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Reviewed by:
  • Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea by Sarah Besky
  • Bradley Jones
Sarah Besky. Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 256 pp.

On a craft brewery tour some years ago, I recall the head brewer’s surprising response to a question about the essence of craft, skill, and quality in beer making. He suggested that the best brewers in the world are not those that produce small-batch, “high-quality” products with steep price tags, as he did. Rather, they are those who brew mass-market beer, the macro-lagers such as Budweiser, who manage to take variable raw ingredients—dependent on seasonality, geography, production methods, among other factors—and ensure a standardized consistency at an immense scale. Industrial brewmasters, he reflected, are able to ensure uniformity of taste through quality control despite the complexities of sourcing and supply chain management. As the brewer’s unexpected response suggests, quality has many meanings, and its production is less straightforward than it seems.

Sarah Besky’s wonderful new work Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea explores these underexamined aspects of quality production, focusing not on beer but rather the production of standardized, mass-market black tea as well as the social and sociotechnical construction of quality itself. At key sites between the plantation and the grocer, Besky follows tea tasters and auctioneers, brokers and buyers, scientists, agrono-mists, as well as other organoleptic and agricultural experts. From Kolkata to London and many stops in between, Besky highlights how Camellia sinensis transforms from an aromatic plant to a “nice cup of tea.” Along the way, she traces the expansive material, sensorial, and discursive labor that (re)produces industrial landscapes, skilled bodies, and regimes of value while bringing quality into being. [End Page 221]

Chapter 1 provides deep ethnographic insights into the work of tea brokerage firms. By following expert and apprentice tasters, tracing processes by which tea is graded and priced, Besky opens the black box of this rarely seen site of valuation and evaluation. We learn that in such spaces as the Kolkata brokerage, through everyday practices of steeping, sipping, and signifying tea, landscapes and bodies are brought into being. In the tasting room itself, subjective sensibilities are sharpened, standardized, and quantified to produce a legible market value, in the process reproducing both aesthetic expertise and middle-class masculinity. More still, valuations are directed not just at buyers but also at producers, informing “high-quality” manufacturing processes of picking, drying, and packaging tea. In this way, the qualification of tea by (mainly) men in Kolkata has “direct implications for the management of laboring bodies who pick, prune, and process leaves,” principally marginalized women (39). The sensory evaluation process, rendered remarkably lively in Besky’s account, transcends the tasting room to regulate gendered labor and plantation production in addition to market price.

Another refreshingly rich ethnographic account, Chapter 2 follows tea brokers out of the tasting room and into the auction hall. Here, Besky brings together detailed descriptions of dialogue and space, offering a visceral sense of bidding on tea. Amid shouts, nods, and the rapping gavel, we learn that through this performative process tea is ascribed value for global markets, as gendered bodies, social expectations, and Indian identity are (re)produced. Moreover, tea is bought and sold in what Besky identifies as “communicative infrastructures,” which govern market activity, ensure the liquidity of commodity exchange, and tether contemporary forms of ritualized performance in the auction hall to historical and colonial antecedents. In short, the norms that comprise the communicative infrastructure of tea “work to fix colonial institutions to each other and to the material and sensory qualities of mass-market black tea itself” (73).

The book’s middle chapters offer two historically oriented archival analyses. The focus of Chapter 3 is on tea blending, a process that Besky argues affords a standardized, mass-market consistency to what would otherwise be a quite variable raw material while also ensuring that the product obscures its ecological origins and becomes “wholly British.” Drawing on early medical journals and tea trade pamphlets from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she shows that...

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