Kevin Gascoyne (photo courtesy of Kevin Gascoyne) |
When I started diving deeper into learning about tea, Kevin Gascoyne's name popped up regularly. I pored over the book he co-wrote, Tea: History, Terroirs, Varieties which basically became my 'tea bible', and read numerous articles he's written over the years. I knew the tea house Camellia Sinensis he co-owns was one I needed to add to my list of places to visit. I've had the pleasure of meeting Kevin briefly at various tea events, and at this year's NY Coffee & Tea festival I realized I needed to ask him to schedule an interview. I was nervous speaking with someone who has done so much, and knew so much. But talk with Kevin and you'll instantly realize he's the guy you want to hang out with; drinking endless cups of tea and chatting about all manner of things. We recently had an hour-long phone conversation where Kevin's passion for tea came through in everything we talked about. We discussed his new collaboration on the Tea Studio project, his favorite tea memory, his opinion on tea education, and so much more. Highlights from our interview are posted below.
The Tea Studio (photo courtesy of Kevin Gascoyne) |
I’ve read a bit about
the Tea Studio, can you tell us a little bit about it? It looks gorgeous, by
the way.
The building was very carefully designed over quite a long
period. We put in an original design with an Indian architect and then it was
adapted by talking to experts from various tea research institutes and favorite
growers that we have from all over the world. We had input from experts from
China, Japan, Taiwan, Nepal, other parts of India. It’s very custom and also
very specialized.
Can you give us a
little background on how the Tea Studio came to be?
The original plan was to simply make a series of boutique style teas for the
specialized tea market that’s starting to grow. The ways to make different
styles of whole leaf led us to small machines the Chinese make to reproduce
their handmade leaves. It’s difficult to get manual workers to do all the manufacturing
as it takes a long time to learn how to do it, and it’s harder to find young people
to do that so they’ve been very quick in developing machines that do it in the
back room. Even a lot of the Longjing on the market now is not panned, it’s
made by machine. It’s getting to the point that even the tea from original prestigious
mountains of Lonjing is being made on these machines. These are specialized
state of the art machines. We bought a few of those, and as we looked into the
logistics of how it’s going to work we started to introduce liquid petroleum gas, it’s super clean and we are the first factory in India to be run on liquid
petroleum gas. Even though tea has a zero carbon footprint, because it takes so
many plants to make a cup of tea, a lot of people make use of coal, oil, or wood
for the dryers, even in the industrial world.
We tried to improve things socially by hiring an all-women
team as [Nilgiri] is not an area where women get a lot of opportunity. We
have a team of very attentive women that are showing quite a lot of initiative.
Having spent so much time in tea factories over the years, I feel we have a
very nice atmosphere which is quite different from the usual factory setting.
Photo courtesy of Kevin Gascoyne |
We’ve put a fund together to put money into female
child education in the village next to where the factory is. A lot of the rural
areas of India only educate the male children. It’s a bad habit that needs
dealing with, which means often the young girls get married off as young as
possible and aren’t always in the best situation with opportunities. We’re offering
the girls in the factory night courses, and are looking into an incentive
program for those that show the initiative to make decisions in the factory.
They can be put on a higher level with better pay. But we’re only in the first
few months of operation, so we haven’t seen very tangible results yet. But the
ideas are there. It’s in the manifesto.
How many employees
are there at the Studio?
One woman runs the shop floor, and she’s in her mid to late
30s. She recruits other girls from the village. Most are in their early 20s
quite a few have one or two children. We have about 5 on the payroll which means
we can be flexible about family needs.
It looks very
peaceful
It’s in a suspended valley that’s 1850 meters above sea
level, and it’s completely surrounded by a patchwork of small holder tea-fields,
where we get the tea from.
And is that why the
founders picked this area in Nilgiri?
Yes- Number one, its
high altitude, number two, there is a small farmer set-up, so that means once
you get the quality of tea that you want, (we want one leaf and a bud), you can
then control the leaf input in the factory quite nicely. We are looking to bring
cultivars from other regions and other countries, but that’s phase 2.
Photo courtesy of Kevin Gascoyne |
How many teas are you
currently producing?
Some are still in the process of being developed. We started
off with about 11 teas. In principal we can make 5 different styles of leaf. We
can make a Mao Feng style and an Anji Bai Cha style, Longjing style and a pearl
style depending on the machines. From those we can make different levels of
oxidation. We can do a black tea in the Anji Bai Cha machine, or a green tea.
It gives us quite a lot of opportunity to try different things. Four to five of
the teas so far are really tasting great, and the others are still being worked
on to bring up the quality. Because we’re in the first few months of
manufacture there is a lot of fine tuning to do but we are fortunate to have
started with a selection of teas that are really enjoyable to drink. From this point we’re just going to improve the
aromatic spectrum and structure and definition. And also enjoy the seasonal
differences- once we’ve done a full year we’ll understand what the seasonal
variations are.
And the teas you do
have available- are they for sale on the Camellia Sinensis website?
Yes we’ve got 4 on the camellia sinensis website, they are
all numbered by batch. We are encouraging our clients to enjoy the differences
by batch to enjoy the evolution and seasonal differences. I really like the idea that you’ve got this connection- from
the beginning of Camellia Sinensis project; it’s been about the connection of
us as the intermediary between the producers and the other side of the counter.
It’s nice to share this experimental tea factory scenario with our clients so
they can live that with us.
Since you’ve
travelled all over the world drinking teas, can you share one of your favorite
tea travel adventures?
Here’s one of my favorites: I was standing in one of our
stores talking to one of our ‘puerh geeks’ (who are very into the date, year,
factory, mountains, processing recipes, etc), talking to one of these young
chaps on the other side of the counter and he’s telling me about the
laboratory-style recipe of how he’s been making this tea he just bought from me:
93 degrees, 6 grams, 120 ml for a minute and a half for the first steep, and he
changes the recipe for the second steep and he’s going on and I’m hearing this
very technical laboratory style procedure that he’s describing and in my head I’m
drifting off to when we bought the tea back in the village. We bought this mao
cha where we pressed it into bricks. We sat on tree stumps and this guy just
showed us the squirrel that he shot for dinner and they give us each a great
big cup and come by with a handful of leaves and the guy comes out with a big
saucepan that has been bubbling out on the open fire. Scorching hot water,
pours it into the cup so my hands are so hot it’s difficult to hold the cup,
and when I drink it it’s burning my lips, and every time I get near the bottom
someone comes out and fills it up. It was a nice contrast of our western way of
revering tea and the Asian people’s way of living with tea as something that’s
just part of their environment.
I’ve read a bit about
your tea school, and it seems focused more on sharing a passion for tea;
empowering the drinker and not on academic certification. Can you tell us a
little bit about that?
We’re not into a tea master certification; we’re much more into, enjoy sharing tea because we like it. Enjoying the taste, sharing our thoughts,
not building some sort of strange artificial hierarchy or personal specialness
into what you drink. We drink tea because we like it. People who know about it
or don’t know about it- they can like it just as much. You can enjoy a tea
without knowing anything about it. I taste with people who know nothing about
tea and some of them have incredible taste perception. It’s not because they
know what altitude it was made at or because they can name six mountains in
Yunnan or anything like that. It’s really about this visceral enjoyment of
sharing this leaf which has an incredible history with human kind. 5000 years
of being something not only good for us, but it makes us feel great and it
brings us together, to sit in a circle and enjoy it together. To us it’s a lot
more about that. Obviously we have a passion for flavor experience so we’re
chasing the rare batches and trying to get stuff that blows our minds but we
don’t want to build any elitism. When people start working for us it’s very
clear that everyone is welcome, whether it’s a little old lady from the suburbs
or a student from college or some snooty tea expert from Paris, they’re all
welcome and hopefully we can all sit around the table and drink tea together.
If someone came to
you and said ‘I sort of know the basics about tea’, what would your advice be
to take their skills to the next level?
Gaiwan- the gaiwan is cheap, it’s not the investment of a gongfu
cha or senchado teapot. Easy to use, it’s very visceral to use because you can
open it, smell it, and it gives you a nice sensitivity and connection to
infusion. And you can do multiple infusions. It’s the first step into exploring
the depth of a tasting experience. It creates a ‘tea space’ you have to sit
down and be there. It brings you into the moment of infusion. You have to be
there at least for the 30 seconds of infusion time. Rather than a teapot that
you can drink while you’re doing other things this creates a physical space
and a space in your head to have that focus, and really get into the depth of
the flavor profile that you’ve made in a concentrated way instead of a teapot.
During your day do
you have any person tea rituals?
I usually drink about 3 liters of Darjeeling before lunch
and I try to vary between 3-4 different ones. Then I’ll often drink Wuyi oolong
after lunch, and late afternoon varies, could be different things. In the
evening I like to sit down with 4 gongfu cha pots. I collect the pots and I like
to sit down with four of those in the evening and just do different infusions
of 4 different teas. It’s a nice way to finish the evening for me. I share them
with whoever is around or just on my own.
Photo courtesy of Kevin Gascoyne |
Do you get a lot of
people asking about health benefits of tea, and if so how do you approach this?
We've done a lot of lab research so it’s easy for us to show
people the amount of tea antioxidants, and caffeine levels. We got a big table
printer in the shop and on the website with all that information. But what I
try to do is when people come in what our usual story is ‘once you walk into a
tea shop that is full of tea, you are in a healthy place’ the best tea is the
one you’ll drink a lot of. That’s the one you want. When all the original
Japanese sencha research came out in early 2000s and everyone wanted Japanese sencha
and a lot of people didn’t like it. it’s not what they wanted to drink. People were
coming in, spending a lot of money on sencha and gyokuro and not enjoy it and
not taking up the tea drinking habit. So I always say the best tea is the one
you’re going to drink a lot of, because this is a health tonic. We don’t need
to worry about which one is more healthy. The one we want is the one that gives
us pleasure. Pleasure is really good for your health, don’t forget! No one has
ever proved being stoic is good for your health…as soon as you are in a tea
shop you’re in the right place. You can travel through the world of flavors and
aromas. It’s way more interesting to approach it from a gastronomical point of
view, and an epicurean point of view instead of some sort of pharmacy dispensary.
You were raised in
England and were a tea drinker from an early age, was there a specific moment
that opened your eyes to the world of tea?
I grew up in Harrogate so I was lucky to have Betty’s, the
Taylor’s tea room. They had a tea room where I could buy single estate
Darjeeling and Assam in my youth. As a teenager I got into buying bags of this
and enjoy it at home. At 19, I went to India backpacking and tasted fresh
Darjeeling, and it was like something I knew but in a much higher form. I got
very excited about that, started writing articles about it for different
magazines in the UK and in Japan. And then gradually became this hobby/passion
obsession.
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Thank you so much Kevin for finding time in your busy
schedule for this interview. Readers, If you’re attending World Tea Expo, Kevin
will be conducting a few different seminars. Be sure to say hello if you don’t know
him, he’s a pleasure to talk with.
This is a great interview! And such an interesting interviewee!
ReplyDeleteAwesome interview! I'm definitely going to be following what Tea Studio does in the future. It sounds like this venture could really help the women of Nilgiri.
ReplyDeleteVery enjoyable interview - thank you.
ReplyDeleteQuite enjoyed this interview with Kevin, I've been following him keenly and hope to meet him one day.
ReplyDelete