STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 9 they say they have shade-grown coffee, and I go there and see some trees shading the coffee. But they put the coffee plants so tightly together that if you look under them, there's nothing. It's like a rubber plantation. It's completely dead soil. So don't get fooled by some trees. If you go to some plantations that say they do good for biodiversity, don't just look at the trees. Look under and on the ground because the most important part of biodiversity is actually how many insects there are and how much life there is in the soil. STiR: I know most cultivated tea is Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, but most of your trees are Camellia sinensis var. assamica. Why is that? Kenneth Rimdahl: To understand that, we have to go back to the history of tea again. Long before there were countries and borders, tea grew wild in the forests and mountains of this region. Tea originated from an area stretching across northern India and the Himalayas through northern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and southern China. Tea doesn't come from one country. It does not come from China because China didn't exist when the tea plant first started growing. The people who originally populated those regions were nomads. They were looking for plants they could eat. They began eating the tea leaves and making a kind of soup with them. But they also realized they had to find a way to transport the tea leaves because the wild trees didn't grow everywhere. And so then they started to ferment it, and that was called hmiang in Thailand and laphet in Burma. I can also tell you that a very similar word to laphet and hmiang even existed as a Chinese word long before the word cha. It's much older than tea. This was the original way of using the tea. To eat it. The reason why Camellia assamica is called assamica is because of the British. When Carl Von Linné named the tea plant, he only knew about the Chinese and Japanese tea plants he'd seen in Amsterdam in draw- ings. He got the name Camellia sinensis based on that. Then, when the British colonized India, they were up in Nagaland and found tea growing wild in the forest, like in Thailand or Laos. It was a tea plant but different than sinensis sinensis, and that's why it got the name Camellia sinensis var. assamica. The Europeans found it for the first time in Assam, but it's the same plant growing wild in Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and southern China. So, C. sinensis assamica is actually native to Thailand and the surround- ing region, but this is not an important tea plant; it's just a plant that has been growing here all this time. Assamica was used for making hmiang, not necessarily for drinking tea. That's why we work with assamica at Monsoon Tea Company because this is the tea that actually comes from here. We can see Camellia sinensis sinensis as a domesticated version of the wild tea plant made for growing in tea plantations, like a wolf vs. a dog. When you have Assam tea, that's different. When the British got their assamica tea plants they mixed and merged them together with the sinensis sinensis from China. For the tea plantations in Assam today, it's not the same assamica that grows in the forest here in Thailand. There are different variations, of course. The Tale of Tea is the first academic scientific book that talks about the origin and history of the plant itself. STiR: Many farmers you work with are from different Northern Hill Tribes. How diverse is northern Thailand? Kenneth Rimdahl: Biodiversity is not the only thing that matters to us at Monsoon Tea Company. Diversity, in general, is a part of our company philosophy and who we are. Northern Thailand is a big, diverse cultural zone. Here, we have some farmers who are Muslims A wild Camellia sinensis var. assamica tree growing in a forest near Chiang Mai. Wild assamica trees can grow up to 15 meters (50 feet) tall. Photo courtesy of Monsoon Tea Company from Yunnan with Yunanese parents who came here a long time ago. We work with the Karen and Lanna people and groups from northern China. Many of the hill tribes originally came from China or Laos. The indigenous Northern Thai people did not make tea. They made hmiang. The Chinese and other Hill Tribes that came here, fleeing Mao, found the hmiang trees and started producing tea instead. However, the Lanna people from northern Thailand did not do that. They continued making miang until very recently. So there are many different kinds of people here, and we have a lot of diversity in our tea production. STiR: Monsoon Tea Company is not just trailblaz- ing. You're laying the foundations for a framework that people can follow all over the world. Reforesting a region and providing steady income for under- served communities shows that tea can be the solution, not just the problem. Kenneth Rimdahl: I hope that more producers in our food chain can start to work in this way. We don't have to destroy the land to make food. Of course, we cannot have all the tea in the world grow this way because it's a lot more expensive. So, we also have to consider that normal tea plantations are necessary because tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world, and we need them to produce tea efficiently. I'm just trying to make a little niche area of the tea world work. So, I'm not saying that normal tea plantations are bad because they're also important. But if we can stop producing tea in such a damaging way and start producing it more in a less damaging way, then I'll be very happy.

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