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Halifax turning to tea-totalling
January 23, 2008
HFX/The Daily News
by Dean Lisk
It’s tea time. Once regulated to back element of grandma’s stove, where it would steep into a bitter brew, tea is steaming back as a drink of choice in Halifax.
Oolong, black, white, red, green – even chai – are growing in popularity as people eschew their store-bought tea bags for special loose-leaf teas and exotic blends.
“At the very beginning, there was lots of curiousity. But people weren’t surewhether they wanted to try,” Jia Tsu Thompson said. “Now, we have people coming in only to pick up tea.”
Thompson is president of the My Lan CUltural Centre on Lower Water Street. For the past four years, she’s been importing tea from China to Halifax. In the beginning, she’d order a few hundred cans at a time. Now, it’s a few thousand.
“People come in and say, ‘I can’t drink that tea in my cupboard any more, and throw it alal away,’” said Thompson.
“It’s the flavour,” Rebecca Babcock said. “There is no comparison between the dusk packed into a little bag compared to a leaf that is allowed to unfurl in your cup.”
Babcock is the co-owner of the recently opened Cargo & James Tea on Barrington Street. It is the Edmonton-based company’s second franchise location in Canada and serves about 70 different teas. It has coffee, too.
The place looks more like a trendy coffee shop than modern tea cafe. It’s only when you notice the rows of glass canisters – full of brown, yellow and green leaves – that you realize this is a steeper’s Shangri-La.
“We had a girl who worked for us over the Christmas holidays who put it succinctly. She said the tea that you put in tea bags is essentially the hot dog of teas,” Babcock said. “It is made up of the dust and leafovers of the production of really good tea. Either that, or it is machine processed.”
Cargo & James Tea was started in 2001 by converted java-addict Tim Grover, who was told by his doctor to give up his cups of Joe or risk a heart attack.
Like others, he wasn’t a fan of the brown liquid his grandmother left brewing all day, so Grover started researching teas and having samples sent from India.
Once he was a tea convert, he opened the business.
Babcock had a similar experience. As a university studentliving in Edmonton, she also developed health problems – heart palpitations, bening cysts and stomach problems – tied to coffee drinkage.
“This is how I met Cargo & James,” said Babcock, who move to Halifax two years ago as a grad student at Dal. “I had no intention of being a business woman, but my husband, Trent, and I just missed the tea so much.”
She said the numbers show the specialty loose-leaf tea market is growing si growing at more than 20 per cent per year. An estimated nine out of 10 Candians have raised a tea cup, including the majority of Maritimers. Most are used to Red Rose, Tetly and King Cole – brands which have been sitting on store shelves for generations.
When Thompson began importing for Mu Lan, she found people were hesitant about exotic names like Angel Jasmine, Huang-Shan Silver Noodles, and King of Guan Yin.
“Once they try it, they say, ‘I never tasted tea so good,” she said. “Usually woman are more inquisitive than men. There was an occasion where a woman came in and tried Dowager Empress tea. “She told her husband, ‘Honey, try it,’ and he said ‘You know I hate tea.’ He wouldn’t try a sip, so I said, ‘Look, if you don’t want to try a sip for your wife, try one sip for me.’ He did, and after he tried it, he bought some.”
Thompson found price was also a concern, with cups ranging from $2 to $5, pots for $6. She points out loose-leaf tea can e brewed a few times, with one serving lasting five or six cups – somethingyou’d never do with a tea bag.
“Are you going to suffer through the cup because of 20 cents?” Thompson asks. “Top quality tea is very similar to top quality wine, you pay a little more.”
Babcock said the mission of Cargo & James is to make really good tea available to people. She began her journey into the world of tea in Edmonton at a Cargo & James sniffer counter, a place you can smell the different leaves.
“I thought tea to kind of intimidating at first,” she said. “You go to a Chinese tea shop and you go in there feeling that you already need to know a lot about it. Here , you don’t feel like you have to walk in the shop and know everything about Japan Sencha, or flowering teas, to order a really great cup.”
Shelley Goodson uses a sniffer tray to entice people to try different types of tea at her business, the Queen of Cups on Ochterloney Street in Dartmouth.
“It is also a wonderful way to get people to try different things,” Goodson said. She goes around her shop with a tray of smaples she playfully refers to it as her “tea aroma-therapy tray.”
“If you like the way something smells, you will always like the way it tastes,” she said.
A Vancouver transplant, Goodson opened her business nine years ago. Her take on why this ancient drink is growing in popularity has to do with the way it’s perceived.
Unlike the go-go-go workd of coffee, when someone can down and espresso shot and have a jolt of java in a solitary way, having tea is a social activity.
“It is much more ritualized, and people enjoy having a cup of tea with somebody – not that it isn’t pleasant to sit down and have a much longed for solitary cup of tea at the end of the day.”
There is a civility associated with it, said Goodson, who serves her tea in bone china. “It’s a soothing thing. People thin they can take some time as opposed to grabbing a coffee and chugging it on the run. Tea is tototally different.”