What European City is the Center of today’s Tea Market?

Hamburg’s historic Warehouse District, with its connecting network of roads, waterways and bridges dating from the 1800s, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This labyrinth of buildings is interlaced with Venetian canals that once accommodated  barges delivering goods directly to loading doors on all six floors. I found it amazing that this complex survived the 1943 Allied bombardment which destroyed 80% of the city.

I spent several days in residence at the blending labs at Haelssen & Lyon, the oldest continuous resident of the warehouse area. Their modern blending operation and mammoth warehouse – housing enough tea to satisfy the German market for four years – is located 20 minutes outside the city. But the company offices and tasting rooms remain in this picturesque building where the firm began in 1879.

While traditional Chinese tea consumers will always turn to Longjing, Keemun, Ti Kwan Yin and Golden Yunnan teas, younger consumers in the country known as the birthplace of tea lean toward fruits, herbs and blends designed for a healthy and active lifestyle – just the recipes Hamburg has been creating for several decades.

Colonial housewives turned to herbs and fruits to fill their teapots when they swore off George III’s tea and taxes in the run-up to The Revolution. They called their caffeine-free infusions “Liberty Teas”.

Chinese retailers often look to western tastes and out-of-country blenders to create new tea drinking experiences which will stand out in the growing tea marketplace, proving the age-old adage “all the tea in China” no longer comes only from China.

I’ll drink to that!