Beverages: Infusion reigns

18 May 2006
Beverages: Infusion reigns

Tea, or fruit extractions under the general name of "tea", can very quickly develop your beverage menu into something attention-grabbing, and without any particular skill demands. And the best and most practical way of varying your menu is to offer something which is
tea-like but doesn't require complete staff retraining.

Rather than any old black tea, offer something unusual or rare - typically, Drury Tea & Coffee may point you to its Phoobsering oolong, from 6,000ft up the Himalayas. An oolong is a semi-oxidised tea, neither green nor black, very fine and delicate, and one which must always be drunk without milk, which would overpower it. This one will certainly get attention - but being so rare, it costs £105 per kg.

Another suggestion is to offer the only British-cultivated tea, from the Tregothnan Estate in Cornwall. This also commands a high price for rarity value, but is still sufficiently new to win customers' attention.

Certainly there's never been a better time to rethink your attitude to tea, says Newby of London. The consumer is showing greater interest in new kinds of beverage, and Newby's unusual tea-based blends have attracted considerable interest. Among the more exotic are a blend of Ceylon tea with strawberry and mango and the company's Black Tropical, a full-bodied black tea with papaya, pineapple, mango and coconut.

A real curiosity is Newby's chocolate tea, blended on a black Ceylon base. "It's one of those things you wouldn't drink all day, but you can be sure people will want to try it at least once," says general manager Mark Donovan.

The biggest modern tea trend of all is chai, or char, or chaya. This is the classic Indian drink, brewed at the roadside or railway station by char-wallahs and thought by some to be the most wonderfully rich and refreshing tea in the world. The newest version to appear is from Tetley, which believes that some of the proprietary chais on the market, imported mainly from America, were too sweet for British tastes.

"Our Chaya drink is a relative of the way it's served at Indian roadsides," says Tetley's senior brand manager Alex Probyn. "The method there is a vat of constantly heated milk, not water, and they throw the tea in, with leaves and spices, and loads of sugar. Traditionally, they serve it in little disposable clay cups. "We had to bring the idea to the UK, but make it easier to prepare."

Every Indian char-wallah has his own recipe, varying the amounts of cardamom, cinnamon, pepper, vanilla, clove or ginger. Tetley decided against a one-size-fits-all and devised three catering varieties. One is a black tea version, one a green tea, and the third has absolutely nothing to do with Indian tradition, being based on rooibos - but it does give a perfectly natural, caffeine-free variation.

Tetley's other innovation is to make Chaya something which can be brewed with an espresso machine - like making a latte, but one part Chaya to seven parts steamed milk. But you can serve it cold, as a frappé, and if you don't use an espresso machine, you can microwave it.

It's not hard to find variations on chai from many of the big brands - Unilever has its Tchaé, which is based on green tea, with variants including jasmine and mint. A new and much smaller company, Drink Me Chai, has already won a business enterprise award and is probably the only chai-type product to introduce a peppermint flavour.

Tetley's non-Indian ingredient is itself one of the most steadily growing tea-type drinks, although it's no relation to tea at all. This is rooibos, the "red bush" of South Africa, and it's marketed in Britain by the family who discovered it. Bruce Ginsberg from Dragonfly Teas of Berkshire regularly lectures around the world on the properties of the plant his grandfather discovered almost exactly 100 years ago. The bush produces not leaves, but fine needles. These used to be chopped by the local villagers and left to dry in the sun before being made into a drink. Helpfully for British tastes, one of the standard African uses is with sugar and milk. Rooibos does crop up among several of the big brands, and Tetley again has devised an interesting variant, adding vanilla to smooth the taste.

Boiling point Competing with chai as the fastest growing tea type is green tea. Twinings' pure green tea and blend of green tea, orange and lotus flower are promoted as relaxing and refreshing, and a natural source of antioxidants. However, warns Twinings, keep your water to just under boiling point, and be sure not to let it brew too long, as this can produce bitterness.

With green tea being the fastest growing category in the UK market, Jackson's of Piccadilly has introduced a Sencha, the most common green tea in Japan. It's delicate and refreshing with a subtle, sweet grassy taste and no bitterness. Jackson's has extended this enveloped range to encompass natural flavourings including Sencha green with mint, orange blossom and camomile.

The company has also produced Chinese White Silvertip tea, referred to as "the only true white tea", giving delicate, creamy, golden liquor with a hint of rosiness. White tea comprises the newest buds and leaves, and undergoes minimal processing. For a light, sweet, peachy taste, Jackson's offers Chinese White Silvertip Tea with osmanthus, the flower of an Asian shrub.

The question of truly "natural" flavouring is one which has been raised by Numi teas of California, whose teas are distributed here by Union Coffee Roasters. One of the biggest hazards in flavouring, says Numi, is natural jasmine. While the brand offers its Monkey King jasmine-scented green tea as "a wonderfully calming brew", there's also the warning that jasmine can be a difficult tea to source properly. Some are produced with too-obvious artificial flavouring and in such a ham-fisted "splash it all over" fashion that there's no real delicacy left.

The most visual of all varieties are flowering teas, and the latest of these is also from Numi, through Union. Flowering teas really are crafted by hand, in China - it involves tea leaves and flowers tied together with cotton thread, and each one could take between one and 10 minutes to create. When the hot water is added, the flowers appear to blossom in the cup, and so for the best effect it's well worth choosing good clear teapots or cups.

For customers who have never seen this before, the effect can be dramatic - Harvey Nichols's café in London has tested this idea for afternoon tea, and Union is now making a special "bouquet" pack available for café operators, featuring eight varieties and a glass teapot.

Another player in flowering teas is Drury, which adds a helpful reminder - the patterns of flower teas are constantly changing, and so it's worth asking for the newest designs, and highlighting them on a tea menu.

An entirely new tea variant comes from a London company whose story has fairy-tale aspects to it - but is true. The partners happened to meet a Chinese herbalist in Shanghai, and gave up their other careers to introduce a British first - tea based on Oriental health principles, but adapted and blended for Western palates and tastes and for the first time made practical for the average caterer by being put in tea bags. There are nine teas in the new Birt & Tang range - typically, Detox tea is a blend of dandelion, milk thistle, Chinese violet and green tea, while Cycleplus is intended specifically for women with PMT troubles and contains angelica and chuanxiong. They're distributed by Orient Solutions of London.

Hangover cure One of the most unlikely, but genuinely top-selling drinks to be produced in a conventional tea bag is yerba mate, which is the Argentinian national drink. It's not visually appealing, looking similar to very dark green tea, and its critics say it smells of rotting vegetables, but its fans say nothing sets you up for the day quite like it. It's also claimed to be the world's finest natural hangover cure.

Typically, Cotswold Tea of Birmingham has been surprised at the way the product now dominates its website sales. "You make it with one bag in the cup or two in the pot, and leave for slightly longer than traditional tea," says partner Kay Healey. "You should have some sediment in the bottom of the cup which has lots of the mineral and vitamins in it."

A cup would cost about 2p to prepare, and sell for about £1.50, but there's a more profitable way of presenting yerba mate at the table. Instead of cups, the traditional gourd from which country Argentinians used to drink it can be bought, together with traditional hard straws. Two people share a gourd. The instructions for cleaning the gourd are - don't. It's said to be similar to old Chinese teapots, which hold the flavours of all the teas ever brewed in them.

One of the most bizarre "teas" to achieve big success is "bubble tea", which was invented by a teashop owner in Taiwan in the early 1980s, and went on to become a craze in the Far East, and then California. It's a mixture of iced or hot sweetened tea, milk, and strange little balls made of tapioca, called "pearls", which sit at the bottom of the cup. The tea is drunk through a straw, and the pearls are sucked up and chewed. But beware - as a craze, it might well have a finite life.

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