Doped Teas - An Open Secret?

[Janice]

The first tea I ever purchased was a jasmine tea from Harney and Sons and the second was jasmine pearls from Chinatown in NYC and after that different grades of jasmine pearls from Adagio. I’m guessing that a few years passed before I became acquainted with properly scented jasmine teas. Even though I’ve developed a taste for Japanese greens, yancha and puer I do still enjoy jasmine. I can only hope that the jasmine pearls I purchase from Seven Cups are scented in the traditional manner rather than “doped”. At $2 a gram they certainly should be.

[LeoFox]

Regarding "faked pu"
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2116

[Baisao]

It's odd how infrequently I seem to have encountered flavored teas.

Likewise, I am surprised by how little this is talked about.

I feel like it is the norm rather than the exception with Chinese oolongs and reds but maybe I am naturally inclined to be suspicious. Usually, the higher the price the better the faking is. Taiwan has it’s own problems here and there but nothing on the scale of what I’ve encountered with Chinese teas.

The question has been posed regarding who in the chain is doping the tea with fragrance additives. It could happen by the maker as there’s little oversight.

Perhaps someone knows how the teas are being scented and by whom?

[GaoShan]

This harks back to our discussion of the value of tea recommendations. I don't have enough experience to tell which teas could be doped, and would appreciate input from those with more knowledge on which vendors to buy from and/or avoid.

[Ethan Kurland]

This harks back to our discussion of the value of tea recommendations. I don't have enough experience to tell which teas could be doped,....

If one is asking for advice about doping, one is asking a lot. My advice for those who most definitely want to avoid fraudsters, chemical flavorings, etc. is to avoid the teas that commonly attract those kinds of people & shenanigans. There might be too much reaching out to enjoy all kinds of tea. If one has a few teas in regular rotation & a couple more to be drunk infrequently, isn't that enough? We can master enjoying several teas more easily than we can master finding the good teas of dozens of categories & types of tea.
Gaoshan, one recommends w/ limited responsibility, I hope. I would assume that when you write that you like a tea, pick up certain flavors, & have certain feelings that that is all true; I would not assume that you mean everyone will like it, taste the same flavors, nor have the same feelings.
Even if a vendor calls a tea organic & you call the tea as the vendor does, "organic", I would not assume that you are 100% sure of that purity. I have reasons to believe that tea that I call organic is organic, but I am not having tea leaves tested.

[GaoShan]

This harks back to our discussion of the value of tea recommendations. I don't have enough experience to tell which teas could be doped,....

If one is asking for advice about doping, one is asking a lot. My advice for those who most definitely want to avoid fraudsters, chemical flavorings, etc. is to avoid the teas that commonly attract those kinds of people & shenanigans. There might be too much reaching out to enjoy all kinds of tea. If one has a few teas in regular rotation & a couple more to be drunk infrequently, isn't that enough? We can master enjoying several teas more easily than we can master finding the good teas of dozens of categories & types of tea.
Gaoshan, one recommends w/ limited responsibility, I hope. I would assume that when you write that you like a tea, pick up certain flavors, & have certain feelings that that is all true; I would not assume that you mean everyone will like it, taste the same flavors, nor have the same feelings.
Even if a vendor calls a tea organic & you call the tea as the vendor does, "organic", I would not assume that you are 100% sure of that purity. I have reasons to believe that tea that I call organic is organic, but I am not having tea leaves tested.

Absolutely, recommendations are subjective, and we can only recommend things based on our knowledge and experience. When I started drinking tea, I thought some teas were amazing that I now know were just okay. That doesn't mean my opinions were dishonest, just that I didn't have enough information to judge the quality appropriately.

I agree that it's easier to judge tea quality if one limits oneself to a few categories. After several years drinking Taiwanese high mountain oolongs, I'm beginning to explore red teas from Fujian, which is why this thread caught my attention. Rightly or wrongly, I feel more confident about my ability to tell which green oolongs I like than I do about other categories I'm less familiar with. I still don't know if I could tell if a "Taiwanese" oolong came from Thailand or Vietnam, though.

[Andrew S]

This harks back to our discussion of the value of tea recommendations. I don't have enough experience to tell which teas could be doped,....

If one is asking for advice about doping, one is asking a lot. My advice for those who most definitely want to avoid fraudsters, chemical flavorings, etc. is to avoid the teas that commonly attract those kinds of people & shenanigans. There might be too much reaching out to enjoy all kinds of tea.

However, I think that it would be useful (or just interesting) to be able to acquire a mildly-adulterated but otherwise-nice example of a tea, to learn what to look for.

But perhaps it is just wishful thinking to think that something like that can be arranged easily or reliably.

I think EoT did offer some kind of comparison tasting set in the past, but I can't remember more detail than that. And AET has just posted around here about some comparison that Global Tea Hut did (viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2299), but I know even less about that. I think both were about agrochemicals or something rather than the kinds of adulterants that we're talking about here, though.

My wishful thinking is wondering whether someone here knows of a tea grower or tea seller who does adulterate their tea, but would be willing to do an anonymous unadulterated batch as a comparison to help us avoid their teas in the future...

Andrew

[Baisao]

This harks back to our discussion of the value of tea recommendations. I don't have enough experience to tell which teas could be doped,....

If one is asking for advice about doping, one is asking a lot. My advice for those who most definitely want to avoid fraudsters, chemical flavorings, etc. is to avoid the teas that commonly attract those kinds of people & shenanigans. There might be too much reaching out to enjoy all kinds of tea.

However, I think that it would be useful (or just interesting) to be able to acquire a mildly-adulterated but otherwise-nice example of a tea, to learn what to look for.

But perhaps it is just wishful thinking to think that something like that can be arranged easily or reliably.

I think EoT did offer some kind of comparison tasting set in the past, but I can't remember more detail than that. And AET has just posted around here about some comparison that Global Tea Hut did (viewtopic.php?f=36&t=2299), but I know even less about that. I think both were about agrochemicals or something rather than the kinds of adulterants that we're talking about here, though.

My wishful thinking is wondering whether someone here knows of a tea grower or tea seller who does adulterate their tea, but would be willing to do an anonymous unadulterated batch as a comparison to help us avoid their teas in the future...

Andrew

I think it would have to be a tea grower rather than seller. I strongly suspect this is happening at the grower/processor stage and not with the seller. I believe many sellers are as blind of the practice as individual buyers are, thinking they are lucky to have found such amazing teas. “I know the farmer and he’d NEVER do that,” yet the tea is too good to be true.

[John_B]

I would expect that the effect should show up in standard ways common to conventional flavored teas, and I'm not noticing that in versions I've tried, which span a broad range. In those added flavors typically wash out pretty fast, as when drinking Earl Grey. Not always though, so I suppose done in the right way maybe it's not completely obvious.

In the example of a tea stored near an aromatic wood or spice to get a flavor to transfer maybe it wouldn't be like that, and it would seem like that flavor fading over a few rounds is just a normal transition pattern.

[Bok]

Often it is a discrepancy of what you smell and what you taste in the cup. If the two sensations do not match there is a good chance something is off. As well as already mentioned quick dissipation of flavours, extreme first cup and rapid decline afterwards.

Also, trust your gut! If we concentrate and really pay attention, we can sometimes detect unnatural/artificial fragrances.

[Iizuki]

Here's a theoretical argument for why producers might have more incentive to adulterate teas compared to vendors.

The vendor has more options at his disposal. Let's say that a vendor acquires a batch of tea that doesn't sell too well because it's regarded as boring or bland. He has basically three responses available: price adjustment, dishonesty (adultery, lying etc) and just replacing the offering with something else. Now imagine that you're a farmer who's tea is regarded as boring and it doesn't sell. Your "replacing the offering" option is far more limited than the vendor's. You can maybe adjust processing but the material is locked. When there are bills to pay you could be easily cornered into choosing dishonesty.

[mbanu]

If there are not strong supply-chain controls, either through the legal system of the country of origin or through large companies who have agreed (possibly due to custom from a time in the past where everyone was frustrated enough to make it so) to actually self-enforce, a tea can be stepped on by anyone and everyone at each level of the process.

If they cannot be sued for misrepresentation, the vendor can convince the buyer that the tea is better than another tea, even if they only have two teas of the same quality. MarshalN called this the ABA trick. (A natural salesman who does not restrain themselves doesn't even need two teas, just three containers.) A variant on the wholesale level is to have someone agree to buy in bulk after trying a sample, but to send a different tea than the sample, or to send a tea where each container is topped off with the sample tea but where the interior is a different tea. (To fight against this hustle is the reason why many British-style tea-testers are taught to drill a hole at random into the middle of a tea container to obtain a comparison sample, comparing it to a bit of the original sample that has been held in reserve.) And of course if the farmer finds that their own tea is not doing very well, but their technique is good and their regional reputation is good, they can bring in fresh-picked green-leaf from another region and blend it into their own before processing without mentioning it. This is more possible than ever before, after all, with good roads and fast trucks, which erase the usual limitation on this that green leaf tends to be fairly fragile.

[Baisao]

Here's a theoretical argument for why producers might have more incentive to adulterate teas compared to vendors.

The vendor has more options at his disposal. Let's say that a vendor acquires a batch of tea that doesn't sell too well because it's regarded as boring or bland. He has basically three responses available: price adjustment, dishonesty (adultery, lying etc) and just replacing the offering with something else. Now imagine that you're a farmer who's tea is regarded as boring and it doesn't sell. Your "replacing the offering" option is far more limited than the vendor's. You can maybe adjust processing but the material is locked. When there are bills to pay you could be easily cornered into choosing dishonesty.

I think this is spot on. I’ve seen people wowed by obviously doped tea and disinterested in unadulterated teas, and even more disinterested in organic/feral/wild teas because the qualities are subtle. Doped teas are simply more accessible to neophytes than a tea that asks us to be knowledgeable and participate in the experience.

[Bok]

I think it is also a question of what other kinds of drinks/foods someone typically consumes: it’ll be much harder to appreciate a wild/very clean/naturally grown tea if you are having a diet based on food additives, over sugared, etc.

The senses might be more desensitised compared to someone who eats more naturally grown and little processed food. Not smoking, drinking alcohol and meat free also seems to produce a more sensitive palate.

[Andrew S]

The senses might be more desensitised compared to someone who eats more naturally grown and little processed food. Not smoking, drinking alcohol and meat free also seems to produce a more sensitive palate.

That might also affect a person's ability to 'feel' a tea, but that's another topic altogether, I think...

Ten or fifteen years ago, I'm sure that I would have been underwhelmed by a pure tea from old bushes.

And I'm sure that the usual consumer would ask questions such as, why would I pay more for a tea that smells and tastes less strong.

Now, of course, I'd happily pay more for a tea that tastes more pure, feels better, and has less upfront aroma and flavour. I now value things like how vibrant or fresh a tea tastes, or how long its aftertaste lingers, or how it makes me feel, over things like what kinds of flowers or fruits I can detect in the aroma cup.

I'm sure that I'm in the minority for most tea-drinkers overall, or at least that it can take a while to work out what a person really values and enjoys in a tea.

But perhaps adulterated teas have their place - they may have led me onto this journey (albeit that I recall preferring high mountain tea that tasted 'fresh' over tea that tasted like 'milk', despite what a bricks-and-mortar vendor told me down here...).

Andrew