Chaidim's Blog

The latest report from Greenpeace entitled "Trouble Brewing - Pesticides Residues in Tea Sample from India" shows that random samples of your first love “Lipton Yellow" contains more than 16 known pesticides harmful to health. Unsurprisingly, Lipton and Twining’s and other big (and sometimes small) commercial brands use similar lines of work, i.e., buy huge quantities of cheap tea worldwide (India, Sri Lanka, China, Kenya), blend it to always obtain the same taste, and sell it as quality tea with a lot of marketing buzz around. Tea is indeed Tea, but there are many levels to consider. Do you want to know why am I going to pin down the pinnacle of your childhood tea souvenir, when you first discovered tea, ...

If you want to know what's in a tea bag, just have a look at these pictures taken this morning while working on our Chaidim Organic Shin Chin Oolong. It's called "leftovers" (technically Fannings"). Originally, these small pieces of tea were treated as the rejects of the manufacturing process in making high quality leaf tea like the orange pekoe. Fannings with extremely small particles are sometimes called dusts. Fannings and dusts are considered the lowest grades of tea, separated from broken-leaf teas which have larger pieces of the leaves.