One thing that Brits abroad complain a lot about is the tea. Wherever you go, it’s just not the same as you get back home. Not in the US, nor in France, nor Germany, nor Italy (“You want tea? Not espresso?”) nor anywhere else I have been.
Of course, tea is part of the history of the British Empire (along with opium, but this is a family blog) and it has become part of the British psyche. Generations of Brits have “a brew” every day, whether it’s hot or cold outside. This is why, about 9 years ago, you would have found me wandering the streets of a small town in California looking for a cafe that would make two cups of tea, hot, with milk, and definitely no lemon.
(As an aside, there are definite advantages to not having a tea culture. The removal men who came to pack up our house in the UK arrived and promptly started drinking tea. It must have added a good 2 or 3 hours to the packing time. The guys who unloaded in the US refused a brew and completed the job in double quick time.)
What I didn’t know until arriving here is that just south of Charleston is the only tea plantation in the USA. Being fans of a cuppa, we thought that was worth a visit, so off we went. Charleston Tea Plantation is on Wadmalaw Island, about half an hour from the city. The drive is actually rather beautiful – the urban environment gradually dissolves into a rural idyll of trees overhanging the roadway, bridges over creeks, and marsh all around.
About 15 years ago, in one of my previous careers, I visited a bunch of coffee plantations in Southern India. This was fascinating: coffee plants grow best in almost jungle-like conditions, shaded by trees. The berries are bright red, and after picking there’s a lengthy – and smelly – process of washing and fermentation before you even get to roasting. So I was interested to see the tea process too, and relive my “Man from Del Monte” days.
This tea plantation is run by just a handful of people. In some countries they have hundreds of people picking the new leaves from the tea bushes, but the Charleston Tea Plantation manages with just five and a machine called the Green Goddess, a version of a cotton-picking machine, that drives over the fields and cuts the tops off the bushes. It’s only the very newest leaves that are used for tea, which is why the bushes in the photo below look like that – as soon as fresh young leaves appear, they are picked.
A lot of people in the Deep South drink iced tea, often flavoured with fruit, which suits the climate a lot better than a hot cup. There’s a story, maybe apocryphal, that iced tea was invented at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, when the East India Company pavilion was trying – and failing – to give away hot tea under the sweltering Missouri sun. So, rather than throw it all away, they mixed it with ice and discovered that the punters rather liked it. I’m yet to be convinced, though I have found peach tea very refreshing on a hot day.
Finally, in case any Limeys need reassuring, we have found a place here to buy Yorkshire Tea. So that’s all fine.
South of the Mason-Dixon line 