The Wild Truth of Tea

by J.T. Hunter, Shana Zhang

This book is more than how to brew a cup of tea – it is a tea education you won't find anywhere else. Dive deep into the guts of the tea industry from the perspective of true insiders in the tea industry. Most tea drinkers never realize the depth of the story behind each cup. This book illuminates what even people who are in the tea business may not know.
Packed with nitty gritty, real life stories and unearthing gems of knowledge about the tea business, this book reveals the deep inner workings of the tea business and maps out who the real players are and what they are really doing, as well as what you can do about it.
Shana Zhang comes from a tea family and has a background unlike any other author on tea. She has worked for the largest tea export company in Yunnan and now runs her own venture, Wild Tea Qi. People travel from all over the world to directly partake of her in-depth knowledge of tea.
JT Hunter has been working tirelessly in the field to support the last true tea artisans and shed light on the importance of biodiversity and the truth behind the tea business.
This book is for the tea lovers, the tea newbie, the tea connoisseur, and anyone in the business of tea. Reading this will make you reassess everything you think you already know about tea.
You thought tea was healthy – and it can be – but in the first half of the book, the industry-insider authors expose the appalling truth of how the tea most people drink is produced and distributed. The second half of the book explores the deeper reasons about why we brew tea, which will ultimately inform how you brew it. This book will change the way you buy and drink tea.
Shana Zhang worked in the largest tea exporting company in Yunnan Province, China. She and J.T. Hunter now run their own tea company, Wild Tea Qi, specializing in only premium, truly organic tea leaves from ancient, wild tea trees, and they operate their business from a holistic, traditional Chinese medicine perspective. J.T. Hunter is the author of another book on subjects similar to this new one, which is also well worth reading.

Genres: Tea

206 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2015

About the author

J.T.Hunter – The founder of Wild Tea Qi (an artisan tea company), co-founder of the International Tea Academy, author of the controversial book Wild Tea Hunter, Executive Director of the International Tea Masters Association of China, Taiwan and Thailand. JT tirelessly searches for the exotic, wild, and ancient tree teas and master tea artisans from the Taoist mountains of Wuyishan to the remote mountains of Yunnan. He has studied with Taoist masters, Buddhist monks, and the tribal people of Yunnan in their mysterious tea cultures. He has been studying Taoist healing martial arts, meditation, and Qigong for many years. In his tea treks he saw how many large-scale farms and unsustainable harvesting practices were actually destroying the environment and producing teas with very weak Qi energy. They were simply being mass-produced for large profits while paying unskilled workers a very poor wage. He saw how the master artisans were quickly disappearing, how the spiritual tea culture was being lost. It became JT’s mission to help support the true artisans, support sustainable tea harvesting practices, and to make this amazing, spiritual tea culture known to the west. Thus he created Wild Tea Qi. Today, he continues his treks across China digging deeper into the spiritual tea culture in search of wild and ancient tree teas.

Reviews

[David]

Although Goodreads shows the author as J.T. Hunter, the book , in fact, is written by Shana Zhang, co-owner, with Hunter, of Wild Tea Qi. And it is really not much more than a poorly argued polemic against the current trends in the tea industry and in favor of handmade teas from wild tea trees coupled with the benefits of Chinese medicine. Any recent developments in the tea industry are dismissed out of hand as "artificial." Conclusions aren't supported by arguments and assumptions are never defended. On top of that, it is a difficult read; it flows like a poorly done translation from Chinese into English (which is exactly what I suspect it is.)

Yet with all of this going against it, there is clearly a charm to the book that I cannot deny. Zhang is passionate in her views. She clearly favors the small, independent tea producers and artisan teas. She is rightly appalled at the rape of natural environments by large tea plantations. And she is convinced her approach will make the world of tea better. I am afraid, however, that her approach, if adopted, will only make tea scarcer and more expensive.

I give this book (only available on Kindle) only two stars. Nonetheless, I urge all people seriously interested in tea read it. The issues it raises must be confronted.

[Pamela Hamon]

This is a personal tell-all about the Chinese tea trade as revealed by a native Chinese woman working in the industry. This may be one of the few English language texts that delves in to great detail about the relationship between Daoism, the 5 elements system, Traditional Chinese Medicine theory, and the suggested use of tea in relationship to these systems. Could have used some stronger editing and author bias is very clear. That said, this is an interesting insider view that I would recommend if you are a tea enthusiast, working in the trade, or interested in getting in to the trade.

[Lisa Narana]

It's a mind-blowing Tea book!