Doped Teas - An Open Secret?

[Baisao]

I have noticed an increase over the last five years in what I believe are doped teas, teas that have been surreptitiously adulterated.

I’ve spoken with a handful of tea enthusiasts and they seem split on whether this is happening or not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sellers I’ve spoken to do not believe this is happening. It appears to me to mostly occur with Chinese teas though I’ve encountered one Taiwanese sample that I questioned.

I do not intend to name sellers of teas I suspect have been doped and I hope that other people will respect this and not call them out either. I believe that many sellers are acting in good faith.

A naturally occurring aroma is complex whereas an artificial aroma tends to be a simple, single note.

For example, some roasted oolongs have vanilla aromas that are complex. The industrial extract of vanillin (3-methoxy-4-hydroxy benzaldehyde) is a singular aroma, utterly lacking in complexity. Most people would agree that there’s little comparison between a natural vanilla and vanillin.

I posit that the absence of aromatic complexity is one of the key indicators of doping with artificial scents. I suspect those doping teas are aware of this and the better ones are changing how they are doing this (more on this later).

I’ve had dancongs and hongcha with conspicuously strong rose and peach aromas utterly lacking in complexity. The irony for these is that the teas were good enough without this artificial gilding.

I’ve had a noxious dancong once that smelled like fabric softener. So while it was a little more complex the aroma was entirely artificial and out of place in a tea.

I’ve recently encountered teas that seem to have a more clever approach to doping: using natural aromatics that will have complexity. Twice now I have had teas that I am certain were doped with allspice. While baozhong should have an allspice-like finish, it shouldn’t literally taste like allspice, including the tongue numbing sensation of the powdered spice.

I also suspect that some yancha and dancongs have minerality enhanced with a spray of saline.

Sellers say that these shenanigans wouldn’t happen with the higher end teas I am referring to. They may also say that this can’t happen because the maker doesn’t know what [insert ground spice] is or couldn’t possibly spray their tea with fragrances.

I want to bring attention to this so that we can encourage sellers and their growers to stop doing this.

[LeoFox]

A musical analogy could be pure tones vs complex tones, or timbre. The artificial pure tones lack the complex layering and timing of overtones that are found in natural sound.

[teatray]

I imagine a useful way to check for some adulterants w/o specialized equipment would be to prepare two quick brews: one hot and one room-temperature or slightly higher (otherwise same parameters). Tasting the resulting cups at equalized temps (e.g. via water bath) should give an indication, as most additives would dissolve in the colder brew while the tea will hold back a lot (though obviously very dependent on processing).

Calling out sellers (even if assumed unsuspecting) would be beneficial, overall, I think, but only if the evidence is conclusive (visual/chemical detection or knowing the tea type very well + at least some kind of additional cupping/detection techniques, shared in full, so as to be reproducible by others).

[Ethan Kurland]

I’ve had dancongs and hongcha with conspicuously strong rose and peach aromas utterly lacking in complexity. The irony for these is that the teas were good enough without this artificial gilding.

Sellers say that these shenanigans wouldn’t happen with the higher end teas I am referring to.

I spent a few hours sampling dancongs, rou gui & da hong pao w/ my Russian friend in Thailand, V, whose palate & opinions I respect though his preferences are different than mine. V tasted flavors that I did not & talked about aroma that I was sure was not there.

A couple of weeks later I went to a Chinese section of Bangkok w/ someone who knows much > I do about tea & seems to like to everything. He will say a tea is only fair at best while drinking it w/ pleasure. At our third stop & around our tenth tea sampled, he said that one tea was very good, not the best, but very good. It was so expensive that even if I had had the same opionion, I would not have purchased any. My friend did buy some.

When we were leaving the owner came in & recognized my friend. He had us sit down & tell him about our day of tasting. Hearing that I had found nothing that I wanted to purchase, he served us 2 small pots of DHP for free. Each had a dominant flavor & each had aromas for the nose that I did not taste in my mouth (except maybe for a first infusion, I cannot remember so far back exactly).

I thought the owner had been generous though I did not enjoy drinking those last 2 teas. I thought my friend had simply drunk too much tea earlier & could not drink more. When we were about to leave, the owner of the teashop/cafe switched from English to Thai, which was used also by my friend for a minute or so before they laughed together as we left.

I asked what had been discussed in Thai. I was told that the owner I had thought I was stupid & that he was glad that my friend did not have a stupid friend (me). My friend hated those last 2 teas which remain the only teas I ever saw him fail to enjoy.

Of course, those teas had been what Baiso calls doped. In Thailand they are most often sold to people willing to buy teas by how dry leaves smell & less often bought by people who pay to drink some & like it. "Up to them,..." is what is said, (= no one twisted their arms).

I don't think consumers can expect businessmen to behave better w/ more expensive teas than they do w/ cheaper ones. Those willing to drink yancha & other very expensive costly categories of tea, need to somehow to not be concerned about their prices & sophisticated palates to enjoy them and/or stories that accompany the tea to enhance pleasure and/or pride in their storage & aging skills (pu-erh) to enhance enjoyment. For consumers w/o unlimited $ and/or time to devote to some teas, I think it wise to avoid them.

[LeoFox]

That's a nice story Ethan!
I think one way to experience obvious doping is to try any of the loose leafs from places like Harney.
It is almost laughable how there is this consistent perfume over many of their teas- green, black, oolong, doesn't matter, hahaha. They all kinda smell a little like their flavored blends- Paris comes to mind, because my wife likes that one.

I remember Don Don of mei leaf mentioned in one of his videos how older sencha going stale has a "Sakura, mochi" aroma. I would say, I've never detected that aroma in normal tea, even when old- except in Harney teas- making me suspect it is a commonly used perfume in that industry. Edit: apparently there is one japanese cultivar that gives off this aroma that is not a sign it is going off. But in my experience this aroma from Harney teas is so artificial - and is not just from sencha

Also, for yancha- especially rougui, it is always silly and a bit disappointing to me when I taste Chinese 5 spice cooking spice. If it is that spice, there probably isn't any health concern, but it's just a real shame

[mbanu]

Everything old is new again! Including tea-fraud, sadly. However, many of the old tools can still work as a first line of defense. If you shake the tea up in cold water and strain the water off, is it colored? Are there visible oils? Does it have a strong flavor or aroma? If you rub the dried leaf on a piece of paper, does color smear off? If the tea is being sold by weight, does the weight match? Does the tea look as though it may have gotten wet? (Moisture increases weight). Some hustles succeed because people would not think the effort was worth it, or don't understand how it could be automated. I once had a gunpowder green tea where the leaves were wrapped around pebbles to increase the weight -- did someone do this by hand? Was there a way to adjust a rolling machine to make it do this? What made it worthwhile to do with a low-priced gunpowder tea? I still have no clue, years later.

With more advanced fraud, it is harder. If there is a particular substance, sometimes a chemical test can be developed, but there's the oops-factor. If a pu'er smells like aromatic wood, was it intentionally placed on aromatic wood, or was it thoughtlessly placed in a chest or cabinet that just happened to be made out of that wood? A lot of times determining oops is about legal risk. For instance, U.S. based sellers selling to U.S. based buyers would be foolish to intentionally try such a hustle because of strong legal protections against this sort of scam that would erase any profits with fines, however, an ignorant stocker who does not realize that flavored teas must not only be kept away from unflavored teas but also from differently flavored ones might easily taint a tea by mistake.

There are also all-natural frauds. Someone can sell an old tea spiked with fresh tea-dust. The tea dust revives the flavor of the tea temporarily, but as the base tea is flat and the dust stales quickly, it only lasts as long as the dust does.

[Ethan Kurland]

... many of the old tools can still work as a first line of defense. If you shake the tea up in cold water and strain the water off, is it colored? Are there visible oils? Does it have a strong flavor or aroma? If you rub the dried leaf on a piece of paper, does color smear off? If the tea is being sold by weight, does the weight match? Does the tea look as though it may have gotten wet? (Moisture increases weight....

mbanu, thanks for the helpful lesson
LeoK, I drink black currant tea from Harney about once a month. Putting the leaves of that in a tin made it my black currant tea forever because it would take so much work to get that aroma out brought by reportedly natural flavors. I like drinking it (w/ milk) but am slightly disappointed because it has never tasted as good as the dry leaves smell. My first love likes Harney's Paris blend & many of their other works of "masters" of adding flavor and/or blending. I've tried many of them but only like Harney's black teas that flavored w/ fruit.

[LeoFox]

Thanks, @mbanu
If you have more methods, please keep them coming!

[Baisao]

I think it’s well known that H&S, Republic of Tea, et al. scent their teas. It shouldn’t surprise anyone. Same for bottom tier teas like gun powder mint. It’s generally an awful tea even without being wrapped in pebbles. And most of us know to expect jinxuan at a certain price point to be coated with dairy creamer.

This is unfortunate but expected. If someone is hiding something then they are doing so poorly.

I am talking about high end to luxury teas, some at $2/gram. Nearly all of them of
Chinese origin.

I fear that some people who are new to teas may think the powerful aromas of these doped teas is normal. While this is nothing new, it seems to have dramatically increased in the last 5 years. So much so that it’s the exception for me to have a Chinese tea that doesn’t raise questions about it’s nature.

Having seen Chinese teapot owners earnestly insist their VERY obviously fake antique Yixing pot is a treasured museum-worthy specimen, I have no doubt that treasured teas by self-proclaimed masters are being doped and sellers are going along with it in good faith.

This has now become so ubiquitous that it threatens this tiny market of high-end Chinese tea. Of course more people must become aware of this embarrassing issue and demand cleaner teas.

[Andrew S]

I thought that it is relatively common-knowledge that dancong is adulterated to raise its aroma, but I don't remember where or when I read that, and I have no real experience with dancong, other than being put off by it early on in my tea years (and then ignoring it for many years) because the examples that I tried were thin, bitter, uncomfortable, and 'over the top' in terms of aroma but underwhelming in terms of anything else (no doubt, I was drinking poor quality examples, and they may have been adulterated).

Similarly, I don't know much about red tea, so I can't comment there. I also have not heard about old puer being adulterated in this sense, except for those stories such as puer bieng aged next to logs of camphor (at best) to try to recreate the camphor aroma that old puer is 'supposed' to have (albeit only after many years).

@Baisao: it would be interesting for me to try a yancha which you suspect or know to have been adulterated, just to learn more and see what I should look out for.

Apart from complexity being a factor, would you say that adulterated teas tend to drop off quickly over several infusions? And I wonder if any adulterants make you feel uncomfortable, or if they are neutral in that regard (within reason, of course; no doubt there are better things and worse things that you can use to adulterate a tea).

If expensive (and potentially decent quality) dancong, hongcha and yancha are being adulterated, I wonder at what stage it is being done - presumably, it would be easier to get it done right with huge batches and industrial sophistication rather than small batches being processed and sold by individuals or small businesses.

Andrew

[Baisao]

@Andrew S, I don’t drink enough yancha to call one out but having had some salty Chinese teas lately I suspect they are sprayed with saline rather than having minerality.

Good dancong doesn’t need to be doped. Yes, the style has a green twig kind of bitterness but the aromatics should not be over the top in a non-doped sample.

I don’t notice the suspicious aromatics consistently dropping off quickly. I have noticed it but not consistently. I think this depends upon the substance used. In some instances I’ve left a suspected tea in a tin for a couple of years and the faked aroma will evaporate off, leaving a perfectly fine tea.

I still believe the best indicator is a lack of complexity in the novel aroma and a sense that the aroma doesn’t fit with the rest of the aromas in the tea. These frequently smell amazing in the bag, in a “too good to be true” kind of way. They may still be good in cup but this is where the simplicity and dissonance of the aroma becomes apparent. It won’t fit with the rest of the aromas.

Not all doped makes me feel badly but the one with the fabric softener fragrance had *really* strange qi. Some teas that use agrochemicals give me an unpleasant high but that’s not the same as doped teas.

I think @LeoFox’s analogy is on point:

A musical analogy could be pure tones vs complex tones, or timbre. The artificial pure tones lack the complex layering and timing of overtones that are found in natural sound.

[mbanu]

I do wonder if my memory is playing tricks on me in regards to the pebbles... My memory tells me that it was a mixture of pebbles wrapped in tea and loose, but my brain today can't think of how wrapping pebbles in tea would work -- if the pebbles were just put in the bag and rolled with the tea, they would not cling together. I suppose provided that the pebbles were the right color, they could sufficiently masquerade as gunpowder without any further effort. An old trick from the bad-old-days was to disguise iron-filings as tea-fannings to increase the weight. Fortunately that particular hustle seems to have gone extinct, but governmental authorities still test for it.

I also have not heard about old puer being adulterated in this sense, except for those stories such as puer bieng aged next to logs of camphor (at best) to try to recreate the camphor aroma that old puer is 'supposed' to have (albeit only after many years).

Two frauds I can think of for pu'er are cake-dusting and malicious sheng-shou blending. In both cases whether it is fraud or not depends on if the seller is upfront about it. With cake-dusting, the cake will be dusted to cause small amounts of tea to fall off the surface. This can be used to sample a tea to see how it is progressing without breaking the cake, which may sometimes be necessary, or to skim tea off a high-priced cake.

With blending, a sheng and a shou pu'er are pressed together and sold as pure sheng. Again it is about whether it is revealed or not. One of my favorite pu'er blends, Nor Sun, is a blend of Hong-Kong traditional stored sheng and shou, but it is fairly undeceptive by pu'er standards, in that it is a loose pu'er that labels itself as "pu'er tea" and is silent about the type.

[John_B]

It's odd how infrequently I seem to have encountered flavored teas. A Lapsang Souchong version I bought once was clearly a chemical copy of smoke, but it couldn't come close to passing for the real thing. The Jin Xuan here in Thailand aren't marketed as milk oolong, and don't seem to ever include that flavoring input. I could see how low quality Dan Cong could be passed off as high quality Dan Cong through adulteration, but I don't think I've ever tried a version like that. I don't drink Harney and Sons teas to use that as a baseline for the experience.

A friend has a genetic intolerance to all sorts of chemicals and additives, to the extent that he can't use most soaps, laundry detergent, or fabric softener, and he talks about what he reacts to in teas sometimes. It doesn't come up so often but more than I seem to experience, maybe because he tries teas from lots of different sources. The examples of adding spice or using a natural aromatic wood to add fragrance he could probably tolerate, so he would have to be able to taste that like the rest of us.

[John_B]

A couple of weeks later I went to a Chinese section of Bangkok w/ someone who knows much > I do about tea & seems to like to everything. He will say a tea is only fair at best while drinking it w/ pleasure. At our third stop & around our tenth tea sampled, he said that one tea was very good, not the best, but very good. It was so expensive that even if I had had the same opinion, I would not have purchased any. My friend did buy some.

Which shop was this in Bangkok?

[Ethan Kurland]

I do not know the name of any of the shops visited that day. We were being led by a patient & kind man. That day he even helped NIt walk up many steps & work through the crowds at a busy temple so she could pray for a few minutes while I appreciated the beauty & of the buildings & statues for a while.

He probably bought tea mostly to be polite to the shop rather than because he wanted it much. He has a good heart.