Brewing Black Tea

Video Transcript

"In this clip, we're going to talk about black tea, the most commonly consumed tea in the world. Black tea you find that in your iced teas at restaurants. It's what you find typically in the grocery store tea aisle. And it's the most commonly consumed tea across the planet. Black tea is characterized by its dark color. It also is produced that way because it is a fully oxidized tea. Consequently, we steep black teas with boiling water, and we're going to steep them for three to five minutes. The black teas are - produce a much darker cut and a richer flavor than you'll find with the green teas and oolong teas. So black teas came into being when the British East Indies Company and the Dutch East Indies Company were trying to get tea out of China and into Europe. They found that the green teas tended to spoil during the long voyage. So one of the ways around that was to oxidize the tea which took out almost all of the moisture, leaving about three percent in the tea. This resulted in a product that was easy to transport and still very tasty once it got back to the mainland of Europe. So that's why traditionally today in Europe, most people drink black tea. Black tea is most commonly produced in India and Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka exports more black tea than any other country in the world and it goes primarily into the Middle East and into Russia. The Indians drink a lot of black tea and they produce a lot of black tea. But they don't export as much because they like to drink it as well. It's been said that if the Indians each drank one extra cup of black tea a day, they would become a net importer of teas over time. Now, let's go ahead and taste this tea, it looks like it's ready. I'm going to pour it out. You'll see, right from the start, you'll see that is a very dark red cup. The Chinese actually even call black tea red tea because they think the color is more reddish than black. This is what most people know in the United States as tea. When we do classes on tea, this is what people say, oh finally, we're getting to the tea tea. So here it is let's taste it. It's got nice, strong notes. Very tannic taste, it's got a good mouth feel to it, it's something that kind of lingers in your mouth for a long period of time due to the essential oils. It's really what people think of when they think of tea."