At World Tea Expo... with Jane Pettigrew

How and when did you start working with tea?

Tea found me and became a profession for me in 1983 when I opened a tearoom in London with two friends.

Before that, I was a language and communications trainer, lecturing in an adult education college. I was also just a typical British tea drinker, drinking tea as an everyday beverage with no knowledge or understanding of it. I certainly didn’t realise what an important part of my life tea was to become.

What is the first experience that you remember in regards to tea? 

It’s hard to specify one particular occasion: I grew up drinking tea. My mother bought loose leaf tea straight from the chest at our local grocer’s. I don’t remember which teas we drank but I’m pretty sure that Ceylon teas were prominent, and probably blends by our grocer.

You are involved in many aspects of the tea industry, including holding the position of the Director of Studies at the UK Tea Academy (UKTA). Tell us about this position and the organisation. 

Since the early 1990s I have been involved in tea training for staff in hotels and tearooms around the world. UKTA, established in 2015, grew out of that and an evident need to raise awareness about tea-related matters in the hospitality sector. We started teaching UKTA courses in February 2016, aiming to reach out to the UK catering industry, but quickly found that we were attracting tea professionals and interested amateurs from all over the world — many of those first students have been coming back for different courses. We have also trained, and still train, staff from top hotels, restaurants, coffee companies and tearooms.

Rona Tison and Jane Pettigrew at World Tea Awards 2019, credit: @WTE

You are also a seasoned participant and speaker at World Tea Expo. What has your experience been like over the years? How has it changed over time? 

World Tea Expo is impressive: it is the biggest, most tea-focused show I have ever worked at. About 15 years ago, it was very much about Afternoon Tea, and everything and everyone that went with it, and publications were more the sort with recipes and ideas for celebrating afternoon tea. The audience then was very different: mainly female, often wearing hats as if dressed up to go out to tea. Things gradually changed: the audience became much younger, more balanced in gender ratio, with entrepreneurs more interested in the tea itself rather than the accessories. The range of exhibitors also began to change so that, apart from US tea and herbal wholesalers, companies came from the Far East, South Asia and Africa to display, talk about and sell their teas. The education programme also began to change from simpler basic tea education to more complex and advanced topics aimed at helping tea businesses make more of their business, and understand and benefit from new trends. The show will be in Denver, Colorado in 2020 rather than in Las Vegas. We are very interested to find out who that move will affect, the mix of attendees, and the type of supplier.

What do you think is the biggest benefit of attending World Tea Expo? 

Expo is a great forum for exchanging news and views; it brings together many tea people from all over, to share and learn. It is a showcase for ideas, new research, products and companies, and provides something for people at all different stages of their tea business or tea career. There are so many different activities and opportunities to taste teas from all over the world, to learn how they are made, find out where they come from, and how they provide an income for the local communities. It offers a powerful networking opportunity and a chance to understand more about the current trends and developments.

You’ve won many awards in the tea industry. This year in Las Vegas you were awarded the Best Tea Publication: Book, Magazine Award for your new book World of Tea. Tell us about this book. What prompted you to write it? 

During my tea career — presenting, writing, editing, training — I have always tried to keep up-to-date with what is happening around the world: production methods, markets, growers, trends. But it was difficult to find out everything I needed or wanted to know in just one publication. Anyone — tea wholesalers, retailers, students, interested amateurs, journalists — looking for similar information had to consult many different sources. The idea of World of Tea was to collate the information as a source of easy-access information. Also, in the past 10–15 years, more people are developing a passion for growing tea in very unusual and unexpected places, say Holland, Italy, Spain, Scotland, so it became even more difficult to keep up and access all the relevant information. 

My book aims to create a quick reference tool to every single place that grows tea by giving statistics for each country or region with all the data required and accompanying running texts of historical facts, information about tea production, relevant social factors, and details of factories. The last press run included new growers in North and Latin America, the UK, Europe, Bhutan, and Australasia. Many more have started growing tea since, which will be included in the next edition.

You have written numerous books on tea, where do you get the inspiration?

They are very varied. The first, Jane Pettigrew’s Tea-Time, was a collection of recipes from my London tearoom, with some background and history. A Social History of Tea was published in the UK by The National Trust, with an updated edition by Benjamin Press/Elmwood Inn Fine Teas in Kentucky. I loved researching for that book — you never know what you are going to find. My Tea Classified (sold in the US as The New Tea Companion) is a guide to all the basics about tea, summarising what we teach in our UKTA foundation courses. I wrote a gift book on Afternoon Tea, and one, Design For Tea, about the different tablewares and how they developed from the Chinese tea wares that arrived in England in the second half of the 17th century. With Bruce Richardson of Benjamin Press/Elmwood Inn Fine Teas, I compiled guide books to tearooms in London and Paris. There are so many different aspects of tea and so many different ways in which tea connects to other areas of our lives that the possibilities for books and articles are infinite and wonderfully fascinating.

What’s your usual tea routine? Do you have an all-time favourite tea?

The first thing I do every morning is brew tea. I can’t focus on the day ahead until I’ve drunk several bowls of roasted wulong, Nepalese black, Yunnan black buds, Phoenix wulong, or Alishan jade. My preference changes with the time of year, how I feel, what I feel I need. My mind comes to life as I brew and sip. As the day goes on, the teas I drink and how much I drink depends on what I’m doing and where I am. If I’m training in the UKTA studio, of course we drink a lot of different teas through the day; what we drink depends on which country or which type of tea we are focusing on. If I’m working at home, I usually prepare a tea that gives several brews, with the pot and a bowl permanently at my elbow. I really can’t function without. 

My all-time favourites are jade and dark wulongs, roasted wulongs, Yunnan blacks, Nepalese First Flush and other seasonal teas, and an outstanding Oriental Beauty.

Jane’s latest award-winning book, World of Tea, can be found here.