Those little beans and leaves have a long way to go from the field before they reach consumers. Here’s a brief guide to their journey.

Jonathon Gregson Tea About

Tea

All tea comes from one type of bush – camellia sinensis. It can grow wherever the climate is right, from India and China to East Africa. Soil, climate, and rainfall all affect the quality and flavour, as does the way it’s picked and handled.

All of the tea we buy is picked by hand, with just the top tips and buds of the plant harvested. Picking by hand, rather than harvesting by machine, helps to guarantee quality – by allowing human judgement to select only the best leaves, and making sure they’re not damaged.

From there, what happens depends on the kind of tea being made: white, green, oolong or black.

For white and green, the lightest teas, the leaves are simply dried. For oolong and black tea, the leaves are tossed or rolled to release a little of the moisture inside and coat the leaves. This creates a fermentation or “oxidation” reaction that intensifies the flavours and darkens the leaf – and the time it’s left to oxidise determines its flavour and colour, from lighter oolong to darker oolong and all the way to black.

The leaves are also graded by size, with larger leaves known as “orthodox” and smaller leaves known as “CTC”, which stands for “cut tear curl”.

CTC leaves are often used to create tea bags. The smaller leaf size maximises surface contact with the water, which means a nice, strong cup of tea can brew more swiftly and with less room to circulate – perfect for convenient brewing directly in a mug.

Orthodox teas are more commonly sold as loose leaf tea. The larger leaf size means less of the surface area is in direct contact with the water, and that typically results in a slightly lighter flavour versus CTC tea. Some consider that a little more refined, allowing the more subtle flavour notes to shine through. Orthodox tea is also ideally brewed in a teapot, which gives the leaves lots of room to move around in the water.

After grading, the teas are then packed up to sell. If they're heading to Taylors, they'll then travel by ship to Teesport on the north east coast of England, and then by road to Harrogate.

That’s when we blend them, placing them inside a blending drum (a large, slowly rotating container) which delicately mixes teas from different sources together. A tea blend is simply a recipe - a mixture of teas with complementary flavour profiles, which can be adjusted to make sure the final flavour is always the same. If there’s a change in the way one crop tastes from one season to the next, our tea buyers can adjust the blend recipe a little here and there to make sure that the final taste is always consistent.

Jonathon Gregson Coffee About

Coffee

Coffee beans are the seeds of a fruit called coffee cherries, which grow on coffee trees. Once the cherries are ripe, they're picked by hand or (if the land is flat) by machine. It takes about 8,000 cherries to make 1kg of ground coffee.

The next step is called "processing", which dries the cherries and removes the fruit from the beans. There are two key approaches to this: dry processing and wet processing.

Dry processing is the simplest and oldest approach, and simply involves drying the whole cherries in the sun. As they dry, the fruit begins to ferment, often creating fruity and funky flavour notes which can influence the taste of the roasted coffee. Known as the 'natural' method, this typically creates low acidity, full bodied coffee.

Wet processing removes the pulp from the bean before drying, through a process of soaking, rolling, fermenting and washing, with each stage removing more of the fruit. The beans are then dried in the sun or by machine. This is known as the 'washed' method and typically creates light, clean-tasting, fruity coffee.

Lastly, the coffee beans are "dehulled", which removes the final layers of fruit from the beans. The beans, which are still green at this stage, are then bagged up ready for export. If they're heading to Taylors, like our tea, they'll travel by ship to Teesport on the north east coast of England, and then by road to Harrogate.

The next stage is blending. A blend is simply a recipe - a combination of beans with complementary flavour profiles, which can be adjusted to make sure the final flavour is always the same. The taste of individual coffee harvests can change a little from one year to the next, and our blends can change with them, ensuring consistency from batch to batch, and from year to year.

Lastly comes roasting. Before going into our traditional drum roaster, the coffee beans are still small, green and dense. Applying rapid heat causes changes at the chemical level, turning them dark and fragrant. The longer they roast for, the more the flavours turn from bright, acidic and fruity to dark, toasty and chocolatey.

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