Facts About Tea
A Few Important Facts about Tea
The history of tea has been traced back as far as the 4th century so facts about tea are easy to find. Tea originated in Eastern Asia and China and its first use was for medicinal purposes. Today, tea is more flavorful and although it is still used to treat many conditions, it also is a social beverage for pleasure and relaxation.
While heating hot water and pouring it over a teabag seems like the most popular way to prepare tea in the United States, in reality it is not. Iced tea is the number one drink. In fact, just about eighty percent of all the tea sold in the United States is ice tea. Ice tea has been around since the 19th century but credit for its invention is given to Richard Blechynden. He was a tea merchant from Great Britain who created ice tea for the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.
Facts about tea also tell us who first came up with the idea for the teabag. Thomas Sullivan was a merchant who sold tea in New York City. Just after the turn of the 20th century, he started selling his tea in cloth bags because of the rising price of tin boxes. It is said that one of his customers just put one of the bags in a pot and poured hot water over it. That was all it took for the birth of the modern teabag.
When it comes to favorite drinks, tea comes in second to water as the most popular drink in the world. It is also one of the cheapest drinks you find anywhere. You should be able to get as many as two hundred cups from one pound of tea. And, if you are watching your caffeine, tea has less than half as much caffeine as coffee.
One of the most interesting facts about tea is that all tea comes from the same tea plant, Camelloa Sinensis. This includes regular black tea, green tea, Oolong tea and white tea. The tea plant is a dark green and grows in tropical environments. It thrives where there is lots of heat and humidity.
There are five countries in Asia which produce most of the world’s tea. These include China, India, Japan, Sri Lanka, and Formosa. China used to produce around 50% of the tea in the world but now its production is down to around 10% of the total tea grown. China produces mainly green tea.
When you look at the facts about tea production, you will see that India is the number one country when it comes to growing and exporting tea. Black tea is the favorite type of tea in India. The third highest producer of tea is Sri Lanka, also known as Ceylon. The famous Thomas Lipton of Lipton tea spent a large amount of money building the tea industry in Ceylon. Originally, Ceylon exported more coffee than tea but the coffee industry there was consumed by disease and never reestablished.
The facts about tea processing tell us exactly how tea is dealt with when the leaves are ready to be harvested. Tea leaves are handpicked. They are then left to wither or dry up for around twenty-four hours. Next, tea leaves are pressed between metal rollers which mix together all of the substances within the leaves. The leaves are left out to air dry for many hours and then heated to remove any moisture that remains.
Depending on whether the tea is black, green, white and oolong, the oxidation process may take longer or shorter periods of time. Even though green tea is becoming more popular in North America because of its antioxidant properties, roughly 75% of all tea produced is black.
There are so many flavors of tea you are sure to find at least one that you like. The antioxidants in tea, flavonoids and catechins, have been shown to help people reduce their risk of such diseases as cancer, diabetes, and stroke. Some studies even show that tea has anti-aging benefits.