Differences between Chinese and other assamica teas

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absence
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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?
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mbanu
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Sat Aug 13, 2022 8:00 pm

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. :D

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.
oeroe
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Sun Aug 14, 2022 12:13 am

According to some articles cited in Tea: A Nerds Eye View, Yunnanese Assamica and Indian Assamica are actually rather distinct, and Yunnanese Assamice is genetically closer to Sinensis than to the Indian Assamica. Production matters too of course, but it seems that the underlying cause might be very different tea tree.
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LeoFox
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Sun Aug 14, 2022 4:49 am

oeroe wrote:
Sun Aug 14, 2022 12:13 am
According to some articles cited in Tea: A Nerds Eye View, Yunnanese Assamica and Indian Assamica are actually rather distinct, and Yunnanese Assamice is genetically closer to Sinensis than to the Indian Assamica. Production matters too of course, but it seems that the underlying cause might be very different tea tree.
https://teajourney.pub/origin-india-dis ... -of-assam/
Meegahakumbura concluded that unlike southern Yunnan Assam tea (found near Xishuangbanna, Pu’er City), western Yunnan Assam tea (found near Lincang, Baoshan) shares many genetic similarities with India’s C. sinensis var. assamica. Thus, western Yunnan Assam tea and Indian Assam tea both may have originated from the same parent plant in the area where southwestern China, Indo-Burma, and Tibet meet. However, as the Indian Assam tea shares no haplotypes with western Yunnan Assam tea, Indian Assam tea is likely to have originated from an independent domestication.A significant proportion of samples were shown to possess genetic mixtures from different tea types, suggesting a hybrid origin for these samples, including the Cambodia type. The study revealed that Chinese C. assamica has a distinct genetic linage compared to C. assamica tea from Assam. Chinese assamica and Indian assamica were likely domesticated independently in southern Yunnan, China, and the western portion of Yunnan Province, and Assam, respectively.
absence
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Mon Aug 22, 2022 10:18 am

Interesting replies, thanks!
mbanu wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 8:00 pm
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.
I didn't know that the goal was to compete with "Western" black teas. Where can I read more about that? If Yunnan producers were uniformly unable to mimic the teas preferred by the Western market, I guess the taste difference mainly comes from other factors than the production method?
LeoFox wrote:
Sun Aug 14, 2022 4:49 am
The study revealed that Chinese C. assamica has a distinct genetic linage compared to C. assamica tea from Assam.
Intuitively, it makes sense that such distinct lineages are the source of the taste differences. I've drunk a variety of black teas from West Yunnan, including ones made from C. taliensis and the wild Dehong variety, and they all taste distinctly "Yunnan", and couldn't be mistaken for the black teas commonly associated with the Western market.
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mbanu
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Mon Aug 22, 2022 1:41 pm

absence wrote:
Mon Aug 22, 2022 10:18 am
Interesting replies, thanks!
mbanu wrote:
Sat Aug 13, 2022 8:00 pm
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.
I didn't know that the goal was to compete with "Western" black teas. Where can I read more about that? If Yunnan producers were uniformly unable to mimic the teas preferred by the Western market, I guess the taste difference mainly comes from other factors than the production method?
Edward Bramah wrote about his experience trying to get the British tea industry excited about Yingde in his book Tea & Coffee. I quoted the particular chapter in a thread on TeaForum for folks who don't want to seek the book out (although it is very interesting reading). From the Chinese side, this was mentioned in English in old issues of China Reconstructs magazine, an English-language Chinese political magazine that talked about a variety of subjects including commercial and industrial development.

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I think related to this problem was that traditional Chinese tea was not selling well at all in the UK after World War I, even when prices were good, as was mentioned in this 1925 North China Herald article. Although it isn't mentioned directly, part of it might have been importers skeptical that the quality would remain, as one reason for the original break with the UK over Chinese teas was frustrations with adulterated and counterfeit tea whenever demand grew. So even when this problem was solved temporarily through nationalizing the tea industry, there was still the decades of built-in resistance to Chinese teas.

In the "Great Tea Scramble of 1954" as Bramah called it, the Chinese tea that sold (my guess was early Yunnan black) was only sold when its Chinese origin could be hidden in a blend.
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