Nicola Davis
speaker
498 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 18 Aug
Nicola Davis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
It's very, very fine powder.
The next stages happened in a laboratory down the corridor from where we were sitting.
So David and I donned our white coats and headed in.
On the lab bench were tubes of clear liquids into which the powdered tea had been transformed using hot acids and hydrogen peroxide.
It's called the digest.
And so, with the tea sold by Tam O'Brien turned into colourless liquids and fed into the mass spectrometer, David ran the experiment.
Which database would this tea match?
The cluster in Scotland or the international group?
While the tea growers had been doing their sleuthing with David, Richard Ross was getting to know Paolo Zaccarra, the Italian nurseryman who'd been supplying the tea plants Tam claimed to be propagating from to produce hardier Scottish plants.
The growers had believed that they were buying plants with a better chance of survival in Scotland than your average tea plant, that at least one generation had been grown in Scottish soil, and especially selected by Tam to be more viable.
And it wasn't only the tea growers who were beginning to discover more about what Tam had been up to.
On a beautifully sunny day this autumn, I met up with Stuart in his offices in Aberdeen, in a building not too far from David's laboratory.
He was strikingly tall with a wry sense of humour.
Before joining Food Standards Scotland, Stuart had been in the police, a detective inspector working on murder cases, a crime scene manager, even a firearms officer.
But at the start of 2019, he turned his investigative prowess to tea.
Coincidentally, around the same time Richard got his nasty surprise at the Balmoral, alarm bells were ringing among authorities about Tam O'Brien's wee tea plantation.
Some of those articles, including mine, noted Tam was producing tea that was being sold to hotels and shops.
But he hadn't registered himself as a food business with the local council.
When they dropped by to find out what was going on, Tam claimed all the processing and drying needed to turn the leaves into the final product you and I would drink was actually being done by a company in Fife.
Stuart began by going around all the hotels and companies that had purchased tea from Tam.
Showing 261–280 of 498 · page 14 of 25
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