Tag: chemistry

Book: Tea. T, Eden

14/03/2020 / / 2 Comments

I picked this up from the public library. Unfortunately the last person to have it decided to write in it with a black felt pen of all things. And I know it was recent because in the margins where they decided to jot swaths of notes down, they went back and blanked it out with white-out tape of all things. As if that made it better.

I cannot fathom some people.

With that mini-rant out of the way, Dr. Thomas Eden was (is?) the former director of the Tea Research Institute of East Africa. His works are those you’ll find alongside Denys Forrest’s, C.R. Harler’s and William Ukers’. Contemporaries spread out across Sri Lanka, India and Africa, they frequently reference each others’ research. Continue reading

Legg-Cut Tea Production

19/08/2016 / / 2 Comments

The mechanical evolution of tea production began as early as the 1880s,2 attempting to modernize and streamline the traditional Chinese techniques brought to India. These early machines often dealt with the time-consuming methods of rolling, drying and firing, and improving upon existing orthodox techniques. The early 1900s saw the rise of unorthodox manufacture, exploring different means and ‘shortcuts’ in leaf disruption (focusing on leaf maceration to kickstart fermentation, or to forego withering). These two eras correlate with Harler’s third and fourth Phases of tea making, respectively.2

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