By Lindsey Goodwin

Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series examining the changing beverage tastes of Americans and how they may affect the tea business.

While RTDs may be seen as indicators of popular taste, many in the tea business also hope they’re gateway drinks to higher-end hot teas. But is the American palate ready for the nuance and subtlety of whole-leaf, single-estate tea?

Increasing Quality

With better teas available in mainstream grocery stores, it appears that Americans are developing more discriminating taste.

Benjamin Harrison, co-owner of Rishi Tea, said that in 1999 he was laughed out of buyers’ offices, but now palates are maturing on a national level. “There’s a new appreciation of quality,” he said, and the average consumer understands that “you can get quality without paying a huge premium for it.”

Jesse Jacobs, owner of San Francisco’s Samovar Tea Lounge, added that now, most customers easily differentiate teas’ quality levels, and this sophistication drives quality increases.

Sage Group’s Spring 2006 “Specialty Tea is ‘Hot’ Report” predicted there would be many new tea products put out in the following few years, and competition would cause an “improve or perish” quality battle. Sources said this was reflected in the increasing sales of limited edition artisanal teas and in improved teabags, such as Mighty Leaf's pouches and Tea Forte's whole-leaf pyramid bags.

Tea Types

One major industry shift has been the popularization of more tea types. Harrison said customers now are recognizing “significant differences between types and understanding what their preferences are.”

Other experts noted a shift away from black tea toward other types. Still, said Mighty Leaf’s vice president of hospitality and sales, Joane Filler-Varty, black tea is “an integral part” of the palate. Other sources added artisanal blacks are on an upswing.

Tea writer James Norwood Pratt said that after “emerging from ethnic groceries just a decade ago,” green tea “has now gone mainstream.” Charles Cain, director of operations for Teagschwendner U.S., observed a shift toward high-end Japanese green teas in particular.

Pratt added, “I suspect that the decade of the 2010s will see America’s taste in tea return to where it was in the early 1930’s … when green tea and oolong constituted something between one-third and one-half of all U.S. tea sales.”

Medium- to high-end oolong is a popular bet for the next big thing in specialty tea. Sources attributed this to ease of drinking, accessibility of flavors and variety of tastes.

Future preferences for pu-erh and white tea are less clear. Although connoisseurs celebrate pu-erh, Sage Group compared it to Bleu cheese (an acquired taste), and other sources cited subtlety, lack of breadth and other factors as limits to white’s growth.

The Blending Revolution

Despite the shift toward “pure” teas, blended teas are holding strong. Most sources linked flavored teas’ popularity to palatial accessibility, but Pratt offered a more practical reason: “Flavors are essential in places like most of the American West, where the water is so bad, real tea flavors are undetectable.”

Flavored specialty teas are here to stay, but sources said they are undergoing radical changes. According to Harrison, “In the past, low-quality black tea was a carrier for an artificial fruit flavor. Now, there is an understanding for intelligent tea blending that goes way beyond fruit and fannings.”

Cain said his company uses its Trend Teas line as a testing ground for new flavors, in which numerous variations determine complex consumer preferences. Similarly, Adagio’s Web designer, Ilya Kreymerman, said its customer blends encourage preferences for flavors to develop organically through online competition.

Current U.S. flavor trends are often those that are already popular overseas, Cain added, pointing to acerola, acai, yuzu and dragonfruit as examples. Jacobs and Harrison both pointed out that scented teas, such as jasmine and lychee, are also in huge demand.

However, many of these trends are just trends. “The most popular flavors in the U.S. are almost universally the same as my grandparents were drinking,” Cain said. As companies find ways to stay atop trends, Pratt added, “the state of the palate always fluctuates unexpectedly.”

Although it’s anybody’s guess what fad flavor will replace pomegranate, it’s clear that “the love of fine green and oolong teas will continuously spread and grow,” he said.

Happily Ever After?

According to all our sources, the trends they described are not limited to the coasts or to major cities, but are permeating America.

However, there’s a lot of work to be done in the specialty segment. Many are questioning whether non-specialty-tea drinkers will switch in significant numbers to specialty tea. As Kreymerman said, “There’s this feeling that (specialty) tea is always a step behind where it should be.”

Pratt has confidence in tea’s future in the U.S., but also called the specialty segment to action: “California produced more table wine than rotgut for the first time in the year 1965. Up ’til then, more California wine was made to drink on skid row than at the dinner table. People in the tea trade need to ask themselves what a comparable watershed would be.”