The thing about Darjeeling, part 2

Slippery mao feng + the crumbling—and hopeful resurrection—of a renowned tea region.

Call it WD-40 for the spirit

The tea: Mountain green tips mao feng green tea, sold by CC Fine Tea. $12 for 2oz.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of regional green tea styles throughout China, and I’d be lying if I said I understood their differences in great detail. Green tea from China is the world’s original tea, and the margins aren’t close. Oolongs, black teas, brews from Japan, India, Sri Lanka, or Taiwan—these are, at most, 300 to 400 years old. Lu cha—Chinese green tea—stretches back millennia. Distinctions between style, processing method, leaf grade, and historic traditions can be difficult to determine, even for seasoned drinkers.

What I can say is this is everything I want from a green tea. It’s bright, refreshing, and has a slippery, lubricating quality that gets me back on my feet after a draining walk under the summer sun. If they made WD-40 for the human spirit, it would taste like this mao feng. That’s a quality to look for when buying Chinese green teas. Good ones should show off a balance of vegetal and floral flavors with a hint of nuttiness. You also want an immediately enticing aroma, a natural sweetness, and minimal astringency or bitterness. The tea should glide down your throat.

The source: Jason Chen is a Chinese tea industry veteran, and his CC Fine Tea (formerly Smacha, a now-closed shop in Bellevue, Washington) has a small but wide ranging selection of very good Chinese styles. I’ve had the opportunity to travel with Jason and have observed his keen palate in action. His company is old school in many senses, with no nonsense and little marketing promotion. I particularly enjoy their green teas, puer, and Wuyi cliff oolongs. CC Fine Tea has long relationships with factories in Zhejiang, which is where this mao feng hails from.

To brew: One of my tea teachers, Theresa Wong of T Shop, has told me she thinks that good tea should be capable of being brewed in many ways while still tasting good. In other words, it should be bulletproof—tolerant of user variance and error. That concept applies to this mao feng, which I’ve enjoyed as cold brew and hot with varying dosages. I most enjoy it brewed in a bowl or mug to be sipped casually through the day. Temperature is your main factor to control here. I pour boiling water from my kettle into a glass pitcher, then decant over the leaves with a thin stream down the side of the bowl. This method reduces the temperature down to 185 degrees Fahrenheit (85 degrees Celsius), which seems to suit the tea well. When brewed hot, I taste the green sweetness of edamame with hints of butter. There’s a high floral aroma, decent body, and a light lingering finish. Cold brewing yields a more umami, brothy cup. The leaves can be steeped two or three times.

---

A tea region on the brink

What I held off on mentioning from last week’s story about the joy of drinking Darjeeling is how awkward it felt to be in Darjeeling. The quaint inns and bungalows where tea buyers stay, the careful obeisance paid by brown-skinned workers to white foreigners like myself—in some ways it seems like the British Empire never left.

Buyers speak of a tiredness in Darjeeling, that the region has been dancing to the same tune since the 1850s, and the grooves in the vinyl are wearing thin. On one hand, adherence to orthodox tea-making traditions in the face of modernity is part of what makes this tea so distinctive. But Darjeeling is failing, both as an economy and a tea. Tensions with labor unions have compounded year after year. Far-off corporate owners keep selling or abandoning unprofitable gardens. And longtime drinkers will tell you that it’s harder and harder to find teas that replicate the magic of eras past.

“The Darjeeling tea industry is a strange amalgam of a plantation style but corporate-owned structure,” says Niraj Lama of Happy Earth Tea. “Workers live and work in the garden but they do not own the land they live on. It is leased by the government to the tea garden owners, most of whom are mid-size private corporations which are run from outside the Darjeeling hills. There is little local participation in the equity of these gardens.”

Darjeeling’s plantation infrastructure is a seamless extension of its colonial days, when planters conscripted natives to clear-cut forests and haul multi-ton cast iron equipment up the hills to set up factories. A sense of agricultural paternalism has undergirded the region ever since. By terms of their 99-year leases from the West Bengal government, gardens are obligated to house and provide for their workers. Labor unions are well organized—a rarity in the tea world—but a sharp divide between worker and management classes means there’s little opportunity for advancement. The company town knows best, so long as you stay on the path it’s carved for you.