doomslayer wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2020 3:31 pm
Like, sure, there are reputable tea sources out there but it’s not like they babysit and watch farmers every minute.
This is actually a big strength of the plantation-model. Since all the tea is being grown in one centralized area, it is actually much easier to assess what is going on with the tea growing.
Each model has its own advantages and disadvantages, but I think a good first step is to understand which models are most common and where.
In China, the most common (I think) is still the maocha model; this is where small-scale farmers do all the growing and partial processing themselves, and then sell to the factory for refining, export firing, and packing. This one is the hardest to track because the tea is coming to the factory essentially already made. I think there are also still tea cooperatives, though, state-run (and privately run?) plantations, and prison tea farms; would love more info on the non-maocha tea production models in China.
In India, there are the plantation model and the bought-leaf model. The bought-leaf model is a bit like the maocha model, except that the leaves are not processed in any way, they are just plucked and carried to the factory. Usually you will have several factories that are each surrounded by family farms within a reasonable travel time, as fresh leave does not keep. This one is probably the second-hardest to track, as while the farms will be nearby and the leaf has not been modified, it is still arriving at the factory from multiple sources with no good info on how it was grown other than the condition of the leaf itself and whatever hints can be drawn from this.
In the plantation model, the processing factory is vertically integrated with the tea fields. With this it is easiest to track, because there is often a supervisor who has been formally trained in responsible pesticide use. They may intentionally decide to go against best practices, but it is also easier for them to be caught by third parties who have some of the same advantages from the centralized tea fields as the supervisors. (This is not foolproof, of course, as many plantations are in very rural areas where it is difficult to drop by unexpected.)
Vanenbw wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2020 8:13 pm
I thought I read somewhere that even conventional Japanese green tea has pretty high standards, and the pesticides used not as damaging as those in some other countries. I don't know if this is factual information. I really have not researched it.
In Japan, usually the problem is monoculture practices, as far as I know. So one packer will start doing things a certain way, then suddenly everyone is doing it that way. Then when they find there is a problem, it is through the whole industry, and then is corrected in the same way.
doomslayer wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2020 9:11 pm
As for the "organic" - maybe it works better in countries like US or Japan, I do often eat organic produce myself here in the US. But for places like China, again, having witnessed a lot of things firsthand in my home country, "organic" is just an empty word for me.
An organic certification is only as strong as the certifying body, sadly. There has been some concern over this in the U.S., as it has moved away from the tilth system and towards a more general (and somewhat looser) national standard organic certification. The U.S. at least keeps a database of valid organic certifiers, so while there may be loopholes in the actual laws, it is possible to verify that the organic certification itself is valid. (I once bought organic tea from a vendor and later found out that their organic certification was fraudulent through this method.) Not sure about other countries.
A helpful thing is to rely on any national laws that are in place. Unfortunately one thing that the new "selling multiple small packages online" model breaks over the old "send it all over in a shipping container" model is that it is unlikely that anything has been tested, even if there are laws requiring testing, because often they are set up for testing at the ports, not examining random packages.
Baisao wrote: ↑Tue Feb 18, 2020 4:17 pm
What about other adulterants?
For this it is actually a little more encouraging. Most forms of adulteration are fairly old-fashioned. They usually fall into a few categories:
Trying to sell less tea as more tea by messing with the weight. Allowing the tea to absorb water has been used in the past, but this is a risky one because tea that has been wet for any length of time tastes significantly more flat and is also far more likely to get moldy. It is also easy to detect if you have ever dealt with any post-fermented teas, as these are normally kept in humid environments to begin with. If it isn't pu'er, it shouldn't taste like pu'er.
Another one is just adding something heavy to the tea. The best ones here are ones that have some plausible deniability. In the past there was an infamous trend of adding iron filings to black tea to increase the weight, but of course if it is discovered there is no way to explain how it got there. Mixing in non-tea leaves used to be popular, as if confronted someone could say that they were from shade trees that had accidentally fallen into the bush. For whole-leaf teas this is easy to detect because the leaves don't look like tea-leaves, but it is much harder with broken-leaf. The closest I have ever come to this hustle personally was a batch of gunpowder that had a suspicious number of gunpowder-shaped pebbles mixed in.
A related hustle is re-drying used tea leaves. This is positively antique, and I would not have believed that anyone would do this anymore with the quite reasonable modern tea prices, but with the rising price of pu'er, it has been spotted happening in the pu'er market; MarshalN did a blog post about this a few years back (
http://www.marshaln.com/2016/06/taobao- ... he-cooked/).
Next, there is trying to make stale tea look and smell fresh, or poor-quality tea look and smell better in general. This is usually accomplished by adding dyes to the tea. There are two ways to test for this that I know of, a wet test and a dry test. I don't know if they will catch all dyes, but the wet test worked for me personally on some tea from Java that had been dyed.
The dry test used to be known as the "Read test", after its inventor. To do the Read test, you just take some dry leaf and smudge it against a white piece of paper, then some more dry leaf and smudge it against a black piece of paper. If there is any smearing, then something is on the tea.
The wet test is to just put some leaf in a glass of cold water and shake it, then strain off the water. With normal tea, nothing will happen to the water. It will remain looking and basically smelling like water. If it changes color or becomes cloudy with oils, or smells strongly like the tea (assuming this is not an intentionally flavored tea), something has been added.
Finally there is doctoring the tea with more tea of a worse quality.
One way is sending you a different tea than the tea you sampled. A good way to prevent this is to always keep back a small amount of the original sample and then taste it against the full order when it arrives. It should not be drastically different if it is the same tea.
Another way is to spike the tea with tea dust. Some places will do this legitimately, but then they will say so in the sale; it is more common as a legitimate practice in Japan because "matcha" has a better reputation than tea dust in general. This is done because it can give a bland tea the illusion of quality if you take it and dust it with some fresh tea dust from a good crop. However, this dust quickly goes stale, and then you are left with the rest of the tea. You can test this dry or wet. For dry, just take a sample and shake it in a sieve over some white paper. If the dust just keeps coming, that's a problem. For a wet test, give the tea a rinse and see what comes out.
Dishonest blends where a tea from one place is cut with a tea from another can be tricky. For whole leaf, sometimes the shape of the leaves can help. For broken leaf it is harder. In those cases it is good to have a "reference tea" for tea from a region you get a lot of tea from, which is bought in a way that is absolutely reliable, even if for an unreasonable price. Then you compare the tea in question to the reference tea. It won't be exactly the same, of course, but it should make it easier to determine if the new tea is what it says it is.
Preventing this will also depend on the purchasing model. Tamper-proof packaging can help when it comes to factory sales, since while you have no control over what went on before it was packed, you can at least have a reasonable guarantee that it is still in the state that it was in when it left the factory. The Shengchan codes used in China are also helpful here, because they make it easy to trace a package back to a particular factory.
For teas that are sold bulk at auction, it will depend on the strength of the auction-house. Reputable auction-houses spend a lot of time ensuring that the tea that goes up for auction is what it claims to be and that the tea sent to the winner is what was bid on. However, after that it can be much harder to trace the tea.