It looks like a farm of box hedges. As if somebody started planting a formal garden and just forgot to stop. Long lines of green bushes, trimmed as flat across the top as kids with fresh crew cuts.
It’s a tea plantation. Specifically, Charleston Tea Plantation.
Tucked away in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, below trendy Kiawah and beyond the weekend homes at Folly Beach, this is the home of American Classic Tea, the only commercial tea grown in America.
That makes it a brewed-beverage David in a world of bottled Goliaths.
“Lipton spills more tea than we sell,” Mack Fleming admits. But cheerfully. In the 10 years since Fleming and partner William Barclay Hall started on this venture, their tea has gained more than a toehold in America.
It’s in specialty shops in all 50 states, and it’s sold in supermarkets all over the Southeast. They’ve got deals with Wal-Mart and Sam’s Clubs, which like the “grown in America” label. They’ve got a mail-order business with teas and regional foods, even American Classic T-shirts.
But still you have to wonder: In the jostling world of specialty teas, with Lipton, Snapple and Arizona Tea crowding the shelves, what are Mack Fleming and Bill Hall doing way out here on Wadmalaw Island?
Hall grins. “It’s not often in life you get a chance to do something no one else has done.”
It’s not easy getting a straight answer from Fleming. Tall and patrician, he loves to lecture like the former teacher he is.
In a nutshell, here’s the story.
The Charleston Tea Plantation is actually the fourth attempt to grow tea in America. By coincidence, all four tries have been in South Carolina. And by an even bigger coincidence, the first two ended in violent deaths after five years. When people point out that Fleming and Hall have survived 10 years, Fleming says, “I remind them that there are two of us.”
The first tea plant arrived at Charleston’s Middleton Gardens in 1799, part of a load of camellias. Tea is a relative of the camellia–“sisters, if you will.”
In 1848, Dr. Junius Smith started growing tea in Greenville, S.C. The tea did well, but Smith didn’t: Five years later, he was shot.
In 1874, Dr. Alexis Forster tried again, in Georgetown. Again, the tea did OK. But Forster was chased “by rascals,” according to accounts, and died when his buggy overturned.
On to the third attempt: Dr. Charles Shepard’s Pinehurst Tea Plantation in Summerville, S.C., in 1888. This time, the tea did well and so did Shepard.
In 1904, at the St. Louis Exposition, forerunner to the World’s Fair, Shepard entered his tea in competition against teas from all over the world and was judged best of show.
Shepard’s tea business died when he did, in 1915. But none of the tea plantations actually failed. In all three cases, there was no one to carry on. Pinehurst lay fallow for years. Eventually, the land was developed for houses–some with tea plants in their yards.
In 1963, Thomas J. Lipton Inc. was toying with growing tea in America. Most of the world’s tea comes from India; the second-largest grower is China. And in the 1960s, America didn’t do business with China. So Lipton was interested in other sources.
The company started experimental farms in several places: Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama. And Wadmalaw Island, with plants grown from cuttings of Shepard’s Pinehurst tea bushes. Of the plantation’s 320 tea “clones,” or offspring of the original plants, 315 came from Pinehurst.
“Not only are these plants historically significant, but horticulturally, they are as well acclimated as you can get. They’ve been in the Low Country since 1888.”
Again, history intervened. The first manager of the plantation died when an Eastern Airlines flight crashed in Charlotte in 1974. The second manager didn’t work out. So Lipton called on Fleming, who was teaching horticulture at Trident Community College in Charleston.
Lipton gave Fleming a 14-person staff, all specialists in their fields. “We grew the hell out of tea,” Fleming said.
Along the way, they solved some problems. The trouble with tea in America wasn’t climate; it was labor. In most countries, tea is plucked by hand, usually by women. In the Old South, on the original plantations, it was usually picked by children. So on Wadmalaw Island, they designed the first mechanical tea harvester. Based on a tobacco harvester, it’s still the only one in America.
Enter history once again: In 1972, Richard Nixon went to China. And the trade gates opened.
“You’ve heard of `all the tea in China’?” Fleming says. “Well, half of it is here now.”
After that, Lipton wasn’t so eager to grow tea in America. But Fleming wanted to stay with it. Then he met Hall, long-haired, flamboyant, driving a red Lotus with the license plate “Tea Pot.”
You usually don’t see Hall’s name without the phrase “third-generation tea taster” in front of it. Hall earned his chops in tea. Starting at 17, he served a formal apprenticeship in London. For four years, he tasted 800 to 1,000 cups of tea a day. By the end of the day, his mouth would be brown and his tongue would be black from tea. But at the end of four years, he could taste a cup of tea and tell what country it was from, what region and sometimes what plantation.
Tea is sold strictly on taste. There’s no chemical way to evaluate it, no test you can give it. A tea business depends on tasters, who must be able to taste a tea and set its value within a quarter of a cent.
Hall explains all this while driving down the road in his Jaguar, rock blaring on the radio, cigarette dangling from his lip. Doesn’t smoking alter those delicate taste buds?
He smoked when he was an apprentice, he says. “If I stopped now, it would alter my taste.” He cackles wickedly. “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”
Hall was a tea dealer when he saw an article on American tea. The article said there was no tea grown in America. Tea needed high elevation; tea needed cheap labor. Well, Hall knew the only reason for elevation was drainage–and South Carolina’s sandy soil would take care of that. And for labor, you could get a mechanical harvester.
“I got on a plane and flew to Charleston.” He went straight to the library in Summerville and asked for everything they had on tea. He discovered Lipton’s experimental tea station. And there was Fleming.
The two of them talked Lipton into selling them the plantation. And they were in business.
“We’re totally different,” Fleming says. “The visual difference being just the beginning.” Work ethic, philosophy, all different. The only thing the same is a desire to succeed in the tea business.
Something about it must work, says Hall.
“Not many partnerships last that long. Mack knows the horticulture and I know the tea-tasting side. I’m even the mechanic for the tea bag machine and Mack’s the electrician for the whole farm.”
On the filing cabinet next to Mack Fleming’s cluttered desk is a hand-lettered sign: “Don’t wait for things to happen–make them happen!!”
Fleming brings that same passion to the tough job of getting American Classic Tea into American kitchens.
“My wife won’t go in the supermarket with me.” He likes to lurk in the tea aisle, watching people choose. Nine times out of 10, they’ll grab Lipton or maybe Luzianne. But on that 10th time, he’ll see somebody reach past all the others, down to the bottom shelf, to pick a box of American Classic. Then he’ll ask them: Why?
“We can propagate it, we can grow it, we can cut it, we can put it in a box. Our challenge is developing a market. That’s the most puzzling to me. How do you reach the consumer?”
Hall was talking to a store owner in Florence, S.C., recently who called them “the best-kept secret in South Carolina.”
“And that hits home. If you go down the street and stop 10 people and ask them if tea is grown in America, nine of them would say, `Probably. We grow everything else.’ “
Fleming is getting ready to hire an ex-Lipton sales and marketing specialist to help them spread the word. And he has a mockup of a label for a new boxed tea for Sam’s Club.
And though they are apparently in the right place, it may finally be the right time. Hot tea has grabbed that all-important niche in American taste: trendy. Tea houses are joining coffee houses in many cities. Hall likes to say that tea in America is where wine was in California 40 years ago.
Fleming and Hall will tell you everything about the tea business–except exactly how much tea they produce, exactly how much they sell. No offense. It’s business.
“There’s too many people in the tea world scrutinizing us,” Hall says. “We have too much money, time and effort in.
“We don’t want somebody walking in and starting another tea business.”
American Classic Tea, though not distributed to Chicago-area grocery stores, is available by mail order. Call 800-443-5987.
TEA’S QUALITY STARTS IN THE FIELD
Tea is a year-round business at the Charles Tea Plantation. The harvest goes on from May to October. If you buy a box of American Classic in April, it may have been harvested in October. But during the harvest season, the tea you buy is probably no more than a month old.
As a horticulturist, Fleming’s job is out in the fields. The tea year starts in February, when they trim all the bushes off flat. That’s called the first flush. By April, the bushes are getting lush. When the new tea growth has reached “three leaves and a bud,” they start harvesting, picking off new green leaves. They harvest every 15 to 18 days from May through October.
If you look down the lines of bushes, you see color variations in bands, from pale to dark. That’s because the bushes are grown from many different clones. “Bill has to contend with that when he blends,” Fleming says. “This is blended in the field, if you will.”
Tea fluctuates with each picking. Rain, heat and season all affect the flavor. So when the leaves are picked, Hall takes over.
First comes the withering stage. Leaves are put in troughs where reversible fans blow air through them and draw it back out for 18 hours. That drops moisture in the leaves from 80 percent to 68 percent.
The softened leaves are then ground up to expose their juices to the air. Then the leaves are spread out to oxidize–they turn brown.
After about an hour and 15 minutes, the leaves, now coppery-orange, are loaded into a conveyor dryer that reduces moisture from 68 percent to about 3 percent. The leaves turn black and curl in to seal the juices.
After the stalks are extracted, Hall starts tasting. He allocates the day’s harvest to one of 15 bins. He draws from those bins to blend each batch, to keep the quality even.
“Taste is a hard thing to describe,” says Hall,who aims for a “smooth, bright, mellow, flavory tea. Not harsh, not bitter.”
If anything goes wrong with any of the steps, the day’s harvest must be thrown out.
Some tea drinkers attach a lot of mystique to loose-leafed tea vs. tea in bags. Hall says freshness is really what counts. “Tea doesn’t improve with age,” he says.
