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Advances at Ahlstrom

The humble tea bag has been undergoing a make-over recently, increasingly finding its way into the specialty and value-added segments with a range of innovations and developments geared to servicing the growing upper-end of the market. Ahlstrom’s recent offering promises to fuel further interest and solutions in an industry that does not typically garner a lot of attention from consumers.

"Ahlstrom’s latest foray into the tea bag segment is not a departure from traditional core infusion filter paper business, it is an addition to the range," Michael D. Black, general manger of Ahlstrom’s food product line told Tea & Coffee Asia.

The new fine fiber web product providing eco-friendly polymer designs ideal for pyramid tea bags, was officially launched at the recent Tea & Coffee World Cup/ASIA 2008 exhibition held in Hyderabad, India, last November 20-22.

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China’s Anji White Tea A Gourmet Tea Industry Grown from a Single Wild Bush

By Helen Xu Fei

Anji county nestles at the northern foot of the Tianmu Mountain in northwest Zhejiang, four hours drive away from Shanghai. The mountainous county is a heaven of greenery, and is famous for its bamboo, white tea and eco-tourism.

Anji harbors the largest commercial bamboo forest and bamboo nursery in the country. The aesthetic bamboo scenery captured in the film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" was shot here. It is also the motherland of the unique Anji white tea, a temperature-sensitive albescence species yielding off-white leaves in early Spring. Tea produced from this bush tastes superbly refreshing with an underlying sweetness.

White-leaf tea is a rare natural mutant. It was once appraised as the best tea of the country by 12th century Song Dynasty emperor Zhaoji, who was a doomed ruler but a great artist and a passionate lover of tea. He concluded in his book The Treatise on Tea that "white-leaf tea is exceptional, and is unlike any other teas. Its branches are intricately winding, and its leaves are delicately translucent. It is rare and grows only by nature in foliage mountains…just one or two bushes are found…" However, as time passed, the rare white-leaf tea was reduced to a legendary tea and nowhere to found.

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Balanced Plant Nutrition A Progressive Approach for Coffee Cultivation

By Ujwala Ranade -Malvi 

Agriculture has been an integral part of civilization from times immemorial. From subsistence farming to commercial agriculture, from green revolution to gene revolution the history of agriculture has been very colorful. Coffee belongs to the Rubiaceae family of flowering plants and is a fairly new entrant on the agricultural front. It is a perfect example for this discussion as it is the beverage of choice world over, the second largest traded commodity in the world and most importantly because there are tens of thousands of people who depend of coffee for their livelihood. The majority of the coffee is cultivated in the third world developing nations that lie between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. It is these growers that need to be educated on the concepts of how to maximize their yields and quality while still increasing the health of their soils, so that growing coffee becomes a profitable endeavor for them and not just a hand to mouth livelihood.

It is a well known fact that we have very little inherent fertility left in our arable soils to produce the quantity and quality of agro-products that we need for our growing population. In the last 400 years, due to intensive agricultural practices of mono-cropping, mismanagement of fertilizer and pesticides, we have depleted our soils of nutrients that the natural processes of weathering had produced over millions and millions of years. With depleted soils of today, increasing costs of fertilizers and the global need to produce more food we will have to modify and re-evaluate our methodology of agriculture. There will have to be a shift in paradigms and we will have to put more energy and intensity into increasing the health of the soils while still churning out the yields that are so required.

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The Perfect Grind The Challenge of Grinding Coffee for Pods and Capsules

By Daniel Ephraim 

Properly grinding coffee for use in high quality single cup brewing methods, such as pods and capsules, may be the toughest challenge in all of coffee processing. It is extremely important for any brewing method, whether it be urn, drip, French press, etc., to have the correct grind distribution for that methodology. However a brewing cycle that may be reduced to 15 – 20 seconds, as in the case of pods and capsules, instead of 4,6 or 8 minutes, presents a special and unique challenge. Additionally, the hot water in a pod must flow through the filter media twice, both on the top and bottom, thereby challenging the extraction dynamics further.

Single cup brewing methods have been around for a long time, with the vending machine being one of the earliest examples. Generally speaking, there has always been an accepted trade-off between quality and convenience with many of the earlier single-cup systems. If the coffee was not quite up to par, this was to be expected, or accepted, as part of that trade-off. As pods and capsules have grown in market size and sophistication, the need to trade-off quality for convenience has not only become unnecessary, but also unacceptable to the consumer.

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