Tea Grotto Blog

According to researchers at the University College London, those who drink black tea are able to de-stress more quickly than those drinking a placebo. The stress hormone cortisol (associated with all manner of ails), spikes during a fight-or-flight response, and it’s abatement in the body is much faster for someone who’s recently had a cup of black tea.

Additionally, people who drank black tea regularly (four times daily for six weeks) were found to have lower baseline levels of cortisol.

So—as if you needed any more reason to steep up your favorite black tea—go ahead and add serious stress reduction to your long list of tea health boons.

I’m in Taiwan and happen to be with one of the major tea importers and exporters of the country, Jackson Haung. Mr. Haung has been in the tea business for 45 years and was the former chairman of the Taiwan’s tea manufacture association. Taiwan is famous for producing some of the world best Oolong teas. It has over 13,000 local tea family farmers, now that the government doesn’t control production of its tea plantations. It produces 20,000 tons of Oolong tea each year, while importing 25,000 tons of black and green tea.

I learned something else fun from him yesterday during our conversations. Sencha and Matcha powders can be powdered in two different ways:

1. Using a traditional stone grinding technique or
2. by freezing the loose leaf tea to make it hard then using high pressured air to powder it.

Speaking of matcha, the U.S. is just now learning about how healthy Japanese Matcha powder is. When one consumes the ground leaf, they are getting the added benefit of protein and beta carotene that do not steep into the liquor when drinking loose leaf. Additionally, because you are drinking the leaf, you get more vitamin C and catechins (colorful compounds with antioxidant properties) than you would by drinking regular tea. I learned yesterday from speaking with Mr. Haung that powdered sencha delivers even more nutrients than matcha powder, as matcha is shade-grown and sencha is grown in sunlight. He drinks a cup of powdered sencha every day along with three cups of guava “tea” for insulin and 3 cups of Oolong.