Piffle from Julie: An American Tea Plantation

As many of you know, I am a fan of tea, especially black tea. So when I discovered that the only tea plantation in North America is Charleston Tea Plantation, I was excited to visit.

Tea (Camellia Sinensis) likes hot, rainy weather, so the climate here is pretty perfect. It's also what we had for our visit. There's a tour of the processing plant, and a trolley tour of the tea gardens. It rained off and on during the trolley tour, which was only a problem when it rained hard enough that we wanted to close the windows.

Russ made a new friend - Waddy the frog

Russ had been to a tea plantation in China, where they used hundreds of workers to hand-pick the tea. Here, they developed a harvesting machine, and only have 4 field workers. They rotate the fields so one field is harvested each day for about 20 days, and then they start again at the beginning.

The machine that allows them to use very few workers

Tea plants

Ominous clouds over the tea fields

All tea comes from the same plant, but there are different varieties. The Charleston Tea Plantation blends several varieties together, all from their own fields.

Only the top 3 leaves are used for tea (the "flush")

Baby tea plants in the greenhouse

Several different types of tea were available to try in the gift shop. They had both cold and hot tea, sweetened and unsweetened. One of the special kinds is "first flush", from the first cutting of the season. It was very flavorful, so I bought some along with some green mint tea. I also bought a pretty new mug with tea strainer and lid.

Some of my purchases. A cool new mug and 2 kinds of tea.

The tea isn't technically organic, since they do use some nitrogen fertilizer. However, it's close enough to pass Whole Foods stringent requirements, and they will soon be selling American Classic Tea at some locations. In the meantime, you can always order online: Charleston Tea Plantation products