Latest Issue

By Jane Pettigrew 

Following her previous article about different types and qualities of puerh teas from Yunnan province, Jane Pettigrew discusses what’s happening in the market since the puerh bubble burst almost two years ago. 

Between 2004 and 2007, the price of puerh tea rose dramatically with famous brands fetching prices that were five times the cost of production. When the bubble burst in spring 2007, prices began to fall back but the recent craze for puerh has left behind it a good deal of confusion. Tea merchants are wary and connoisseur tea drinkers are dazed by the wide range of prices. Browse the internet for puerh cakes, and you will find prices that vary from just a few dollars to several thousand dollars and it is not easy to understand why there is such a gaping chasm between the cheapest and the most expensive.

By Heneage Mitchell 

Kaapi machines involves three partners who decided in 2007 to form the first dedicated coffee equipment company in India, One of the prominent partners is CMA who have been present in the market for 11 years and have been supplying coffee machines to India though a distributor and have also been supplying espresso machines to the biggest coffee shop chain in India. The second partner, Mahlkoenig of Germany, was also represented by a distributor, KLRF, and has been active in the domestic industrial and shop grinder segment.

Coffee

Victims of hepatitis C may be able to help stave off progressive liver disease with regular cups of coffee, a study in the US reported in the journal Hepatology has discovered.

Researchers from the US National Cancer Institute led by Dr. Neal D. Freedman concluded that among the 776 test subjects, all of whom were hepatitis C sufferers with related liver damage, those that drank three or more cups of coffee daily were 53% less likely to see their liver disease worsening over four years than those that did not drink coffee.

The researchers found the higher a patient’s coffee intake, the less risk of progression was noted. Those who regularly drank one to three cups of coffee daily were 30% percent less likely to progress than those that drank no coffee at the start of the research. Three or more cups increased the percentage of decreased progression to 53%.

Tea

A joint Scots and French study published in the journal Food Chemistry has concluded that drinking tea can have an amazing preventative effect on fatty deposits in arteries – reducing fatty build-ups by up to 96% - if you are a hamster. The researchers from the University of Glasgow, and the University of Montpellier fed hamsters a high-fat diet for 12 weeks. Some were given the human equivalent of one cup of black or green tea or fruit as well

University of Glasgow professor Alan Crozier, who was one of the researchers, believes humans may also benefit from the findings.

"The amount they were given is about the equivalent to a human having a glass of fruit juice or a mug of tea a day - the dose is not massive: it is a nutritionally relevant dose," Crozier was quoted as saying in the Scotsman newspaper. "The hamsters were on a high-fat diet and you get signs of heart disease with the fatty streaks in the arteries after 12 weeks. One group was given just a high-fat diet and none of the juices and the teas. The results showed that in this group more than 20% of the artery wall was covered with fatty streaks. If you feed them the high-fat diet and a juice or tea, then there is a reduction in the fatty deposits, particularly so with the raspberry juice and green tea. But the others were very effective as well," Crozier said.