Assam Tea Company?

On Mar 8, 1:03 pm, winef...@hushmail.com wrote:
> Have you bought any tea from Upton?
....
> I might give Assam a try.

I am in a minority on this, but I have tried maybe 20 or more Assams
from Upton and have not found any of them really very satisfying, and
some of them enormously over priced. "Not as strong as I would like"
pretty much describes my whole experience with Upton. Someday I may
go back and try some more of their Assam, but for now I've crossed
them off my list. Also, by having so many very similar teas on offer,
they have managed to make variety and choice into a fault! Let me
know what you think of Assam (also called Tfactor, apparently).

On Mar 8, 4:31 pm, Salsero <tom2ant...m> wrote:
> On Mar 8, 1:03 pm, winef...@hushmail.com wrote:
>
> > Have you bought any tea from Upton?
> ....
> > I might give Assam a try.
>
> I am in a minority on this, but I have tried maybe 20 or more Assams
> from Upton and have not found any of them really very satisfying, and
> some of them enormously over priced.  "Not as strong as I would like"
> pretty much describes my whole experience with Upton.  Someday I may
> go back and try some more of their Assam, but for now I've crossed
> them off my list.  Also, by having so many very similar teas on offer,
> they have managed to make variety and choice into a fault!  Let me
> know what you think of Assam (also called Tfactor, apparently).

Upton's has a new Assam Sewper, TA52, that I'm going to try next. I'm
using up their Season's Pick Assam fannings I got in the Fall, but
they're not selling it anymore. Toci

On Mar 8, 12:50 pm, Salsero <tom2ant...m> wrote:

> Curious about it as an oddity, a group of us shared some of their
> "Koucha," a  "Japanese Broken Leaf Black Tea," that was really very
> nice.  I never imagined that any blacks came out of Japan, especially
> not of such high quality.

"Koucha," (could also be romanized as "kootya," for example) is the
Japanese word for what we call black tea. I have *never* heard of
black tea being produced in Japan (and Japan is my particular
interest). Is it possible that that lot of tea was simply something
produced for the Japanese market? They *do* drink a lot of black tea
there, after all...

On Mar 10, 3:59 pm, Salsero <tom2ant...m> wrote:
> Interesting, I didn't know that they drank much black tea in Japan.
>

We should not judge from stereotypes:

Tea import statistics for Japan for year 2007 (Jan to Dec) show -
Green tea 9,624 tonnes total (from China 9,015 tonnes), Black tea
37,718 tonnes total (from China 21,172 tonnes, from Sri Lanka 10,354
tonnes, from India 2,741 tonnes), Tea extracts 2,165 tonnes total.
Black tea importing is stable - in 2006 it was 36,842 tonnes, for 2005
was 36,175 tonnes. (data from F.O. Lichts)

With total tea imports at 49,507 tonnes, green and black, plus mainly
green local production of 99,500 tonnes (2006 data ex ITC) this would
indicate that one in four cups of tea consumed in Japan is black. Bow
low to the marketing power of Lipton Yellow Label !

Nigel at Teacraft