Following the link, you’ll find an easy and amusing, at first glance, article on how to make green tea taste better. Its authors proceed from the fact that green tea is useful, but not everyone likes it — and they suggest adding ginger, basil, mint, honey, lemon, cinnamon and coconut oil to it, so that one could finally “slurp it down” somehow. Let’s leave for a minute ironic remarks, something like “they simply need to learn how to choose decent tea and train their taste”, but speculate on the following instead.
There is a very large number of countries where tea culture is mostly or purely consumer-oriented. Tea comes to these countries in the form of a ready-to-brew product of very different quality — and, in most cases, in pure brewed form it does not fit into the mass tastes. Therefore, sugar, lemon, milk and all sorts of other things are added to it, turning even a most simple tea into a delicacy with gruff, but personal settings.
In fact, the mass consumer tea culture is constantly dealing with the question “how to make tea tasty?” For several centuries of its active existence, many tea traditions have offered their answers to this question, which are quite satisfactory for most consumers. Obvious examples of such traditional answers are tea with sugar and lemon in Russia and tea with sugar and milk in England. To a lesser extent, but still visible are attempts to answer this question through careful attention to the quality of tea. Despite the fact that it’s not the easiest task to find a good and delicious tea, the very approach “a delicious drink can be prepared without any additives from good tea” is very simple and shifts the responsibility for the taste of the drink to the producer and the buyer. This is convenient, if you are just a discerning connoisseur. And it does not do any good, if you are going to use tea for professional purposes in a country with the consumer-type tea culture.
In order to professionally work with tea, you need to be able to make it tasty. Just tasty. Commercially tasty. Unconditionally tasty regardless of the quality and price of tea leaves. The abilities to brew pure tea leaves well and, if necessary, to convincingly tell about its merits are only a part of such mastery.
Which will never be complete without the ability to quickly collect a tea cocktail from improvised ingredients, find a matching snack for tea, replace alcohol with tea or offer additives for plain and “bitter” green tea so that the person who wants to drink it (for health benefits or something) does not have to force oneself into it drinking it.
Most of these solutions will work only once. The best ones will turn into micro-trends, which, by the way, will not last long either. Very few will create formats. Some of them will turn into money. And all of them, without exception, will become a source of invaluable experience.
