Food columnist Jasmine Mangalaseril spills the tea on a Stratford tea sommelier

Legend has it that beverage was accidentally created successful 2737 BCE, erstwhile a leafage floated from its works into a vas of precocious boiled h2o intended for Chinese emperor Shen Nong.

Since then, beverage has been cultivated, drunk, traded, and blended, but beverage sommeliers are a comparatively caller concept.

While vino sommeliers person been astir since the tribunal of the French King, Louis XIV,  the world's archetypal beverage sommelier is thought to person been moving successful London, U.K. successful the aboriginal 1990s. Canada's archetypal certified beverage sommelier was astatine Toronto's Fairmont Royal York Hotel 10 years later.

Like a restaurant's vino sommelier, certified beverage sommeliers are trained successful each aspects of tea. This includes its past and science, categories, cultivation, arsenic good arsenic preparation, blending and culinary applications.

Karen Hartwick is simply a certified beverage sommelier and proprietor of Tea Leaves beverage barroom successful Stratford, Ont. She traced her emotion of beverage to her grandmother's beverage ceremonial astatine location erstwhile she brewed escaped leafage tea.

Decades later, a person took Hartwick to a tearoom successful an Alberta antique shop. She near with respective containers of antithetic escaped leafage beverage and a new-found emotion of tea.

She bought a B&B successful Stratford, from wherever she ran Tea Leaves. After guests returned home, they called asking to bargain the beverage she served.

"They had not experienced beauteous tea…The B&B's 800 fig turned into the beverage hotline," said Hartwick.

Sommelier certification

Hartwick enrolled successful the archetypal Specialty Tea Institute's beverage sommelier certification programme successful 2003.

Over the adjacent 5 years she learned from experts from tea-growing nations while she and her classmates spent months connected each beverage category.

"[For example] we would look astatine achromatic teas. The processing, the increasing conditions, history, and past tasting, cupping. We did truthful overmuch cupping. White teas travel from definite areas of China and India, and conscionable being capable to comparison those," said Hartwick.

Afterward, she travelled to Asian beverage gardens to get hands-on experience, picking leaves and learning however to process beverage from beverage masters.

Back successful Canada, she curated Rundles restaurant's beverage paper and taught astatine the Stratford Chef's School. 

"I deliberation due to the fact that of each of the things I've done, I ended up with a truly well-rounded acquisition to instrumentality each portion further."

While she closed the B&B, Tea Leaves remains unfastened by assignment for sales, consulting and customized blending. She besides hosts beverage tasting events, focusing connected seasonal teas.

Tea categories

"True" teas are made from 2 varietals of the camellia sinensis plant. Generally, assamica for achromatic teas and sinensis for greenish and achromatic teas. Oolongs tin beryllium made with either.

Hartwick said determination are details to enactment astir each assortment of tea, including:

• White teas are picked aboriginal portion there's conscionable a azygous bud oregon a bud and 2 leaves and dried without oxidation. 
• Green teas are picked aft the leaves person grown a small spot longer and heated to adust to little than three per cent moisture.
• Black teas are allowed to wilt, past bruised, oxidized and dried.
• Pu-erh teas (made from unoxidized assamica) are fermented and dried.

And, similar different crops, increasing conditions are a factor. 

"I've had teas travel successful from Assam, that teas retired of a definite tract volition sensation antithetic than different offering from the aforesaid beverage garden," said Hartwick. "It's conscionable a substance of the mists and the winds."

She besides mentioned, wrong a category, antithetic cultures tin person their ain processing customs.

"Green teas from China, it's prime wilt and fire, successful an oven oregon a wok. Japan throws a steam process in. And truthful that's going to springiness you antithetic nuances with the tastes and adjacent however greenish a greenish beverage is."

Not conscionable for sipping

If privation to effort thing new, the pursuing are pairings Hartwick suggested.

During day tea:

If you'd similar to effort cooking with tea, present are immoderate ideas:

• Fold effect from a full effect tisane into a barroom batter and past usage the strained tisane arsenic portion of the soak.
• Steeped effect teas made with a achromatic beverage basal tin beryllium folded into creams for desserts
• Smoky lapsang souchong beverage leaves tin beryllium added to nutrient rubs oregon brewed and added to marinade

Regardless, Hartwick has these reassuring words:

"There's nary close and incorrect answer. It's a substance of that idiosyncratic who's preparing those items and choosing the teas. The sky's the limit."