Is Verdant's New "Tea" Crassicolumna For Real
Verdant is now selling a tea mad from a near relative of the tea plant they claim is caffeine free. What I want to know, is this for real? Actual tea that is caffeine free? Or are they selling tea from 1800 year old trees again? I am really tempted to order this because they say it is caffeine free. A tea I could drink at night with my insomnia. Sounds too good to be true.
Not sure I would call that stuff tea, but if it actually is Crassicolumna, then it looks like it’s caffeine free: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19128040
Then, you need to trust the vendor to know what he’s sourcing and be honest about what he’s selling – that’s up to you…
The problem I have is this is Verdant. They don’t have a good record with trustworthiness. A while ago they were lying about the age of their tea trees. Who is to say they are not selling normal tea and calling it this crassicolomna.
I think they’d know better than to fake normal tea as herbal. That would get discovered pretty quickly . I can understand being wary of them after the tree age debacle. Based on everything I’ve seen, it largely had to do with them getting involved with a product they really weren’t knowledgeable about (puerh).
I feel they are fairly transparent about where they source most of their teas from and from my experience, the Laoshan teas are consistently good.
@Babble search for thread called Transparency in the Tea Industry I think it was. They falsely claimed a tea was from 1800 year old trees.
@AllanK – well that was a nice endless hole of late night reading I found myself into. Wow! So we never really got a followup rebuttal from them, did we? I saw Lily’s initial response, but then when Scott countered, I never saw Lily counter back.
Tried the crassicolumna sheng last night. I expected something bitter and a little bit unpleasant. I was very surprised. It had a sweet note from the start. It did have a bit of a medicinal taste in the early steeps. It was good, I don’t know if it was worth what they were charging.
Crassicolumna? I was under the assumption that irrawadiensis was the caffeine-free one, and not particularly tasty either. And off the top of my head, the caffeine claim was found to not be entirely true. Hold that thought, and let me see what I can dig up.
Edit: Well that’s annoying. There are no papers that compare irrawadiensis and crassicolumna side by side. Irrawadiensis is considered a closer relative to sinensis than crassicolumna.
Crassicolumna was shown to be caffeine free by HPLC analysis, and had promising amounts of antioxidants & other health-promoting molecules (and the conclusion promoted its use as a caffeine-free tea). Global Tea Breeding stated that crassicolumna had no significant difference in caffeine content from other species, but no reference is given.
Another study that included irrawadiensis but not crassicolumna used chloroform to extract caffeine, and found irrawadiensis to be caffeine-free. But (from my gist of their tables) lower flavanol and amino acid levels than sinensis or assamica. Another study showed that irrawadiensis made up for its lack of the caffeine alkaloid by having higher theobromine. One study suggested it had a very low (<0.02%) caffeine content.
It looks like only one major study (published in 2009) totes crassicolumna’s caffeine-free nature and makes a point of suggesting that it would be a good tea substitute. All the results I’m getting keep circling around to the same paper (the one bef linked).
I’m more intrigued by their other caffeine free herbal, Laoshan Gan Zao Ye, which is supposed to have a green tea like flavor:
http://verdanttea.com/teas/spring-wild-laoshan-gan-zao-ye-ziziphus-jujube-leaf-herbal-tea/
I ordered that one as well as the crassicolmna sheng and black tea. I will know next week how they are. And I will find out one way or the other if they have caffeine.
The black crassicolumna one does look quite nice, but I’m a sucker for elegant tea-leaf photos.
If you’re willing to do the science: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDvyPjloAdI However, there may be another alkaloid in crassicolumna that replaces the caffeine, and might readily dissolve in alcohol in its place.
@AJ that was an interesting video. Except I don’t need to extract caffeine from coffee. Usually I want less caffeine not more.
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