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hi i'm bruce richardson tea master for the boston tea party ships museum.
here to talk to you today about america's longtime love affair with
green tea
now it may surprise you to learn the 22% percent of the tea thrown overboard
overboard in boston harbor on december 16, 1773 was in
fact green tea
and one of the favorite green teas of both the colonists and their cousins
back in england
was a young spring picked tea from china called young hyson
young hyson kept its popularity for well over a 100 years here in the
united states
if you ventured into any general store here the united states in the 1800s,
you may have found a container that looked much like this
it holds 8 to 10 pounds of tea
or if they didn't have tea may hold coffee because the sign here at the top was
a rotating cylinder. Now here it's turned to young hyson
but this could be rotated
and it could also say something like that gun powder green tea which is one of my
favorite teas to talk about here in my civil war village of perryville,
kentucky.
now this is a chinese green tea
that uh... gets its name because we think
when dutch east indies buyers first went to china and saw a it they
couldn't pronounce the mandarin name but they said well it looks like
gunpoweder to me
the name has stuck
this
hand rolled tea is hand rolled very very tightly it keeps the air out
and has a shelf life for or maybe up to 3 or 4 years
here's one of my favorite collectibles from that era. it'ss called a tea and sugar box
because in it are two compartments with each with a lid and one end you
put sugar it maybe on the other end
you put a tea like the gunpowder green tea
into it but the lid on it throw it into your saddlebag
and it's off to battle you go. now both young hyson
and gunpowder green teas use are still available in tea shops all
across america along with hundreds and hundreds of other beautiful teas from
china japan uh... taiwan almost every major tea producing country in the world
but just remember this one rule about making green tea, it doesn't like boiling
water so keep the temperature at about a 175 to 180 degrees.
so that you brew and not stew.
until our next tea time go forth and make a good tea.