SPECIALTY TEA

Specialty Tea is a term you’ll see quite often but it’s important to get to the bottom of what it actually means. This is a tea made using an unusual technique (stuffing tea leaves into bamboo and aging it for 8 years), a craft that can’t be replicated (like handrolled tea in the image to the left), and it can also refer to tea made in a somewhat common way, but with quite uncommon tea leaves (like from clones propagated from a celebrated ‘Mother’ for their fine flavor).

Some may argue otherwise, but it is the opinion of this writer that specialty tea is something that should be reserved for the rare instance a flavor or style may show up in the market. A black tea with mint on your grocery store shelf is not a ‘specialty’ tea. Mint is basically a weed and the fact that it’s combined with tea isn’t particularly unusual at all. It would be ‘specialty’ if, for example, it used a near-extinct type of mint called Black Mitchum Peppermint that is only grown in one area of England and carefully resurrected as a variety to be combined with say, a hand rolled orthodox black tea from a small collective of farmers. But the rest is just hype!

Specialty tea can also refer to rarity of area. Darjeeling tea, for example, is ‘specialty’ because it’s absolutely astounding how the tea is picked, processed and produced. It’s quite literally a 24 hour job to make tea and on these steep hills, treacherous too. It’s not something that can be done by machine. The growing season is quite short and the unique flavor of this area, like none other on the planet makes all tea coming from this area ‘specialty’ in my book.

But Specialty doesn’t always mean incredible flavor (though it should); it’s more the process or place that may make the tea especially unusual. It doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it (though hopefully you will), it just means it was something crafted especially for you. Specialty teas are edible art in the same way that sushi is edible art; tea plants are tended like bonsai and the flavors are to be savored. Often you can re-steep specialty teas multiple times and the handling of these leaves should be thoughtful and careful.

India is the 2nd largest producer of tea in the world, so we should definitely be looking for a growing repertoire of specialty teas in the near future, and do all we can to pay as much as we can for them now to help the gardens stave of climate change, so the flavors you love can be enjoyed for generations to come.