From coffee obsession to tea renaissance: The unlikely rise of the UK's 'cool' craft tea growers

The botanical horticulturalist Jonathan Jones never thought he would pull it off, but he’s managed to build the biggest tea plantation in Europe.

And, yes, you read that right - in Europe.

“People are still surprised by the fact that we grow tea here in the UK,” says Jones, who heads up the Tregothnan Tea Plantation.

“In most people’s minds it’s a tropical crop from steamy countries - China, India, Africa - and a lot of people have not tried growing tea because they’ve assumed the same. But go across to Brittany and there are hundreds of little tea gardens [micro plantations] now. If you’d gone there 25 years ago there would have been none”.

Tea growing is seeing something of an explosion around the world: small tea plantations are cropping up from the US to eastern Europe, even on intemperate Scotland islands. Climate is still key, especially if you’re growing outside of green houses. You need enough rainfall, low winds, enough daylight for much of the year, high but not scorching temperatures and minimal risk of deep freezes - drop much below minus five degrees and you start to lose plants. But these conditions are found in many places.

“With the warm Gulf Stream waters, deep rivers, and morning mists, the conditions here almost exactly mirror those in Darjeeling,” notes Jones.

'Here' is in Cornwall. OK, so the volumes may be small, relative to an industrial producer. But, it’s argued, they’re the tip of the spear for a tea renaissance, buoyed along by tea’s perceived healthiness, and in response, perhaps, to us having hit peak coffee.

“More people are discovering the taste of speciality teas, which come in a huge variety,” reckons Jones.

“Our weird obsession with coffee has crowded out conversation about tea. But actually it has taught people to see a hot drink as a means of slowing down [in a manic world] that will open up an audience for tea. Coffee has been brilliantly marketed as something exotic, as the drink that underpins ‘the third space’. We need to take the best element of that and apply it to tea”.

Loose leaf vs the bag

This is not, it should be stressed, your PG Tips, but a more artisanal product. Certainly part of the problem, for an historic tea drinking nation like the UK - and, after water, we still drink more tea than anything - is that people still deeply associate tea with tea-bags, and then the brand of tea-bag which they habitually buy.

As Nigel Melican (tea consultant, author of 101 Teas to Steep Before You Die and, until recently, the long-time president of the European Specialty Tea Association) explains, the so-called Crush, Tear and Curl or CTC industrial method of tea production has been dominant since the early 1950s, in line with the modernisation of the tea-bag.

CTC cuts tea leaves more finely and uniformly - which suits use in tea bags, and makes for almost double the number of cups per kilo as the methods previously used. But it also makes for a fast-defusing, strong tea, and one that lacks the subtleties of flavour and aroma of non-CTC, large leaf, loose teas. Result: it has shaped the public perception of what a cup of tea is: tasty, heart-warming, but cheap and generic. Supermarkets have not helped in stocking such a limited selection either.

“In other words, convenience has won out,” says Melican.

“We are definitely now broadening our horizons when it comes to speciality teas. But these are speciality because they’re niche. I have a client in Scotland who can even grow tea there and he gets very good prices. Why? Because tea grown in Scotland is so unusual”.

Speciality means very special in some cases, which is just as well since competing with the volumes out of India or China would be impossible: if standard tea sells for around £1.50 per kilo, specialist teas can sell for anywhere between £300 and £1,500, though many are accessibly priced so as to be viewed as affordable luxuries, offering a marked step up in the tea-drinking experience without a huge step up in outlay. It’s much as the US’s reinvention of Italian coffee culture moved us on from instant coffee at home to lattes out-and-about.

Tea's 'Starbucks' moment

Indeed, Jones reckons that in time we will see a Starbucks of tea.

“I can’t believe it hasn’t happened already. Or hasn’t happened and been successful at least,” he says. He’s referring to the coffee giant’s purchase, in 2012, of a company called Teavana - which was trying to do for tea what Starbucks and others had done for coffee - before, as he puts it, messing it up and then selling it five years later. And to the historic tea merchant Whittard, which tried the same in the UK.

The timing now may be more favourable. A chain of ‘cool’ teashops is not such a strange idea, either, he adds: up until the 1950s there was a tea-shop on every corner, much as today there seems to be a barista loitering on every one.

“It’s interesting too how in the coffee retail business it’s all about matcha now, which is a tea, even if the matcha latte is an abomination to real matcha fans,” says Jones.

“But it’s an indicator how interest [in teas, in hot drinks] is broadening. I think we’re all just a bit over coffee now, but I’ll know that tea will have arrived when men start to ask each other if they fancy meeting up for a cup”.

Melican reckons we’ll soon enough see the big coffee chains offer a much broader selection of teas and notes that ESTA increasingly counts among its members baristas who see potential in applying their skills to drinks other than coffee. Maybe they feel the tide is turning a shade of light brown too.

“There are also plenty of countries around the world where there’s no tradition of drinking tea, or where the tea culture is about the herbal kind [not camellia sinensis or black teas]. That means tea is still novel, which brings its own level of interest,” suggest Hannes Saarpu.

He’s the founder of Renegade Tea, operating out of Georgia - that’s the one-time part of the Soviet Union and where, in fact, much of the USSR’s tea supply was grown. When the USSR collapsed, so did the tea plantations. He came up with the crazy idea of re-booting a few of them, which he did in 2017.

“Of course, getting artisanal tea to really take off is a challenge - so many people are just already used to low-quality tea and don’t yet know there’s so much more to it,” says Saarpu.

“There isn’t yet mainstream understanding about how all these experiments in tea are going on around the world. That will take time”.

Just stick the kettle on and wait.

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