Typified by its rugged coastline, hearty livestock, unique cakes, and abundance of castles—not to mention, legendary poet Dylan Thomas – the small country of Wales located Southwest of England in the United Kingdom has certainly never been known for growing tea. That all too common perception, intuitive as it might be, is one that Lucy George, owner of Peterston Tea Estate, is striving to change in a compelling way.
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the UK’s most established media organization, is on George’s side. They awarded Peterston Tea Estate the title of the BBC’s Best Food and Drink Producer in Wales in 2023. The prizes have been given out for nearly a quarter century, with the first batch being awarded by His Royal Highness King Charles III when he was Prince of Wales.
Notwithstanding the accolades, Peterston Tea’s recent recognition has not come easily, for the Welsh climate is not known to be friendly to the Camellia sinensis plant. Indeed, it is a well-known joke that the Welsh consider London to be arid, to give some idea of the local rainfall. As any tea planter will say, while tea needs rain, it also needs ample sun. So, the very fact that even a small amount of tea is being cultivated in Wales—this too of a class recognized for its fine quality—is an extraordinary development.
George’s adventure in tea began ten years back, but the land upon which it is cultivated was not generally used for that purpose. Acquired by George’s parents for the purpose of cultivating fruits, the family grew strawberries, raspberries, and soft fruit beginning in the early 1980s. As a kid, George fondly remembers her mother making ice cream out of the surplus fruit.
It is not unusual for tea to be cultivated on land that has been used to grow fruits. The British planted orange orchards in Darjeeling, India, before tea cultivation had reached its zenith in the region known for producing the “Champagne of Teas.” Indeed, E.C. Dozey’s A Concise History of Darjeeling Since 1835 references a quantity of around six million oranges per season being transported to markets in Calcutta from Darjeeling for sale during the early 19th Century.
The value of such biodiversity manifests beneath the ground. The presence of rich root systems of various plants, which are interconnected by the formation of mycorrhizal networks in the soil, are critical to forming a fertile terroir for tea. Indeed, tea roots are well known to be colonized by Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (AMF) that boost the growth of the tea and enhance leaf amino acid, protein, caffeine, and polyphenol content—all of which are essential for the development of the distinctive character of tea. So, the soil biome of Peterston Tea Estate was already being primed for growing tea by the fruit-farming. The Georges just didn’t know it at the time. As a result, they continued to plant what sold—fruits.
By the nineties, the operation had become more sophisticated. “They [Lucy George’s parents] put polytunnels in. And a lot of the sort of growing systems basically became quite high tech. So, we were using tabletop substrate production, which, at that time, was, pretty new," says George. "It was quite a sort of advanced thing to do."
Lucy took over the farm around 2002. She continued the fruit farming and ice cream production and added cherries to the mix as well as a shop. Over a decade went by, and while sales were progressing, by then, Lucy was no longer running a small family farm: It had become a sizeable business operation to manage. While many would regard this as a sound index of success, building in such a big way was never Lucy’s goal.
“Basically, it was too many people working there. It just felt like the thing had gotten out of control. There was just too much going on… that was just it for me!” she explains.
The idea of doing something totally different, something unique, something that really confounded expectations, is what drove her to seriously consider cultivating tea.
“For me, the tea really came about because it was about trying to use facilities we already had. We had the polytunnels. We had the irrigation system. I wanted to be outside more. I wanted to be challenged, and so the tea pretty much ticked all the boxes, and that's how that started with the first seeds we brought in for harvest in 2014,” George says.
The first batch of tea was sourced from a well-known consultancy called Tea Craft, which is a member of the European Specialty Tea Association.
“I think the first source of our tea was actually from Georgia,” Lucy recollects. “And then [during] subsequent years, we had some seed from areas of Nepal as well. And then we pretty much went in our own direction and sourced seed from wherever we could get it. So, [we have] a really wide base, trying to get that genetic diversity … which would tolerate the climate we've got here,” she adds.
Peterston Tea Estate (named for the village Peterston-super-ely, situated on the river Ely) is located around four miles from the coast of the Irish Sea at the base of a valley called the Vale of Glamorgan – a unique position giving the plantation a distinctive microclimate. In terms of temperature, the climate is quite conducive to tea cultivation with a daily mean of 15° Celsius (almost 60° F) in May when the growing season starts to a high of 20-29°C (approximately, 68-84°F) in July and back down to spring-like temperatures by September/October.
The terroir is mildly acidic with a pH of between 5 and 7 (seven being neutral) depending on the position in the garden, which while being on the high side, doesn’t seem to impede cultivation. The soil ranges from sandy loam to light clay to thick clay in some places. That said, due to the presence of such biomass in the area, accumulated over decades of farming and forest life, ample organic mulch tops the soil.
At an altitude of approximately 165 feet, the garden would certainly not be considered high elevation, but having some height does help. With some slope, water run-off is facilitated, so where a dense clay base underpins the soil, the plants avoid getting waterlogged. The generally cool weather deters the need to use pesticides. With the summer heat bringing insects, a novel solution has been found. The fact that George grows strawberries and other fruits interspersed with the tea bushes not only diversifies the soil but also draws insects such as aphids away from the tea, acting as a natural means of pest control.
Peterston Tea Estate produces 100% organic tea, according to sustainable cultivation practices. George’s main challenges are comprised of dealing with the heavy wind and rather continuous rain, which the estate essentially manages with polytunnels and tarps.
“We rarely get days now without quite a decent degree of wind, and it's when that is in combination with obviously the rain and the cold," says George, who notes that Cardiff is known for being fairly wet as far as even the UK goes. "We've had years when it's literally been raining till September, and there's rarely a dry day. So, that prolonged wetness combined with cold is a sure-fire way to kill a Camellia plant."
That said, George attests to the resilience of the tea plants in being able to withstand the conditions—even those growing outside of the polytunnels—but only after reaching sufficient maturity.
The first year, George planted young seedlings, and the experiment was far from promising: “Most of the plants that went in the first year, I successfully managed to kill,” George admits. “It turns out that growing tea is very different to growing strawberries!”
At the time, George was planting seedlings that had been nurtured for only nine months in the nursery before exposing them to the harsh Welsh conditions. The approach was based on conventional advice obtained from more equatorial tea-producing regions. She decided that, while planting such young plants might work well in regions like Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka, that doing so in Wales was a mistake. She opted to keep the plants in the nursery for twice as long, even coming up on two years for some, before transplanting them in the tea garden. Thereafter, the transplantations not only took root, but these not-quite nascent bushes were also sturdy enough to withstand local conditions.
The decision of when the leaves should be plucked is a real "balancing act." “I think there's a tendency so very often when the plants are growing slower in Northern climates to start picking them quite young because people are desperate to have that leaf and to experiment and to basically make tea," says George. "I take a slightly different approach in that I just like to just leave the plants to mature and establish properly before we start stressing them by additional pruning or heavy picking.”
Establishing a proper foundation for the garden and achieving the right balance in plucking and pruning took around six years to develop. By 2020, George says, the tea experiment had started to yield results that were in line with her overall expectations. Although the farm spans thirty-five acres, with just five acres under cultivation and doing almost everything herself—from handpicking to processing—her tea is truly artisanal and rare.
Peterston Tea ‘flushes’ three times per year, which means it undergoes three main harvests. The first is in late May to early June; another in late July; and a final harvest in September. However, the tea leaves cultivated in the polytunnels are exposed to a more limited intensity of UV light, so they get plucked every five or six days, almost continuously throughout the season, once leaves have properly emerged.
Peterston Tea Estate produces a variety of teas with emphasis on black tea: “Our main focus is on producing black tea. But we do also do green, and we do a roasted green and a steam green. And we’ve done very small quantities of white tea as well as a sort of experimental oolong,” George says.
Although George’s tea is handpicked and used to be exclusively hand-rolled, for the past four years, they have been processing the tea at a factory that is located within walking distance of the tea garden.
“Our climate is very changeable,” says George, adding, “and we found this impacted production. So, we do have a withering trough an oxidation unit so that we can better control the environment during processing.”
A dearth of labor availability for picking and limited processing equipment capacity keeps them from mass-producing. The black tea, which is handpicked mainly by George herself (though she has part-time help), is spread out on the withering trough usually overnight. Then, in the early morning of the following day, oxidation takes place within the oxidation unit (George can occasionally oxidise in the room if ambient temperatures are high enough). This leads to rolling using rollers and drying in an oven. Occasionally, a second ‘baking’ is done for certain batches for which a different (somewhat stronger) flavor profile is preferred.
Green tea is handpicked first thing in the morning and has a short wither period. Fixation is done by either steaming or roasting, depending on the batch, with rolling and drying alternating until finished with a final dry.
“Our main focus is on black tea,” George says. “We grow yuzu fruit here in one of the polytunnels—we made a very small amount of black and yuzu tea last year and have some currently aging a little from this year. We also have different woods available to us, so we have been experimenting with different smokes on the tea—very delicate, I don’t like strongly scented tea—but we’re really pleased with the results so far. So, [we’re] hoping to possibly further this next year and release limited batches for sale.”
In addition to their geographic location, climatic conditions, and topography, what is distinctive about Peterston Tea Estate is the fact that they haven’t entirely given up fruit farming. They are still growing strawberries, raspberries, apples, lemons and limes, and even Sichuan pepper on the estate, in some instances right in between tea bushes.
George describes the challenges she has faced as a new planter. They include building her knowledge of organic cultivation and nutrition, given some variability in plant requirement; coping with the increasingly extreme climate conditions brought on by climate change, which affects plant and leaf development and growth (with consequent impact on processing); and the requirement of consistent processing despite changing leaf properties with each picking. Hence, not only has George and her small team been learning from the ground-up on how to grow and process tea, but they have also had to continually adapt as conditions on the estate have mutated over the past decade.
Although George’s standard is handpicking and she doesn’t plan to change this, she purchased a small battery harvester, recently, for “levelling off.”
“So, if the plants look like they're going to start going into dormancy, we use that literally just to sort of level off," she says. "We've, actually, got more of a bulk picking at that stage, if you can call it that, which we then use for the Kombucha production. So, we use that grade to basically feed the culture,” says George. The Kombucha also sells well for the garden and makes good use of tea cultivation by-product that isn’t of the quality that George wants to put on the market as black tea.
The tea produced by the estate has little astringency and can be represented as smooth. Overall, George describes a cuppa of Peterston as being “mellow.” That is also represented in the look of the tea. “It's coming through with good color. It's quite bright. It's got mixed notes. I'd say it's got hazelnut tones to it, but also it's got some fruity notes coming through as well,” says George.
Brewing Peterston Tea certainly seems to bring a tea connoisseur’s desired complexity to the cup.
She describes her green tea as more aromatic then grassy, which makes it pleasing for green tea enthusiasts. Increasingly, green tea is sold for flavor and is no longer imbibed solely for its medicinal qualities, which is a plus for the green tea produced at Peterston.
After years of experimentation, the retail side of George’s business was, in essence, established just as consumers were transitioning from going out to buy goods to buying online as Covid restrictions impeded movement in the UK as it did in most other places. As a result, around two-thirds of George’s stock is now pre-ordered online and sold to individuals before it is even packaged. However, she also supplies a certain number of retail outlets, restaurants, and cafés in Wales.
While other tea estates are entering the tourism business as a "side hustle," George remains centered on her core business. She says she likes to show people the garden, but when too many curious interlopers arrive, it can be difficult to manage. “Basically, it’s just me out here, so tourism can be a distraction from cultivation, which is necessarily my focus,” she asserts.
While at one point it was George’s goal to expand her garden threefold to fifteen acres, she is currently intent to “just try and remain a small niche and to continuously work towards improving our quality and plant nutrition first and foremost."
It’s a formula that has worked well for her up till now. In keeping with the time-honored adage, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ the estate’s success and acclaim has come from doing what works without overcomplicating the process. In that, despite it being a rare and premium product, there is no small measure of “Synnwyr cyffredin,” Welsh for “common sense,” brewed in every cup of Wales’ own Peterston Tea.
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