How Much Does Leaf Quality Really Matter?
Hey all, it’s Sunday night and I’m feeling philosophical. After spending time reading through a couple of tea blogs, I kept noting a recurring theme with regard to tea quality: most of the teas available in the West that are marketed as being high grade are really garbage not worthing drinking. But that led me to a question that I think we all should ask ourselves: how much does leaf grading really matter? Hear me out. Taste is highly subjective and highly variable. No nose or palate works the same at any given time. More importantly, quality guidelines are not universal. Consider this example. The Chinese used to think they were scamming the British by not only selling them teas like gunpowder and young hyson, which at the time, were apparently regarded as lower grade teas for poor people, but also by selling them teas of this type made from lower grade leaves. The British, however, loved the way they tasted and even placed special taxes on them due to their popularity and perception as fine teas. Even as knowledge of Chinese tea expanded, these two humble teas retained a great deal of their popularity among the British. The point to that is that perceptions of quality are not uniform across all cultures. Some things that may be highly regarded in the East will not retain the same prestige and perception of high quality in the West and vice versa. So, with all of this being said: just how important is the orthodoxy of leaf grading relative to an individual’s personal preferences? Is how a tea smells and tastes more important than its perceived quality or cultural stature? I, for one, tend to say that is the case. I’m not going to stop liking a particular tea just because the leaf quality may not be particularly high or just because it may not be a prestige tea. If I like it, I like it. Pure and simple.
That’s a good question. I agree with you that ultimately it comes down to individual taste preferences and the role of tea across cultures, but the tea snob in me also wonders whether a certain level of refinement is needed to appreciate good tea. Most countries don’t have the storied tea culture of China and Japan. The British as you mentioned, had limited options and had to make do with what they had. Consider another large tea consuming nation, India. The vast majority there drinks (and prefers) black tea dust because that’s all they’ve known. But over time have managed to transform it into something remarkable (masala chai) that fits their cultural palette nicely.
I think when you move past the low-grade stuff to what most of us drink, it becomes more subjective. I often find myself preferring mid-grade matcha and dragon well to the expensive stuff. That’s perfectly fine with me and makes my wallet happy too.
Most of the tea consumed in India is in fact NOT masala chai, just strong tea with milk and LOTS of sugar
True, that’s also how tea is typically prepared in Pakistan, where my family is from. Kind of ironic how darjeeling tea is more sought after by tea drinkers in other countries than the people in the country where it’s grown.
Darjeeling is popular in East India—my cousin always gives me a bag of Darjeeling when I visit Kolkata. Black tea isn’t really my thing, though, and the Darjeeling she gives me isn’t all that, but it’s definitely drinkable. I have barely touched the first bag and haven’t even opened the second one! There are some good online stores for Indian teas within India now, and demand is growing since India is booming and getting wealthy fast.
I’m actually ethnically Sindhi. My dad was born in Karachi before partition, but my mom was born in Kolkata. Dad moved to Pune, then Mumbai, and finally over to Hong Kong in 1969. :)
I totally agree on dragon well. I have had several extremely high grade dragon wells over the years and I almost always have preferred the mid-grade versions over them. They just suit my tastes better. I was unaware of this until very recently, but the Chinese apparently consider the milder first picking dragon wells to be higher quality than other pickings despite the fact that the later pickings have much more flavor. So, apparently truly exceptional first picking dragon wells are supposed to have a light, “pure” flavor, whereas lower grade dragon wells are supposed to be grassier, nuttier, and more vegetal.
Ah, that jives with my own experience with dragon well. I bought different dragon well samples from Teavivre last year and the high grade, first flush ones were just as you described. Pristine leaves but very light flavor. Their regular grade dragon well from later in the season were fuller bodied and more robust.
Oh, and I also remember a Chinese acquaintance who was really invested in tea culture once telling me that, in her opinion, high end dragon well was a scam. She claimed that people basically were paying for young, pretty leaves and not much else. As she pointed out, why pay through the nose for something that doesn’t provide much of a payoff in terms of flavor? To her, it kind of defeated the purpose of drinking tea. I hadn’t thought of this before, but maybe perceptions of quality aren’t even uniform across their parent cultures.
Good dragonwell is much cleaner, smoother, and pleasant to drink than cheap stuff—there’s no comparison!
Okay well for me like yes, taste is of course the most important thing, but having visually appealing leaves for me brings another level of satisfaction, I love looking at my leaves, even if they might not necessarily always translate to better tasting tea, (though in my experience they seem to on average) it enhances my visual experience in a meaningful way. Also I can’t help but feel like what you’re talking about with cultural influences, the British with their gunpowder and young hyson, or with LuckyMe’s Indian example, is an entirely different entity. For us, here, on steepster, tea is a hobby and a lifestyle and to compare that to broad tea cultures’ preferences doesn’t seem fair, if gunpowder is considered a luxury in Britain it’s being seen as such to everyday people, and not those who are devoting themselves to tea. I see two different worlds with this drink: casual drinkers and hobbyists. Casual drinkers aren’t going to be very concerned about their quality, they haven’t tried a lot of things and they’re being told what’s good quality. Anyways, I’m a bit off track, I usually feel like there’s a price point for each kind of tea up to which the quality objectively matters, and after which personal preference is more important. But I don’t know, cause the more I drink, the higher that price point seems to be getting
Once you KNOW the good stuff and understand why it’s good, compared to cheaper teas you’ve also consumed, it may be hard to drink crap tea after. For me there’s a limit to how much I’ll pay for teas, but fortunately here in HK, there’s a lot less bs and we tend to get better quality tea for the money than on the Mainland, where scams are more common than honest sales it seems!
I personally don’t pay much attention to leaf grading. Over the years I’ve come to prefer certain flavor profiles over others, and this usually runs the spectrum in regards to price and grade. If it tastes good, I drink it.
There is an ocean of difference between cheap regular commercial teas and good quality tea leaves (entry level upwards to the costliest). Similar to the chasm between say run-of-the-mill commercial speakers and entry level and upwards audiophile speakers. Within the spectrum of good quality leaves, it merely comes down to a balance between ones tastes & wallet – leaf grade is not as relevant.
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