Tea-o-phile’s journey: England’s drink is hot in Europe

By Kitty Kerner

Happy News for the Tea Exiled
Originally, I was going to write something about the local “holiday scene.” But so far, all I noted was the same holiday-inspired consumer craze in the stores, the same tell-tale signs of the impending season showing up . . . as early as October. Only difference: the Swedish equivalent of Santa Claus is much skinnier. And the use of moss, lichen and mushrooms (plastic) is encouraged as part of the holiday decorations.

Instead, I will focus on another appropriate winter topic: hot drinks. It seems the world is split down the middle between the tea-o-philes and the coffee lovers. Ironically, as the country known for perhaps the most famous “tea party” in the world, the United States is firmly in the hand of the coffee people. Probably out of spite toward the former British rule.

A changing tea-landscape
Of all the tea sold in the U.S. each year, 85 percent is still consumed as ice tea. Many times have I – as a tea drinker in the South – become painfully aware of this fact, when upon ordering “a tea” I was asked whether I’d like it sweetened or unsweetened. The concept of “hot tea” seemed completely alien to at least a few servers I encountered in Florida.

Yet things are changing: U.S. sales of tea have almost quadrupled since 1990, according to the Tea Association of the USA. With the ancient brew gaining rapidly in popularity, chances are you will find not only a bag of Lipton in the most out-of-the-way places but the options for tea drinkers are vastly expanding to include premium and specialty teas. Ha! Move over, Starbucks. In moving to Sweden, I had once again the unfortunate luck to land in one of Europe’s biggest coffee-strongholds. The average Swede’s coffee consumption is just under 10 kilograms per year, making Sweden the second biggest per-capita coffee consumer in the world, right after Finland, and before Denmark and Norway. (It must have something to do with those long winters.) The U.S. doesn’t even make the top-10 list with less than 4.5 kilograms per capita.

Despite the fact that Swedes love their coffee – strong and often black – I was pleasantly surprised to find myself in tea heaven, comparatively. One of my first café experiences left me utterly bewildered: upon asking for a tea the cashier at the counter pointed to the corner and said I could choose from a range of teas there. I carried my mug full of hot water over, looking of course for boxes of tea bags and finding none – because right under my nose was an array of tins with various loose leaf teas and a jar of tea infusers beside it. Since then, I’ve discovered that this satisfying tea system is quite common. It’s good to see that even in a decidedly coffee-centered nation, it is possible to have a life as a tea drinker without feeling like a second-class citizen.

Not only is the availability remarkable, but also the quality. Since organic foods are mostly mainstreamed into the regular grocery stores here in Sweden, you find a variety of organic teas (and coffees) right on the supermarket shelf, including fair trade products. It makes it easy to go for the “good” choice; one grocery chain even has signs explaining what you get when you buy organic.

Keeping it simple
In Germany, one man has taken the quest for affordable, high quality tea even further. Günter Faltin, a professor of economics at the Freie Universiät Berlin, wanted to go beyond just lecturing about starting a business and decided to start one himself. Long story short: he decided to buy tea directly from the producer and sell it directly to the consumer, thus eliminating the price-driving middlemen.

The radical part was the simplicity of his idea: he bought only one kind of tea – top quality first flush Darjeeling – and sold it in 1 kilogram bulk packages, instead of the usual 100-gram packages, another major money saver. By radically reducing his product range, while keeping high quality standards (though not exclusively from certified organic growers, the tea is practically pesticide-free), he managed to offer the tea for less than a third of regular retail prices. And people bought it.

Faltin sold the first two tons of his Darjeeling within three weeks, right at the university. Today, the Teekampagne is the largest single importer of Darjeeling worldwide with 400 tons annually. They have 140,000 mail-order customers in Germany alone and still sell only one kind if tea. In addition, the business is reinvesting its profits into reforestation projects in Darjeeling, a joint project with WWF.

Now the professor is bringing his simple but successful business idea to another tea-crazy nation: Japan. Perhaps in a few years, might even the United States be ready for such a “tea-volution”?

Until then, consider giving your friends and loved ones a tea sampler with different fair trade/organic varieties. It’s a gift that supports a sustainable market idea, doesn’t contribute to the seasonally driven consumerism and may even introduce someone to the world of that “other” caffeine supplier, the wonderful leaf of Camellia sinensis.