The drink has a long history, as food writer Lee Tran Lam discovers while talking to Cathy Zhang, owner of Sydney’s Ms. Cattea Tea Bar. Cathy grew up in China and is well aware of the millennia-old presence of tea in her homeland.
The oldest tea tree in the Yunnan is 3200 years old and is still alive.Cathy Zhang
Tea has also played a significant cultural role in England, where it was known as ‘scandal water’. The brew is great for bonding and trading gossip, and during the Industrial Revolution (when water quality could be notoriously unsanitary), boiling it to prepare this hot beverage might have saved lives in England.
Today in Türkiye, each person drinks a whopping 1300 cups a year. Lee Tran talks to Efe Topuzlu, who serves the Turkish brew at his Malika Bakehouse cafes in Sydney and has a deep connection with the beverage.
I remember myself drinking tea from the age of two, three years old. So I think you're just born into it. It's a part of the culture.Efe Topuzlu
And what are its health benefits?
Dr Quan Vuong, senior lecturer in food science at the University of Newcastle, spills the tea on tea. He reveals whether it’s better to dunk a teabag instead of steep loose leaf, whether microwaves actually offer a superior brew, and how to approach pots of jasmine, oolong or pu’er at yum cha.
Credits
Should You Really Eat That? is created by Lee Tran Lam
Mixed by Max Gosford
Artwork: Grace Lee
Theme music: Sydney Sunset by Nooky
Transcript
This podcast is recorded on the land of the Gadigal of the Eora nation. I’d like to pay my respects to elders past and present and recognise their continuous connection to Country.
Efe Topuzlu: That probably was 60-70 cups of tea consumed in two hours.
Cathy Zhang: The oldest tea tree in the Yunnan is 3200 years old and is still alive.
Dr Quan Vuong: It’s the beauty of tea is they contain L-theanine. One of the interesting properties of L-theanine is they really calm you down.
Lee Tran Lam: Tea is the most-consumed drink on the planet, second only to water. From Japanese matcha lattes to Moroccan mint tea, the beverage does more than address our thirst, it allows us to bond and trade juicy details over pots and pours. In fact, scandal water was Victorian-era slang for tea; and today, thanks to black drag culture, it’s a metaphor for truth or gossip – tea, we want it spilt! We plan our breaks around the brew and our yum cha outings, too. Tea is great for our social lives, but when it comes to health and other aspects, how much should we actually sip?
I’m Lee Tran Lam and you’re listening to Should You Really Eat That?
This show explores the cultural, social and nutritional confusion over the staples in our diet.
Should you be consuming more tea, less coffee, should you skip the rice, bread, seafood or cheese? It can be bewildering keeping up with what’s quote unquote good for you and so many different beliefs shape what we consume – what’s fact and what’s fashion and whose perspective is being overlooked? Untangling all of this can be tricky, which is why I started this podcast!
Today’s episode is on tea.
(Sound of tea being prepared and sipped)
There’s a lot of cultural pride in tea: Indians spiced it with ginger, cardamom and cloves and reclaimed it from their British colonisers. This masala chai translates as spiced tea in Hindi, and as everyone from comedian Hari Kondabolu to food writer Priya Krishna points out, it’s redundant to say chai tea, because you’re essentially saying tea tea.
When Turkiye began planting local tea crops a century ago, it switched from being a coffee-drinking nation to a tea-sipping one: each Turkish person now drinks a whopping 1300 cups a year.
China, the birthplace of tea, has around 5000 years of history with the brew, and the tea ceremony is a key part of Chinese wedding rituals. Across the world, a well-brewed pot helps us recover from break-ups and bad news. But are there certain instances where we should put our teacups away?
Let’s talk to some experts and figure this out.
(Tea pouring sounds)
Cathy Zhang: My name is Cathy Zhang. I'm the owner of Ms. Cattea Tea Bar in Sydney. I've got a degree in a bachelor of tea science in China. I've done tea judging internationally – also in Australia as well. I've been doing tea for more than 20 years. So yeah, I'm a tea person.
So ever since I was a kid, I've been drinking green tea. That's a very particular green tea that’s produced in my little hometown in the mountain, of Nine Mountains. Very modest, nothing like flashy, it’s a very rough-made green tea, but tastes fantastic. The production is very small and it only can supply for the local residents. I remember when my grandfather was still alive, when I was a kid that he always gets up at six o’clock on the dot. He would get his newspaper of the day, he'll make a cup of green tea to start his morning and when I woke, wake up, my grandfather would have had his tea for like three or four infusions. So the tea tastes will be quite light. And I will have that cup from his cup. So that's my earliest memory for tea.
Lee Tran Lam: Those cups of Nine Mountains green tea were harvested from cloudy peaks near her Guangdong childhood home in China. For her tea science degree, Cathy visited Phoenix Mountain in the same province – she saw her fingers change colour after an extensive session of picking fresh tea leaves.
She points out China is literally steeped in tea history: it’s home to the millennia-old Tea Horse Road trading route. Pu’er, which is known for its aged teas, was a key stop on that road and can be found in Yunnan, a region that’s home to truly ancient tea trees.
Cathy Zhang: The oldest tea tree in the Yunnan is 3200 years old and is still alive.
Lee Tran Lam: There are protections to safeguard these millennia-old trees and you even hear stories of ancient trees being protected by armed guards.
There’s a lot of literal ceremony around tea. Cathy says during the Song dynasty (from 960–1279), tea inspired competitions and artistry – especially with how the brew was presented.
Cathy Zhang: They would draw paintings on the white froth and they would do calligraphies on that, too. So that's what we call the first latte art. This was back in, like, 1000 years ago, which is very amazing.
Lee Tran Lam: Tea also has an ugly history: British dependency on the drink led to tragedy and addiction in China, when English traders flooded the country with drugs to pay for tea imports. This sparked the 19th-century opium wars.
There's also Robert Fortune, the Scottish botanist who went to China, pretended to be Chinese and stole thousands of tea plants and tea-growing secrets in the 1800s. This led to the British empire transforming India into one of the world’s largest tea-growing nations – at the cost of exploited local workers and China’s tea industry.
(Train whistle and factory sounds)
During the Industrial Revolution in England, tea was also used to prop up workers.
Cathy Zhang: To maximise their labour, basically, companies give the workers tea. First of all is to give them energy. Second is to get rid of the bad taste for the water. Because apparently at that time the London water, you know, tastes terrible.
Lee Tran Lam: Professor Francisca Antman from the University of Colorado in the US suggests that drinking tea actually saved lives in England during this time.
The Industrial Revolution was known for its sewage-contaminated, factory-polluted water; you could die of typhoid and cholera from how unsanitary these conditions were. Making tea, though, required boiling and sterilising water – so brewing this hot beverage might be why mortality rates dropped by a quarter in parts of the country where the water quality was really dodgy.
Tea clearly has many benefits.
Cathy Zhang: One of the important aspects for tea drinking is to enjoy the moment and live in the moment. When we practice tea ceremony, we practice mindfulness at the same time.
Lee Tran Lam: I once went to a Chinese gong fu tea ceremony at Sydney’s Tea Journal, where owner Sunny Huang said, “The first brew is for your enemy,” and instead of serving the steeped leaves for people to drink, he poured the hot infused water over his teawares to rinse and warm them.
“The first brew is for your enemy” isn’t just a cool line to say as you dump that first rinse of tea away. Just as you clean your vegetables and fruit before you eat them, Sunny says you should do the same for tea leaves as they undergo a lot of handling from rural farms to your home.
Cathy adds not only are you washing off pesticide and herbicide residues, but a first rinse will help open up the tea for the next brew and remove surface dust from aged teas like pu’erh.
(Water pouring sound)
I’ve never thought to wash my tea before and there’s no one-size-fits-all advice for this. Rinsing green tea, before you drink it, may lead to an inferior brew, and if you Google ‘green tea rinse’ for guidance, you’ll actually get many tutorials on how to pour it through your hair instead of your pot.
Questioning the contents of your cup is not a new thing. In A Dark History of Tea, author Seren Charrington-Hollins says the leaves used to be a luxury item – which led to tea being bulked out with dubious extras, like floor sweepings, animal droppings and leaves mixed with chamber lye, which is a fancy way of basically describing urine.
She says affluent women would offer used tea leaves to their housekeepers or cooks as part of their contract – yes, spent tea leaves were considered a workplace benefit. Their domestic workers could then sell those tea leaves on.
Then there are situations where tea is offered in a more romantic spirit.
Cathy Zhang: Tea and marriage and weddings are quite significant in China's tea cultures, because tea will be used as a gift to the bride’s family, a very respectful gift, to ask you know, “can I marry your your daughter?” And tea, they will buy the tea from that year, the first year of the baby and then they will store them. So let's say 20-23 years later, your daughter marries somebody, you give tea as a very important gift. After 20-23 years, you know, the tea will become like so expensive. The value will gain so much as well.
(Tea being sipped)
Lee Tran Lam: Tea can be as valuable as wine and whether it’s black, green, oolong or pu-er – it all comes from the Camellia sinensis plant. This botanical name is a clue to its origin: in Latin, ‘sinensis’ means ‘from China’. But tea-drinking is actually more multicultural and international than that name suggests.
Look at English breakfast tea – as BBC’s All Consuming show points out, it goes far beyond British borders and usually blends leaves from Kenya, Sri Lanka and India: each spoonful symbolising Britain’s colonial impact.
As the Vittles newsletter notes, the revered tea ceremony that’s such a large part of Japanese culture, is also influenced by Korea and China.
And can you guess which country drinks the most tea per capita in the world? It might not be the place you think. It’s not China, Japan or England. It’s Türkiye.
Efe Topuzlu: Hello, my name is Efe Topuzlu. I run four venues across Sydney representing Turkish food in different forms. At Malika Bakehouse, we serve Turkish breakfast and Turkish tea all day long.
My grandma used to make this standard brewed Turkish tea, you just top it up with sugar and cold water, just to make it pleasant for the little ones, we call this pasha tea. January, we went to Turkey for a little trip. And my own mum was trying to give tea to my nine-month-old daughter. She goes, “she can be raised in Australia, but this girl has Turkish roots and she just better get used to it, the quicker the better.” That's how we are raised I think, from the birth you just start drinking tea. [Laughs]
Lee Tran Lam: And they don’t hold back either.
Efe Topuzlu: People tend to drink, minimum, 10 cups of tea a day. It can be with food, before or after food, with the food. It can be on a break. It can be at parents or friends’ visit, it can be you know while you're waiting at a queue at the doctor's. The tea consumption is by far the most, compared to any other country in the world.
Lee Tran Lam: Turkish tea is also prepared for much longer than that quick instant teabag dunk in your office.
Efe Topuzlu: The whole process takes about 15-20 minutes, but the tea gets brewed slowly. And you know, it activates the colour and the aromas and everything. There's a term saying “blood red tea”. So it should be very dark. That's important when you’re serving to a Turkish person. If you're serving like a very light coloured red, you will get a complaint or they’ll just simply reject that tea. So the colour is very important.
Lee Tran Lam: Then there’s the Turkish tea glass, which is a thing of wonder – it’s like an hourglass or tulip. There’s even a 30-metre high building that resembles this tea-glass in Rize, in Türkiye's famous tea-growing region.
Efe Topuzlu: So the Turks, they love their tea very hot. So the smaller the cup, the quicker you finish and you have a refill again. So we don't take our time.
Lee Tran Lam: I’ve always wondered why tea cups – whether they’re Turkish or Japanese or Persian – are so small, and now these tiny cups make so much more user-friendly sense than those overly big office mugs where your tea goes cold not long after you bring it back to your desk.
Back in Türkiye, the appeal of tea spills into all areas of life.
Efe Topuzlu: I remember myself drinking tea from the age of two, three years old. So I think you're just born into it. It's a part of the culture.
Every house has its own çaydanlık, which is the teapot. I went to Türkiye, this – back on January. My relatives said they were on the way to see my daughter. And all of a sudden, I went to the kitchen, I saw my mum boiling two large pots of tea. And I'm like, who's gonna drink this, but actually, we drank it. I mean, that probably was 60-70 cups of tea consumed in two hours. It's just a part of, gathering. It’s – when you wake up, the tea is brewing already at home; you go to work, there's a tea room, somebody brings tea in front of you, I went to a restaurant to buy a kebab, just to take away and I was there sitting for 10 minutes and just without even asking, nobody ask me, they're just putting tea in front of me. He goes, “just brother, you’re just waiting, have a tea while you're waiting”. It's just how normal it is. The tea somehow finds you.
Lee Tran Lam: So is there a point where you can have too much Turkish tea?
Efe Topuzlu: I think on my last visit to Turkey, I hit peak levels, 'cos it's been a while that I haven't seen my mum, because of pandemic and, and also the granddaughter was born, so they really missed us. Tea, it just keep coming and coming. I don't remember the exact number. But I believe 20, 20, more than 20.
Lee Tran Lam: And how did he feel after that many cups of tea?
Efe Topuzlu: Yeah, I think you get used to it. I think your body just gets used to anything. And for Turks, I can say tea is in their blood.
(Tea sipping sounds)
Lee Tran Lam: So what’s actually in our teacups and is it good for us? Let’s hear from someone who has studied steeped leaves for a very long time.
Dr Quan Vuong: Hi, my name is Dr. Quan Vuong. I'm currently senior lecturer in food science at the University of Newcastle. I grew up in a rural area named Thanh Binh in Vietnam, it’s about 100km far from Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. I used to be a production manager, helping the farmer growing tea. So I was in charge in the factory where we produce green tea and black tea.
And then I came to Australia to study, and then I became an academic. So because I love tea, I work in tea and that’s why I did my master and PhD projects on green tea.
Lee Tran Lam: Tea was originally used for medicinal purposes, so it’s not surprising that there are good things in your brew.
Dr Quan Vuong: It’s the beauty of tea is they contain L-theanine. Now, in terms of the tea quality, they contribute that umami taste. One of the interesting properties of L-theanine is they really calm you down, so the opposite stimulant to caffeine. Caffeine make you like excited. But the L-theanine is really calm you down, so it makes you more concentrate, so that is really a good and a beauty component from green tea.
Lee Tran Lam: Tea also contains catechins.
Dr Quan Vuong: Catechins are very good for health. Yes, so they they are well known to link with health benefits, like prevention of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes.
Lee Tran Lam: In an article co-authored with Emma Beckett, Senior Lecturer in Food Science and Human Nutrition at the University of Newcastle, the academics point out that “catechins are a type of polyphenol, a group of chemicals with antioxidant properties”. What are antioxidants? Well, as they explain, antioxidants are “molecules that prevent cell damage”. Basically, they’re good for you and in this story – titled “What science says about getting the most out of your tea” on The Conversation – they reveal that there’s a surprising way to maximise the health benefits in your tea.
Dr Quan Vuong: Using microwave, I found is a very effective method to extract antioxidants from tea to water with the faster, faster times. So if just talking about the quantity of the antioxidants in water, then microwave is really really healthful because it only takes you one and half minutes to get very strong teacups.
Lee Tran Lam: But Dr Quan makes the good point that there is a strong difference between a teacup that’s brimming with health benefits and one that actually tastes good.
Dr Quan Vuong: This is not an ideal method because a good tea cup is not just the level of the antioxidant but also flavour, the taste, the colour as well.
Lee Tran Lam: Some people might shun the idea of microwaving their tea, but Dr Quan is not snobby about using this appliance to heat his brew at all.
Dr Quan Vuong: Oh, I do almost every day – with the busy busy times and it's convenient and you know microwave’s in every households nowaday. Now a bit of warning to the people who don't love the strong tea cup, it’s not the good method, because you know the tea cup is very pungent, very bitter because there's a lot of caffeine and catechins in these teacups. But it's really good for you.
Lee Tran Lam: He says instead of drinking 10-15 cups of tea a day, you just need 1-2 microwave-zapped cups to get that sufficient level of antioxidants.
(Microwave beeps)
If you skip the microwave, you can still extract health benefits from your teacup, by allowing your leaves to brew for a few minutes longer. I mentioned some of tea’s health benefits earlier, but I should also give a shout-out to the polyphenols in tea – polyphenols are a phytochemical (i.e. a compound found in plants) and they’re linked to improved brain function and heart health.
If you consider teabags to be inferior – the resort of office-kitchen desperation or convenience, it turns out teabags actually extract flavour and nutrients more quickly than loose-leaf brews.
Dr Quan Vuong: That's correct. Yes, in the tea bag, the tea’s been ground into smaller particle size. The main reason is to have easier-to-extract the components, faster and easier from a teabag into water.
Lee Tran Lam: A compostable, plant-based teabag is more enticing than a plastic one, though – a 2019 McGill University study from Canada revealed that steeping just one plastic teabag can unleash 11.6 billion microplastics into a single cup.
And if you’re a vegetarian, vegan or someone who needs to watch their iron levels, take note: drinking tea can interfere with your iron absorption.
Dr Quan Vuong: Polyphenol in tea can bind with iron. They can prevent the iron absorption in our body. So with that in mind, I strongly suggest you drink tea at least 30 minutes after having the meal.
Lee Tran Lam: So what about yum cha – which literally translates as drink tea in Cantonese? Should you order the pork buns, dumplings and oyster-sauce-slathered Asian greens, but skip the pots of oolong, pu-er or jasmine tea entirely?
Dr Quan Vuong: You know what? Because you have once for a little while, so, like not often, it should be okay – just enjoy. If you drink it every day, that is a problem, but enjoy, enjoy yum cha, with tea. It shouldn't be a problem.
Lee Tran Lam: And what about research showing a link between an increased risk of cancer of the oesophagus and drinking hot tea?
Dr Quan Vuong: Yes, there’s one study they found like the link between drinking the hot tea. So if you drink tea with a temperature of higher than 60 degree Celsius, only few people can drink that tea anyway, because it's pretty pretty warm. So it’s linked with esophageal cancer. They suggest that we shouldn’t hot tea with a temperature of higher than 60 degrees Celsius.
Lee Tran Lam: Just leave your tea to cool for a few minutes. It’s not pleasant to sip it at tongue-scalding levels anyway.
It’s not necessary to enjoy tea at just-boiled temperatures.
One of the best cups I’ve ever had in my life was gyokuro green tea served in a Tokyo teahouse at a deliberately lukewarm temperature – it had so much flavour, it was like eating a rich meal.
You can also steep loose leaf in soda water for a fizzy drink. And it doesn’t even have to go into your cup. Tea Craft’s Arthur Tong points out, you can even use old tea to cook with – a handy tip for someone like me, who has way too many tins and boxes of unfinished tea at home.
Earl grey, chai or hojicha can add an earthy hit to desserts, while a leafy infusion can sharpen stocks and marinades. Tea-smoked duck is a classic dish from Sichuan, China, and Japanese ochazuke is one of the easiest ways to revive leftover rice – simply steep it in a hot stream of green tea.
We talked about tea made from camellia sinensis today, but herbal teas are a whole other story. Particularly given the magnitude of Indigenous ingredients found here.
Dr Quan Vuong: So there are many native plants in the country, so there are over 25,000 native plants.
Lee Tran Lam: Dr Quan says tea made with native maroon bush offers promising health benefits. And First Nations businesses, from Indigiearth to Mabu Mabu, have been filling our teapots with diverse Indigenous ingredients such as lemon myrtle and strawberry gum in welcome ways.
Dr Quan Vuong: I think there is a huge potential for the herbal tea from native plants in Australia.
Lee Tran Lam: Should You Really Eat That is an SBS podcast. It’s written and presented by me, Lee Tran Lam. Thank you to the SBS Audio team, Max Gosford, Joel Supple and Caroline Gates, for their contributions and guidance. The brilliant artwork is by Grace Lee and the theme song is Sydney Sunset by Yuin artist Nooky. The email address for the show is audio@sbs.com.au.
On the next episode of Should You Really Eat That, we’re queuing up for lattes and long blacks and getting our fix of coffee. Follow on your favourite podcast app and feel free to spread the word and tell people about the show.
