through on like different tea varieties like matcha chai where do you see that expanding in north america to dan hear me oh here he goes yeah i've got that one yeah you know the jeff made a point about something and that's the uh people are beginning to understand that it's just fine to have tea you don't have to have coloring in it you don't have to have uh you know a lot of bits and pieces of fruit and flowers and stuff like that there there's a genuine benefit to just understanding the torah and keeping the t simple and uh that actually has uh picked up we're seeing uh declines in the total volume of imported tea into the united states for example and uh part of that is because uh of covin part of that is because of food service uh you know using a lot less tea uh on offer but uh part of that too is that there was an amounts amount of cheap tea out there coming in and the preference is is for less of that you know i tell people that the decision to that unilever made to break up its company and to divest itself of all of its different individual brands and maintain a much smaller profile uh is is based on the fact that people actually don't want to pay less and less and less and less for t to get less and less and less quality they want to pay a little bit more and have a better quality so instead of a two cent tea bag being somehow a great achievement a decent tea bag is a failure it's reducing the quality of the tea reducing the experience of the people who drink the tea and i don't think you're gonna get a lot of converts to two cent tea even if it's cheap so uh what's the opposite of two set tea this last week um the european specialty tea association speciality t association defined specialty tea and they attempted to make the definition uh focused on characteristics of the tea and also things like for example sustainable packaging and uh environmental sensitivity about biodegradable packaging things like that is they brought that into it as one of the components of specialty tea in other words it's not it's not just what's in the bag it's it's the bag itself uh and the practices of sustainable fair trade things like that uh that figure into what makes it special to t so a short answer is what's trending right now seems to be authentic tea tea that has greater flavor more of torah more closely married to the torah there's no question herbals are just racing ahead we're seeing lots of robots we're seeing a preference for non-caffeinated products uh in many cases people are sensitive to the caffeine and not interested in piling that to their daily uh in their daily diet and then i think a couple of teas that are striking people is uh more interesting than they originally thought are uh what brendan mentioned essentias uh you know i've been drinking a different tea from japan every night as part of the japan tea marathon they took us to 15 growing regions and each night we drink a tea from one of the 15 different growing regions and um you know these are these are delicious green teas they're beneficial in many many ways and they're obscure they come from parts of the world where all the tea is consumed by the people who know what's good and don't bother to let it out the bag uh so you almost have to i'm gonna have to know someone in japan who's gonna send you the high quality teas but surprisingly that's that's what's happening we're seeing small retailers we lost a lot of retailers during the coveted lockdowns we lost a lot of people uh who were doing face-to-face tastings but we gained an awful lot of people who were interested in scouring the internet for reputable good dealers you can imagine going to jeff's website and feeling jeff behind those choices the sourcing that he does and and being introduced to the people who were part of that the process of making the tea and i would close by saying that that aspect of t meaning that you're connecting it to origin you're connecting it to a human being who manufactures the tea and grows a tea you know you're connecting it to [Music] culture all of that strikes me as really not just trendy in the sense that it's a fad but something that's actually adding to people's lives it makes it makes it's better for you and it's better for them and if you can do things that are win-win across the globe uh definitely do those things thank you for that dan and our our time is up but i wanted to thank dan jeff brendan for joining us today and sharing your knowledge thank you to all of you for attending today's webinar we will post a recording of this on tfa's website in the next 24 hours uh we also wanted to let everyone know registration is open for tfa's first live conference in november in chicago it's fermentation 2021. please go to fermentationassociation.org to get your ticket we also have a number of great webinars coming up in the next few weeks including the state of the art and coffee fermentation please go to same website fermentationassociation.org to check that out and register and while you're there subscribe to our youtube channel and our instagram account thank you so much gentlemen for joining us today thank you bye bye

Channel: The Fermentation Association

Views: 838

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Id: 3wONZVVMXA0

Length: 63min 41sec (3821 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021