Tea Blog

Writing articles for The English Tea Store Blog and publishing a tea site of my own means I do a fair amount of research about tea. I’d hardly consider myself an expert but I’ve learned a few things over the years. But when I come up against the more technical aspects of tea I realize what a novice I really am.

It should probably come as no surprise that the Chinese have made some substantial strides when it comes to tea research. China is, after all, the nation where tea culture got its start and are still the world’s top tea producing nation to this day. Many of us probably tend to think of Chinese tea production as a small scale sort of thing that takes place on tiny family farms, but it’s probably safe to say that there’s a little more to it than that.

I’m not sure how The Journal of Tea Science escaped my notice until recently but it somehow managed to do so. It appears that they’ve been going strong since at least 1964, according to their web site, which includes a smattering of archives for years starting with that one and ending in 2013. See some of the more current content here.

As one might expect from a publication called the Journal of Tea Science, this isn’t the sort of stuff that makes for thrilling beach reading. Articles with titles like Establishment of Predictive Model for Quantitative Analysis of Major Components in Jasmine Tea by Near Infrared Spectroscopy(NIRS) or Dynamic Variation of Chemical Pattern Related to Aroma Constituents during the Quality Formation of Fresh Scent-Flavor Oolong Tea aren’t likely to be heading up the bestseller charts anytime soon.

On the other hand there are some articles that appear to be a little more intelligible to us mere mortals (Effects of Freezing on Quality of Black Tea, Study on Oolong Tea Brand Loyalty under the Moderating Role of Switching Cost). There are also some that seem like they might appeal to fans of strange research about tea – like yours truly (Application of Fingerprint Technique in Tea Research, Application of Tea Embedding Particle in Cigarette Holder).

What’s not completely clear is how readily available each of the articles are. Such scholarly journals usually only make abstracts of their articles available rather than the full articles. However, even though each of those articles is clickable, actually clicking the link doesn’t seem to go anywhere. Perhaps your results may vary. Of course, if one tea science journal isn’t enough for you, be sure to check out the Journal of Tea Science Research, which I ran across as I was researching this article.

See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.

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