Russian Ceremonies. #5. Russian tea brands.
Initially, the idea to cultivate tea plant at the Southern territories of the Russian Empire (near Kizlyar, the Caspian Sea) came to a Lifland Nobleman Sievers in 1792, the time of Catherine the Great who supported all types of scientific research. But this project was put into life only after the war against Napoleon, they planted tea in Crimea. However only in 1893 the efforts of planting tea succeeded grace to the merchants Popov from "Brothers K. & S. Popovi" who had a prosperous business with Chinese tea. They invited a famous Chinese tea-cultivator Lu ZhenZhou with his team and brought several tones of tea plants and seeds to Adjaria, Georgia not far from Batumi (the Black Sea). During the first 10 years the plantation gave about 5 thousands tones of Georgian tea, but it was almost nothing comparing with the import from China.
In the 30th of the XX century Bolsheviks started a development program of internal tea cultivation and an All-Union Research Institute of Tea Production was founded. The area covered by tea plantations in Georgia increased from 900 ha in 1917 till 30000 ha in 1930. Since 1936 they started to cultivate tea in the Krasnodar region and in Azerbajan. By 1940 the rate of import/internal production came to 1/2 (13/25 thousands tones). The WWII damaged the process, tea became a deficit product, which was included into the soldiers ration - 1 gram per day. The price of a pack of Georgian tea augmented from 8 rubles per 100 g in 1940 to 75 ruble during the war, so people came back to ancient drinks based on carrot leaves or field herbs.
After the WWII both Indian and Chinese tea were imported, nevertheless by 1955 internal production became more important, Georgian and Azerbsajan Tea were completed by the brand "Krasnodarskiy Tchai". In the 70th the USSR produced 150 000 tones of all types of tea - Green, Black, Fine and Bricks. The Union even started to export tea. Only the elite sorts of tea were imported from India, Ceylon and China.
Unfortunately, there were two main reasons why Soviet tea could not reach the quality of its Indian and Chinese competitors: the first one was the climate as there were no tropical regions in the USSR, and the other one - high consumption which pushed the processes from manual to automatised. First was Georgian producers who skipped the tea production to start cultivation of citrus fruit, than the end of the USSR destroyed both Azerbajan and Krasnodar fabrics.
And the time of TEABAG came.
However, nowadays the Krasnodar region restart cultivation of tea and try to come to the market of our country with renovated brands of Krasnodarskiy Tchai. .
