absence wrote: ↑Sat Aug 13, 2022 9:57 am
In my experience, assamica teas grown to target the Western black tea market have similar flavours, regardless of whether they're grown in India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, etc., even when they are unblended and in whole-leaf form. On the other hand, I find that black teas from Yunnan have flavours distinct from the "Western" ones. Are the genetic differences between "Western" and Chinese assamica varieties bigger than the label suggests? Are the production methods fundamentally different? Is the terroir of Yunnan very different from countries that produce the Western style? Or is it some muddled combination of everything?
It is related to market pressures primarily, with a little historical accident thrown in.
In India, Kenya, and Sri Lanka, tea is primarily sold at auction, and China historically did not participate in these auctions. So tastes tended to change to conform to the bidders. In India, usually the Brits or the Soviets were the big influencers. So you have proper Assam, which was perfect for tea-with-milk, or you have something like Nilgiri which plays nicely in a samovar blend. (Nowadays India buys quite a bit of its own tea for making boiled Indian-style chai, so with CTC and dust tea tastes tend to push towards that.) Kenya is largely in the same boat, where the main bidder is the UK, with any odd things happening on the margins with the tea that for whatever reason won't sell at auction or where the planters are unhappy with the rate of pay. I've had aromatic Kenyan teas that were excellent, but usually the plantations that make these experiments seem to stop them because they can't find a big enough market.
Also from the consumer end, people come to trust that when a tea is from a place that it tastes like that place "is supposed to taste". The only time this sort of thing changes is when there is a major collapse in the market, like what happened in Darjeeling after the British abandoned it entirely, and they were forced to come up with a new flavor to find a new market. So the people who are looking for a certain flavor out of a tea are more reluctant to try a tea from a region known for the opposite flavor, especially if they are expected to pay for shipping.
From the China end, they originally wanted to make a British-style tea-with-milk to compete with Indian teas, but weren't able to do it. The story of why would be fascinating, although they tried a bunch of different ways. Yunnan was the first attempt, using Assamica leaves and a mixture of Chinese and imported techniques. Yunnan was actually pretty popular as a re-export to the U.S., but never seemed to be able to carve a spot in the UK, possibly because they lacked an economy of scale. China tried to side-step this through inventing Yingde tea in Guangdong, which used prisoners-of-war from Taiwan in its production, but that didn't work, either. There was also low-priced black tea from Hunan, which was used to making tea-almost-at-cost due to their long relationship exporting brick tea to poor-but-tea-hungry Mongolia, but once again this mostly became popular in the U.S. as an iced tea ingredient, as it did not become cloudy when cold, and did not have the potential to cause political problems like Yingde. I imagine there was some protectionism going on as well -- a Chinese tea has never broken the UK's tea-market without an invitation.