Fresh Cup Magazine

Bring on the Brewers
Tracking Trends in Tea Brewer Technology
By Sarah Allen

A few years ago, when I couldn't make rent and eat on the $300 I made a month as a teacher's assistant in grad school, I took a part-time job at a pub near campus. Our clientele ranged from rowdy collegiates at night to corporate lunchers during the day. Though the pub was known for its in-house microbrewed beer, I filled more iced tea glasses than beer steins. Granted, this might have been because my time there was brief-I only worked during spring and summer iced-tea-drinking weather.
   But before I traded in my apron for a Nordstrom charge card, I learned a thing or two about the foodservice business, and those are life lessons I remember today. Things like the many different foods you can deep fry when you're bored. Or why not to have a beer on the premises after closing (the cops explained this one to us). And I learned how to brew iced tea by the bucket-literally-around the back of the building with nothing more than a hose and a box of teabags.
   What's even more shocking than the fact that this process took place on a daily basis-at, I might add, a well-respected pub-was the lack of complaints we received about the quality of the iced tea. Actually, no one ever said anything about the brew other than "Can I have a refill?"
   The truth is that many beverage and foodservice establishments are still getting away with serving poorly prepared tea, hot and iced, because customers often don't know their tea lacks quality, the only reason being that they've never had it properly brewed. But according to the U.S. Tea Is "Hot" Report, that's about to change. "Tea in foodservice is galloping and heading for a full-out run which will be escalated by aggressive efforts on the hot tea side. Foodservice veterans will remain impressed by the amazing consumption patterns for tea in all forms and types, especially for brewed iced teas during lunch and dinner hours," reads the report. "They will also have to gear up for the expanding boomer population of females seeking herbal teas-hot and iced-and hot tea alternatives to coffee after finer meal service."
   Owners of high-end tea salons, the people who painstakingly prepare each pot or cup with individual attention, might want to stop reading now. But to the many operators selling tea by the gallon in their coffeehouses, restaurants, resorts, and cafeterias, pay heed to this news from the world of tea brewers: whatever the size of your business, whatever the preferences of your customers and whatever your financial situation, options for brewers abound.

   There are various issues to consider before you make the leap into upgrading your tea service. Once you raise the bar on your brewing technology, your customers will increasingly demand quality, as well as selection. This is where brewer manufacturers have been stumped in the past. Brewers of old only had the capacity to brew one type of tea at one water temperature. So if the brewer was set for black tea, which should be steeped at 175 degrees Fahrenheit for three to four minutes, brewing a white tea, which requires a steeping time of five to seven minutes and water that is well below boiling, would be pointless. "The ideal would be a brewer that can be set for different temperatures and different times," says Joe Simrany, president of the Tea Association of the U.S.A. A self-proclaimed tea purest who prefers his tea prepared cup to cup, Simrany also worries about the freshness of the water used in commercial brewers. Ideally, water for tea should be newly drawn, cold and filtered of any chemicals or chlorination. But brewers of old have been known for bringing the temperature of the water up and holding it, therefore robbing it of its oxygen and causing the tea flavor to suffer.
   Market demand, however, has motivated many brewer manufacturers to revamp their existing systems to address concerns about quality and the need for more options while maintaining ease of use. A longtime leader in brewing technology, Fetco recently introduced a machine-the TBS-21A-intended to deliver on these requests. This brewer has the ability to program two different recipes, including steeping time and temperature. Operators have the choice of brewing between one and three gallons, for any desired length of time, and they can control the amount of time the water is in contact with the tea leaves. The company also offers the TBS-21H, a Pulse Brew iced tea brewer that gently showers the leaves with hot water for several seconds, then pauses while the water drains through. The alternating spray and pause cycle repeats throughout the brew cycle, which allows oxygen to contact the leaves, rather than depriving them of it as a steeping brewer would.
   These developments are direct responses to requests from customers, says Scott Svihula, regional manager of Fetco. At the well-attended Take Me 2 Tea Conference and Exhibition in Las Vegas last March, Svihula was astounded by the number of attendees he met who were interested in high-capacity brewers. "I couldn't believe how many people were looking for ways to prepare hot tea easily and in large quantities," he says. "Since there are more tea drinkers now, we need to provide the facilities capable of serving them."
   Retailers want something that's fast and versatile that can still produce a quality cup of tea. The demand for tea brewers with more options prompted companies like Fetco to design brewers that can brew both hot and cold tea, some with elaborate self-cleaning systems that make the appliance interchangeable as a coffee brewer. Cecilware, for example, offers a combination hot coffee/iced tea brewer, as does Fetco, Bunn-O-Matic, Wilbur Curtis, and other big brewer manufacturers. "Originally, I wasn't planning to offer iced tea because I didn't have the space," says Trish Parks, who operates the Bean Machine in Richmond, California. But when Parks heard about machines that can brew both coffee and tea, she was thrilled. "Iced tea can make for a ton of sales if it's prepared and served well," she says, adding that she's been amazed by how much business she's generated in iced tea sales alone. "Honestly, it's so rare that people have good-quality iced tea that when they taste a great tea, they tend to remember where they got it."
   Fetco's TBS-21A is revolutionary in that it can brew both tea and coffee without cross-contamination. The equipment includes different brew baskets and different dispensers, and Svihula says that the only point at which contamination could occur is on the spray plate. However, if the spray plate is cleaned properly between brewing coffee and tea, as the manual instructs, contamination ceases to be an issue. The machine works well for Parks because she can prepare coffee and tea intermittently, varying production depending on any number of factors, such as foot traffic and changes in the weather.
   Experts agree that with a quality brewer, the only way to ruin the tea is to use low-quality leaves. And increasingly, loose-leaf is the choice of foodservice operations. "Considering the quantities we buy, loose-leaf tea is a small difference in price [from filter packs] and a giant difference in flavor superiority," says Seth Leiman, operations manager for foodservice at Ellison College in Texas. Leiman also credits the digital programming his machine boasts, a relatively new feature on higher-end brewers that makes encoding for a variety of tea recipes easy. He notes how the two most popular teas in the campus' foodservice outlets are invariably herbals and black tea. "They're students," he chuckles. "They want the herbal to [keep them] healthy and the black to [help them] stay awake." But even though water temperature and brewing times for these teas vary drastically, the digital programming options, located conveniently on the face of the machine, make correctly inputting each recipe a trouble-free task for Leiman and his staff.
   For his large campus operation, Leiman uses Bunn-O-Matic's TU5Q five-gallon brewer with portable server. It can make between 16.3 and 26.7 gallons per hour from loose-leaf tea and brew it directly into any style of portable server, which makes it easy for his staff to run the servers back and forth from the foodservice floor to the kitchen as needed. But there are plenty of smaller operations that could benefit from a brewer-restaurants, cafés and even salons that want to offer customers tea. But businesses of this scale often hesitate to put forth an expense for a machine they may perceive as being better suited for industrial use. Three-gallon brewers, for example, typically cost between $600 and $700, whereas 10-gallon brewers can run $1000 or more. But such operators shouldn't be dissuaded by the product description; a three-gallon machine has the capacity to brew three gallons of tea, but it can be easily set to brew smaller amounts. Plus, the labor intensity of brewing pot by pot for a thirsty lunch crowd or busy shoppers could put the store back much more in wages than the price of the machine in the long run.
   Delia Sumter owns an art gallery in New York City called D, and she makes it a habit to treat visitors to tea as they peruse the latest exhibit. But as her gallery, which is just over a year old, has attracted more people, Sumter has increasingly found herself in the back making tea rather than on the floor chatting up the artwork to potential customers. When she hired an assistant, the task of making tea became his, but he soon found himself in the same cycle Sumter was in, spending more than two-thirds of his time brewing tea by the pot. Over the winter holidays, Sumter finally took the leap and bought a three-gallon combination hot and iced tea brewer from AAA Commercial Products. "I had nightmares about preparing iced tea in the summer," she says, noting how iced tea preparation is even more labor-intensive. "And with the crowds coming in for the Christmas show, there was no way [my assistant] and I could spare the time to brew pot to pot."
   The brewer is hidden in the back with Sumter's work desk and file cabinets, and she was curious to see what her regulars would say when she made the switch. She boasts an impressive teapot collection and never considered serving the tea in anything but those. So when Sumter appeared on the show floor with her first pot of tea from the brewer, she was curious as to how it would be received by her guests. "Actually, my regulars were more pleased than ever because I had time to chat with them, and I still had fresh tea ready and waiting."
   But space is a consideration for many smaller operations, which means they must find a brewer that can be installed in the front of the store and not stand out with the industrial look for which older brewers are known. There are several options for owners of such operations. Brewers on the market today tend to be sleeker and more streamlined with simple stainless steel designs. And most companies offer a machine with the option of brewing directly into an airpot.
   A less expensive and innovative design for small operations comes from Mike Spillane of The G.S. Haly Co., a tea importer in Redwood City, California. The Accu-Brew System is intended for mid-level brewing, which Spillane defines as larger than a teapot but smaller than a three-gallon brewer. Using most any of the common commercial airpots, the system incorporates a long cylindrical tea infuser designed to fit right inside. Between 12 and 15 cups of tea can be brewed at once with a three-liter press pot, and because it's being brewed inside the thermal pot with no transfer before serving, the tea tends to stay hotter than it would in a teapot.
   Spillane's target market is foodservice, specifically coffeehouses and catering businesses, and he's very interested in moving the Accu-Brew into universities and office coffee service venues. Spillane points out a problem these larger operations often face: an inability to heat water hot enough for tea, which is an all-too-frequent problem with old, industrial brewing machines. During G.S. Haly's extensive research into making the Accu-Brew work, Spillane says "the best we saw got water up to 203 degrees Fahrenheit, and the worst was 197." So he solved the problem through the back door-through the actual tea. The company has studied and experimented with countless teas brewed at lower temperatures-as low as 190 degrees, in some cases-and has found more than 50 black, green, oolong, herbal, white, and flavored teas, and several fruit tisanes that achieve their full potential even when brewed at lower temperatures.
   Just as Spillane found himself having to work around the ever-dominant beverage-coffee-Anthony Priley had to approach his idea of brewing whole-leaf tea in the time it takes to pull a shot of espresso, with coffee equipment in mind. What Priley, president of Seattle-based Affinitea Brewing Technologies, realized early on was that there was no satisfactory way to brew tea in an espresso machine. He had to build something entirely different. Having just received its second patent, Priley's Affinitea Infusion Process is a stand-alone machine about the size of a single-group espresso machine. Using water that is programmed for level of pressure and temperature, the machine "super steeps" tea, making a 12- to 16-ounce cup in less than 30 seconds at the touch of a button. The machine also includes a steam wand for tea lattes, and the company intends to introduce retrofitting equipment for espresso machines to accommodate the Affinitea Infusion Process.
   With consumers becoming more tea-savvy all the time, the world of tea is growing increasingly complicated. The purists, meticulously preparing each cup by hand, claim they will never change their ways, stating the many variables that will undoubtedly be disrupted by a modernized brewing process. And the visionaries committed to building brewers better suited to the escalating pace of life in the 21st century without sacrificing quality, are not likely to give up their pursuit. But the existence of these two converse groups of tea theorists is just another example of the evermore colorful realm of tea.
   Thankfully, none of today's brewing innovations involves a bucket or a hose.

Sarah Allen is Fresh Cup's associate editor. She can be reached at sarahallen@freshcup.com.