Green tea

• White Tea
• Green Tea
• Oolong Tea
• Scented Tea
• Black Tea
• Pu-erh Tea
• Organic Tea
  

Your choice of "which tea to drink" may depend on your mood, the time of day or a free-spirited whim.  Tea's health benefits ensure a taste experience that is guilt free.  At Jing Tea Shop you can choose luxurious teas from all tea categories and in every case be certain to acquire a prize selection: light, soothing and sweet White Tea famous for its high antioxidant content; clean, refreshing and cooling Green Tea; complex, floral and stimulating Oolong; heady, intoxicating Scented Tea; robust and flavoursome Black Tea; and comforting, deeply relaxing Puer.





What is tea?

• Tea is made from selected sub-varieties (cultivars) of the plant Camellia sinensis. 
• “Herbal teas” carry the name of tea but are made from herbs and flowers other than Camellia sinensis, such as camomile or hibiscus.  Strictly speaking, these are not tea at all.

Which factors determine tea quality?

• The quality of tea depends on the place and time of its production, and factors such as soil, climate, time of picking (even to the hour), and its level of oxidation, rolling and firing, as specified by an experienced tea master.

Why are there different categories of tea if they all come from the same plant?

• Different categories of tea (green, white, oolong etc) are produced by differing levels of oxidation of the picked leaf: green and white teas are un-oxidised, oolong semi-oxidised and black tea highly oxidised.  
• Just as different wines are made from different grape cultivars which include Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, there are around 400 cultivars or sub-varieties of tea which include Tieguanyin, Shuixian, Qimen and Yunnan Dayeh.  For example, Silver Needle is made exclusively from the Da Bai (big white) cultivar.

What is the current State of tea culture and trade in the UK?

• Last year green tea sales were up 50% in stark contrast to declines in sales of regular black teas.
• Imagine how amazing it would be if in the next 50 years, the UK’s consumption of French wine was so overtaken by consumption of New World wine that our most famous wine merchants were unable to recognise Champagne.  Similarly and incredibly, China’s most famous green tea, Long Jing, and most of its other great teas cannot be recognised by most of the UK’s most famous tea traders!

Amazing Tea Facts

• From 1608, when tea first appeared in Europe, in Holland, until around 1850, China, with rare and inconsequential exceptions, was the sole source of all the tea drunk in the Western World.
• The English East India company held a monopoly on all China tea exports to the British Isles and Americas for two hundred years.
• Most tea consumed in England between 1650 and 1850 was green and oolong - not black!
• Just as in 1608, China continues to recognise and exports six categories of tea, green, white, oolong, yellow, red and Puer.
• By 1800 England alone was consuming 24 million pounds per annum of tea of every type from white and green to oolong and black, all of it organically grown and hand-made, much of it fit for Emperors and kings.
• All tea came from China until the British began to cultivate tea in India in the 1830’s, and later in Sri Lanka and Africa.  As lack of knowledge and expertise and a wish to keep things simple lead to production of only black tea.
• Clever marketing and advertising by Thomas Lipton and others led to the new ‘Colonial tea’ becoming a hit.
• Quality became a secondary concern to quantity.  Today’s mass-market supermarket teabag represents the nadir of tea quality. 
• Just consider that the Sterling value of the British and German tea markets is virtually identical, although Great Britain consumes seven times more tea!
• The great teas of China they are still produced to this day even though the UK has all but forgotten them.