If you love speciality tea, chances are that you also care a great deal about where your brew is coming from, how it’s grown, and what it takes for your favorite loose leaf tea to make the journey from a tea garden halfway around the world into your awaiting cup. For the true tea junkie, sharing a love for tea means steeping yourself in all things tea-related, so we’ve created a roundup of some highlights from the frontlines of the tea industry.
Now here’s a job we’d all love to have– tea taster! Read all about Sanjay Sethi, a tea expert based out of Dubai whose family has worked in the tea industry for generations. Click the link above to get a taste of what typical day for Sanjay is like. Waking up with a delicious cup of Darjeeling sounds pretty ideal to us!
Black Tea Production is Set to Hit a Record High
If you love black tea, great news: it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. If you’ve got your eye on the rising stock of the specialty beverage industry, we’ve got great news for you, too! With demand for tea growing in markets like the United States, black tea is looking like a pretty solid investment. It’s not all coming from India, either. Kenya and Sri Lanka are huge players in the tea market, making tremendous contributions to the total output of black tea. Get it while it’s hot!
India’s Tea Market Heats Up–In a Bad Way
Even as black tea production booms, some sections of the industry are dealing with the withering effects of climate change. Take India, for example, where drastic changes in annual weather patterns have had a significant effect on the ability of tea farmers to maintain the quality of their crop and keep production on schedule. But these resourceful tea producers have seen hard times before and they aren’t going down without a fight. Some creative measures to deal with the problem include cloning plants that can resist the damage caused by drastic weather changes.
Earnings for Kenyan Tea Farmers Are Up
The past year has been especially tumultuous for Egypt, one of the biggest consumers of Kenyan tea. It’s no wonder that many tea industry experts watched with baited breath to see whether the ongoing political crisis would take a chunk out of Kenya’s earnings. While the crisis in Egypt certainly may have slowed things down a bit, Kenyan tea farmers have shown themselves to be a resilient bunch, raising their earnings by 25%.
Have we satisfied your thirst for industry news about tea? What big stories are you following from the tea world? Share some links below!