Green Tea Forum

Kevangogh · Forum God Joined: 19 Jul 2005 Posts: 916 Location: Japan

If a company buys a lot of bulk tea and ships it to the USA and stores it and in turn ships it from the USA, they only get the FDA number once for the whole shipment. You won't see FDA notices on domestic sellers of green tea because they store it. If on the other hand you order directly from China/Japan/wherever and they ship it directly to you from the country (as we do) then they have to get FDA prior notice. I hate it that we have to do this, I'm no big fan of the FDA let me tell you! However, the FDA really has nothing to do with the quality of the tea, etc. Personally I'm convinced that it has to do with big drug companies keeping cheap drugs from being available to the average American but call me a cynic.

The returned parcels were not refused, they were returned due to the addresses being incorrect. However, I noticed that they had been inspected as they had "Inspected by US Customs" tape all over them.

Karen · Black Belt Joined: 13 Apr 2007 Posts: 123

Chip · Posted: Nov 16, 2007 5:02 am Post subject:

Hi Karen,

Long time.

It is more a matter of not ordering much chinese tea, period. I orderewd from them in the Spring, but not since. I have not ordered anything from China since given the current increased level of concerns regarding their agricultural products.

However, I still for some reason trust TeaSpring more than 90% of other vendors of Chinese tea who have no clue where their tea even came from.

Smelling the dry leaf kind of gives me at least some confidence in TeaSpring's teas since I have experience in the field of pesticides.

nutty teadrinker · Uh, Can I Add Sugar? Joined: 01 Jan 2008 Posts: 3

I agree that it is difficult to find a trust-worth Chinese tea supplier from the Mainland China. I go to Beijing, almost, each year, and buy tea in bulk from a few best-known tea houses or tea shops. These venders have their own tea bases and also supply their products to the Chinese officials, business people, performers, artists and middle-class (and, I guess, the expatriates). If they tell you the tea is eco-certified (=organic), you should believe them. If they dare to "go cheap or cheat" with the quality, it does not only mean to be out of business, but also mean to serve jail times. The rich or not very-rich people in Beijing are very fuzzy about the quality of their own food.
Hangzhou is the other good place. It is the birth place of Dragon Well and it has a tea-drinking culture.
Also, I seem to hear that some Japanese business such as Asahi Brewer (yes, the one that brews beers) has a Oolong tea base in Fujian. The sales-girls (a bit annoying, I admit) always try to sell me the best and most expensive Tie-Guan-Yin by saying that it was produced from a joint venture with Japanese Very Happy

greenisgood · Black Belt Joined: 20 Jan 2008 Posts: 112

I personally think that the whole Chinese tea scare is way overblown. I'm all for environmental protection and wish that everything was organic but seriously, I don't want to ruin Chinese tea for myself with the thought that it might contain some mysterious bad chemical. There is no way to escape synthetic chemicals nowadays, they're in the water we all drink and in the plastic that we all use and who knows where else, and they've been around for decades since the "chemical revolution" and "Silent Spring" and are here to stay. Studying toxicology has lead me not to increased fear but more a sense of inevitability, the pesticides of a Chinese farmer probably evaporate and land on the organic tea fields of Japan only to be infused in our water which is loaded with trace amounts of everything from lead to fertilizer to birth control pills. We can do some things but really theres no escape. We can't change the past and theres only so much that can be done now, we might as well enjoy good tea and hope for the best...isn't it supposed to prevent cancer etc. anyway?