Tea Facts and Quotations

• According to reports, iced tea was discovered accidentally by, of all people, a young Englishman, Richard Blechynden, who had come all the way from Calcutta, India to represent teas from the Far East at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair. Not meeting with much success in the stifling heat, Mr. Blechynden poured the tea over ice and met with a near instant success.
• The Irish consume more tea on a per capita basis than any other nationality. The Irish consume 7.1 pounds of tea annually, which is equivalent to 1,417 cups per year or nearly 4 per day. By comparison, the British consume 5.74 pounds per person or 3.2 cups per day, and in the U.S. we consume .75 pounds, equivalent to about 1/2 cup per day. (How lame!)
• Do you hate it when your iced tea gets cloudy? If so, you can either change the kind of tea you use or change your method of making iced tea. Tea is more likely to get cloudy if you chill the tea quickly after you brew it (which is what I like to do, unfortunately). That is because the sudden chill makes the tannins in the tea precipitate out. You can avoid this by letting the brewed tea cool to room temperature before adding your ice. This clouding is more likely to happen with strong black teas like Assam and Yunnan because they are higher in tannins - you can even see a cloudiness when they are piping hot. I've been using Darjeeling lately to make iced tea and it never gets cloudy even with rapid cooling. But if you don't care how it looks, don't worry about it. It isn't harmful. Just ugly. (Rooibos and other herbals will never get cloudy because they have no tannins.)

Tea and Health News

Green tea appears to help protect skin from sun damage. Since green tea is known to protect the skin from other effects of UV radiation, researchers at the Dept. of Dermatology at the University of Alabama recently used hairless mice to test whether the same is true for photoaging, or premature skin aging from sun exposure. The mice were given green tea in their drinking water and then exposed to various doses of UVB light. Green tea inhibited various chemical processes known to produce photoaging. The researchers concluded that green tea "as a dietary supplement could be useful to attenuate solar UVB light-induced premature skin aging." J. Invest. Dermatol., June 1, 2004; 122(6): 1480-7.

Tea and Health News provided by: TheTeaTable.com

Return to current newsletter.   ~   View archived news.