Tea Museum at Hantane, Kandy - A joint project by the Sri Lanka Tea Board and the Planters' Association of Sri Lanka
Location : Built in 1925, the spacious four storied Hantane Tea Factory, had been abondoned for more than a decade when it was earmarked for the Museum Project undertaken by the Sri Lanka Tea Board and the Planters' Association of Ceylon. Today it stands as a proud monument to the success story taht is Ceylon Tea.
Opening Hours : Open on all days, except monday, from: 8.15 a.m. to 4.45 p.m
Introduction: The Hantane tea factory is located three miles from Kandy. It is served by a motorable road that circles the factory providing easy access. Kandy is a mandatory stop on virtually every tourist itinerary, and the location of Ceylon Tea Museum at Hantane makes sound economic sense. It will also enhance the attraction of hill country to visitors. Additionally its proximity to the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens and Loolecondra, where tea was grown commercially, make Hantane the perfect location. The factory building consists of four floors. The ground accommodate heavy machinery; the first floor occupies some examples in the withering process. Library and the Audio-visual presentations in the second floor whilst the sales outlets are found in the third floor. The fourth floor is to be converted to a deluxe restaurant.
Visitor's view through telescope found in the fourth floor.
Although exhibits are not abundant they do provide a valuable insight into how tea was manufactured in the early days. Old machinery, some dating back more than a century, has been lovingly restored to working order. The first exhibit that greets visitors in the Engine Room on the ground floor of the museum is the Ruston and Hornsby developed diesel and other liquid fuel engines, power for the estates were obtained by water driven turbines.
Museum's "Rolling Room" offers a glimpse into the development of manufacturing techniques with its fascinating collection of rollers. Here the showpiece is the manually operated ' Little Giant Tea Roller'.
The first roller-cum-dryer which was believed to have been used by James Tayler
* Centre transacts 6.2 million kilos of tea in H1 2010
* Overall tea trade through Dubai rises to 64.2million kilos
* Dubai remains 2nd largest export destination for Indian and Sri Lankan teas
The Dubai Tea Trading Centre (DTTC), an initiative of Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC), has announced a record 6.2 million kilos of tea transacted in the first six months of 2010.
The overall tea trade through Dubai for the first six months of the year increased to 64.2 million kilos, an increase of 11.3 per cent from 58 million kilos, primarily due to favourable growing conditions resulting in higher production in most tea producing countries.
With the recent trend of higher production and favourable climatic conditions in the major producing countries, tea prices have been extremely volatile in the past few months. However, the general trend still continues to remain buoyant as carry forward stocks are low and there is good demand.
“Last year, global tea production saw a deficit of nearly 60 million kilos of tea due to drought in major tea-producing countries,” said Ahmed bin Sulayem, Executive Chairman, DMCC. “However, the favourable climatic conditions in the first half of this year have led to an increased tea production by more than 107 million kilos. At DMCC, we remain committed to increasing tea trade through Dubai and strengthening the emirate’s position as a major hub for global tea trade. Through our efforts, we are confident that Dubai will play a pivotal role in the supply chain for the industry.”
Sanjay Sethi, Director, DTTC, said: “Since its inception in 2005, the Centre has grown consistently, with increased transactions and global tea producers, merchant exporters and buyers establishing their base here. As we continue to enhance our services for the trade, we have witnessed an increased demand for our value-added services such as blending, packaging of tea bags as well as loose tea in retail formats, storage facilities and office space for tea companies.”
Dubai remains the second largest export destination for both Indian and Sri Lankan tea. The DTTC presently stocks teas from 13 producing countries, including Kenya, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Nepal, China and Iran. In keeping with its mandate to further increase the tea trade in and through Dubai, the DTTC also facilitates sales with buyers in the GCC countries, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan, Afghanistan, UK and the CIS countries and has plans to expand its services to other Middle East and European markets.
Earlier this year, DTTC hosted the 3rd Global Tea Forum in Dubai, capitalising on Dubai’s longstanding position as a global trading hub. The only global event in the region specific to the tea industry, over 360 delegates participated at this event, representing the entire value chain of the tea industry.
World Tea Media has awarded QTrade Teas & Herbs five first place awards from over 200 submissions at the North America Tea Championship - Hot Tea Class. An independent, expert panel of seasoned tea professionals granted top honors to QTrade across a wide range of tea categories and origins.
QTrade's first place finishers included:
Best Ceylon - New Vithanakande Supreme, Sri Lanka
Best Darjeeling - Jungpana 2nd Flush, India (3rd year as Best Darjeeling)
Best Blended White Tea - Organic & Fair Trade Silver Serenity
Best White Tea - Organic & Fair Trade Silver Needle Supreme
Best Pan-Fired Green Tea - Tunxi Green Tea, China
"We're quite pleased the panel selected not only five exceptional teas from QTrade, but that two of the entries originated from Certified Organic and Fair Trade tea gardens," explains Manik Jayakumar, President, QTrade. He adds, "QTrade continues to work at the forefront of socially responsible, sustainable agricultural methods. Organic Silver Serenity and Organic Silver Needle Supreme finished top in their class, signifying how organic methods can often lead to superior tasting teas."
"We wish to commend QTrade on their continued participation and success in these tasting competitions," exclaims Ronald Eng, President, Kopius Teas. "If you look at the thirteen first place awards and the twenty-eight total awards from the past three years, it's clear that QTrade not only has the global network to acquire some of the world's finest teas, but that they also have the expertise to consistently identify best-in-class entrants."
About QTrade Teas
QTrade Teas & Herbs (www.qtradeteas.com) is a direct from source importer of quality ingredients serving the middle to upper tier food and beverage industries for over fifteen years. QTrade is the largest importer of organic teas in the United States, and also offers a growing selection of organic herbs, spices, fruits and flowers. Augmenting the products is a complementary set of custom formulation, blending, and private label services.
About Kopius Teas
Kopius Teas (www.kopiusteas.com) specializes in providing premium teas, herbs, and accessories for the startup to middle tier wholesale markets. The website features a broad selection of over 400 teas and blending ingredients from QTrade Teas & Herbs and is designed for tea merchants, coffee roasters, cafes, and specialty retailers.
With Twinings moving production of its tea from North Shields to Poland, what would Rudyard Kipling's imperial pioneers think?
Sri Lanka acknowledges that it was a Briton who saved the day when coffee rust wiped out the island's previous staple crop in the 1860s Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian
Tea's addictively bitter aftertaste is one of many aspects of the British national drink which are given the credit for one of history's great cultural hijackings. Understandable soreness at the Twinings tea factory in North Shields, which closes in September next year, is a reminder of how possessive we are about the cup that cheers.
The closure is a tragedy but local unions say that staff – 263 are retiring or looking for work elsewhere – have resigned themselves to last November's news that production will be transferred to Poland to save money. The firm has given long notice, training support, other jobs within the group and enhanced redundancy. Britain has benefited many times from similar closures overseas and transfers here.
The bitterness, however, has come from the current scheme for Polish workers to visit the Tyne and learn its tea lore from the staff they are replacing. Not unusual, again; most of us will one day have to help someone to fill our shoes. But tea produced in Poland? No, no. That is against the laws of God and man.
In a sense it is. One of the buttresses of conviction that tea is our sacred drink is the fact that it so evidently is not the continental Europeans'. Generations of UK holidaymakers have been appalled at watery rubbish in the lands where coffee rules. The United States is every bit as bad. They crown the offence by a fetish with teabags of gaudy colour and maximum complication (which, alarmingly, through globalisation, are making some headway here).
Yet "British" tea is a sleight of hand, at its cheekiest in the marketing of Yorkshire Tea by Taylor's of Harrogate, whose adverts in distant places such as the London Underground subliminally suggest that the hills of the north are green with plantations of Camellia sinensis. When challenged, the reasoning goes that the blend is especially suited to Yorkshire water; but there are many variants of the latter, all deliciously different, and only a handful of bottled versions are available anywhere near the London Underground.
We do have a case, though, against complaints of brand-theft by the world's original tea drinkers, who start beyond what you might call the Milk and Sugar Curtain, a border which follows the line of the old Iron Curtain and then loops round the Arab world, with its venerable and many-flavoured infusions. Their ceremonies are even more courtly than ours, and have the same mystique about pot-warming, pouring sequence and to-strain-or-not-to-strain – but Britons have laid down many more lives for the drink.
"Follow on!" say the ghosts of Rudyard Kipling's imperial pioneers in Song of the Dead, "For we are waiting, by the trails that we lost." Many of those trails led to survey sites for the planting of tea, or investments which failed in factories for sorting and grading its leaves. Sri Lanka rightly claims some of the best tea in the world, especially high-grown; but its industry acknowledges that it was a Briton – actually a Scotsman, but that is not far from Tyneside – who saved the day when coffee rust wiped out the island's previous staple crop in the 1860s. James Taylor's initial 19 acres at Loolecondera met the demands of Kipling's ghosts, and prompted another grand old imperial saying when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle declaimed in 1892: "Not often is that men have the heart, when their one great industry is withered, to rear up another as rich to take its place. The tea fields of Ceylon [as Sri Lanka was then known in the UK] are as true a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo."
It is much easier to say than to do, but that is the way forward for Tyneside. And who knows, it may be helped by the goodwill which comes from helping the Poles to deal with tea. In the same story, De Profundis, Conan Doyle refers to the paradox that this island's history is cosmopolitan, while so much of the European continent's has been insular. That has been another recipe, like tea, for success.
Zhena's Gypsy Tea, known for its dedication to sustainability and innovative tea offerings, and Tully's Coffee, a leading specialty coffee retailer, have announced an unprecedented contest to engage and show appreciation for their vastly expanding tea customers at Tully's throughout the Western United States.
"This contest will give customers a chance to win a tea trek to the fair trade gardens in Sri Lanka, where I will guide them through the fields where we source a large variety of our Biodynamic(R) teas," says Zhena Muzyka, Founder and Master Blender of Zhena's. "Tully's customers have really responded to the new hot tea offerings since we began working together, and we wanted to show their customers how much we appreciate their support by taking this opportunity to take them to the source of their enjoyment."
Each Tully's Coffee will have displays where customers can sign up to win the free trip to Sri Lanka. Tully's will also feature a new Pumpkin Spice Tea Latte promotional drink, formulated especially for the Fall contest. Winners will be announced one month after the last entry is in. Contest runs from September 8th- 30th.
"We are thrilled to partner with Zhena's Gypsy Tea for this innovative idea to show our customers how much we care," said Scott Earle, Tully's Coffee Vice President of Marketing. "Our customers love our new tea offerings, and we want to push the envelope even further by engaging customers in a new and exciting way, with this being one of the biggest prizes we have ever offered at Tully's."
The winners of the tea expedition to Sri Lanka will be heading to Sri Lanka with Zhena, where she will take the winners to several organic tea gardens, beautiful Sri Lankan beaches and even an elephant orphanage in January 2011.
About Zhena's Gypsy Tea
Headquartered in Ojai, California, Zhena's Gypsy Tea is a pro-active purpose based brand, whose goal it is to make a difference in people's lives by offering only premium teas that benefit customers' health and the health of the planet. A socially responsible business with a commitment to improve the social and environmental well-being of the world, through its unique offerings of prized and exquisite Fair Trade(TM), organic and Biodynamic (R) teas and herbs, the company works toward social justice, humanitarian causes and earth-friendly, sustainable, ethical business that create opportunities to alleviate poverty. To learn more visit www.gypsytea.com.
ABOUT TC GLOBAL, INC.:
TC Global, Inc., dba Tully's Coffee, is a leading specialty coffee retailer and wholesaler. Through company owned, licensed and franchised specialty retail stores in Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah, throughout Asia with Tully's Coffee International, and with its global alliance partner Tully's Coffee Japan, Tully's premium coffees are available at nearly 600 branded retail locations globally, including more than 200 in the United States. TC Global also has the rights to distribute Tully's coffee through all wholesale channels internationally, outside of North America, the Caribbean and Japan. TC Global's corporate headquarters is located at 3100 Airport Way S, in Seattle, WA. For more information: (800) MY-TULLY or TullysCoffeeShops.com.
Mega-T Green Tea Dietary Supplement is sold at drugstores.
(Ken Kwok / LA Times)
CCA Industries, MetaboLife and Mason Vitamins claim their supplements can help fight weight gain. But while green tea has been shown to speed metabolism, its effects on weight don't yet pan out.
Like all industries, the herbal weight-loss business moves in cycles. Less than a decade ago, the stimulant herb ephedra was one of the stars of the scene. It sped up metabolism and weight loss, but it also raised the heart rate and, in some cases, caused strokes and heart attacks.
The Food and Drug Administration banned ephedra supplements in 2004, setting off an industrywide scramble to find another herb that could take its place. For now, the winner seems to be green tea. Its reputation as a healthful, revitalizing beverage goes back thousands of years, and it has recently started showing up in a wide range of weight-loss supplements.
Green tea naturally contains caffeine, a common ingredient in all sorts of weight-loss products. It also contains EGCG, a strong antioxidant that seems to encourage cells throughout the body to burn extra calories. In other words, it seems to be "thermogenic," a term that tends to get people in the weight-loss business very excited.
The Mega-T Green Tea Dietary Supplement from CCA Industries is sold at drugstores everywhere. Each caplet contains enough green tea extract to provide 90 milligrams of EGCG and 50 mg. of caffeine. The caplets also contain chromium, calcium, Hoodia gordonii cactus and (in one version) acai fruit, among other things. Users are instructed to take one caplet twice a day with a meal and a glass of water. A package of 90 caplets costs about $16.
Metabolife — a former leader in the ephedra market that filed for bankruptcy in 2005 amid a series of legal problems — is back in the weight-loss game with Metabolife Green Tea. According to its label, the supplement contains a "proprietary blend" that includes green tea, garcinia (a source of hydroxycitric acid) and guarana (a source of extra caffeine). The label doesn't specify how much green tea, caffeine or EGCG is in each tablet. Users are told to take two or three capsules a day about an hour before meals. A bottle of 90 capsules costs about $25.
Each tablet of Green Tea Slim from Mason Vitamins contains 60 mg. of EGCG along with chromium and apple cider vinegar, among other ingredients. Users are instructed to take one tablet two or three times a day with meals. A bottle of 60 tablets costs about $6.
CCA Industries, MetaboLife and Mason Vitamins all declined the chance to comment on their products.
The claims
The label for Mega-T Green Tea Dietary Supplement says that users can "lose up to 20 pounds." The package clarifies with an asterisked note that such results would occur "over a period of time with diet and exercise plan." According to the site, the supplement is "formulated to help you achieve your weight loss goals."
The Metabolife website says that the supplement "helps boost the body's metabolism, making it easier to burn unwanted calories."
The label for Green Tea Slim says the supplement "fights cravings and enhances metabolism" while promoting "thermogenic action."
The bottom line
Green tea really does seem to speed up metabolism, but recent studies show that the resulting weight loss is modest, bordering on trivial, says Craig Coleman, associate professor of pharmacy practice at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. "It sounds like it should work, but when the rubber hits the road in clinical trials, it doesn't really pan out."
Coleman co-authored a 2009 review of 15 studies on green tea and weight loss. On average, subjects who consumed green tea products lost an extra 1 to 3 pounds compared with those who took a placebo. Study participants generally consumed 300 mg. or more of EGCG every day, and the length of the studies ranged from three to 24 weeks. Because of such meager results, Coleman says, he "would not recommend patients take green tea extract in any form for weight loss."
But even modest weight loss can be a positive step, says Arpita Basu, assistant professor of nutritional sciences at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. Basu was the lead author of a 2010 study of 35 obese people who consumed either 4 cups of strong green tea, two capsules of green tea extract (totaling 460 mg. of EGCG) or two placebo pills every day for eight weeks.
Subjects drinking green tea or taking green tea supplements lost an extra 5.5 pounds (2.5 kilograms) and 4.9 pounds (1.9 kg.), respectively, compared with the subjects who didn't consume any green tea. Reporting in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, the researchers speculated that the weight-reducing power of green tea might be especially strong in people who are already obese.
Nobody should count on green tea alone to help them reach a healthy weight, but it could be a helpful part of a more comprehensive weight-loss program that includes diet and exercise, Basu says. Even if it didn't help shed a single pound, the antioxidants in green tea might help lower the risk of heart disease, she adds.
Basu is leery of products that pack all sorts of other active ingredients along with green tea, though. Instead, she suggests that people just brew a cup of fresh tea at home. "It's cheaper and safer," she says.
A salesperson promotes her products in the 2010 Hong Kong Tea Fair in Hong Kong, south China, Aug. 12, 2010. The 2010 Hong Kong Tea Fair kicked off Thursday in the Hong Kong Convention and ExhibitionCenter with the participation of over 300 participants from 15 countries and regions. (Xinhua/Lui Siu Wai)
The debut tea fair last year received strong support from major tea producing countries and regions, including the Chinese mainland, India, Kenya, Vietnam and Sri Lanka.
According to a survey conducted at the fair, more than 90 percent of the buyers agreed that Hong Kong has the capability to host an international tea competition, which helps enhance tea trade and promote tea brands, a comprehensive system and regulations on beverage quality testing and assuring, as well as the potential to develop into Asia’s tea leaf auction center.
They also said that, because Hong Kong does not produce much tea of its own, it can develop into a fair and bias-free trading and marketing center.
The tea fair is combined with the 21st Food Expo, which is the city’s annual food extravaganza and veteran exhibition brand, featuring over 740 exhibitors from over 22 countries and regions, a 21 percent rise over last year.
Competition in the Russian iced tea market is expected to get tougher with Lipton and Nestea likely to be facing competition from popular U.S. based brand, AriZona Iced Tea. The Moscow brewing company is negotiating about Russia based production with Evgeny Kashper, a co owner of Detroit Investment, which owns Moscow brewering company, telling Kommersant that they began supplying AriZona Iced Tea to Russia last month.
“Currently we are holding talks with the brand owners to start bottling in autumn using the capacities of Moscow brewing company.”
AriZona Iced Tea is the second most popular iced tea beverage in the U.S. and is aiming to attract about 3% of the Russian market next year if bottling commences locally. The Russian market is currently dominated by Lipton and Nestea, who together have 96% of market According to Kashper, local production will reduce the retail price of AriZona in Russia to about 30 Roubles a bottle, compared with the 50 it is currently retailing for.
PepsiCo director of communications, Aleksandre Kostikov, thinks that the iced tea market in Russia has already consolidated into the two major players, and that this will make it difficult for a new entrant. He forecasts it will take between $3-5 million of investment to promote such a product in Russia. However, Alexey Krivoshapko, a director at Prosperity Capital Management, says the market isn’t developed enough in terms of volumes and has room for growth, creating a good opportunity for the Moscow brewing company.
“Given that Moscow brewing company has good contacts with all big chains, I think, it’s quite a realistic goal to gain 3% of the market in the first year of operations.”
