Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode two – the list
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Guardian.
Hi, it's Madeleine here. The Science Weekly team is on a break, so for the next few weeks you'll be hearing a selection of our favourite episodes from the past year. Today is the second episode from our investigative series, A Scottish Tea Mystery. If you haven't heard episode one yet, scroll back to yesterday in your podcast feed. Enjoy. MUSIC
Hi, I'm Nicola Davis, a science correspondent here at The Guardian. And this is the second episode of a special Science Weekly miniseries, A Scottish Tea Mystery. Episode two, The List. If you've ever visited Scotland's capital, Edinburgh, you will have seen the Balmoral Hotel. It is a vast, imposing building that sits right above the train station in the heart of the city. A great clock tower marks the Edinburgh skyline, overlooking the busy shoppers making their way up and down Princes Street. Today, tourists will often visit the Balmoral to see the room where J.K. Rowling finished writing the Harry Potter series. One day, a few years after drinks journalist Richard Ross had started up his own tea plantation, he found himself in the city and decided to pop into the Balmoral.
He got wind of something fishy.
The Balmoral Hotel, perhaps one of the most obviously prestigious hotels in Edinburgh, was selling an all-Scottish list of teas in their tearoom.
Having your tea in the Balmoral would be a big deal. It's iconic, like Claridge's in London or the Plaza in New York. Afternoon tea is served in the very grand Palm Court restaurant, a table set with pristine white tablecloths and fine china under a large central dome. By this point, Richard had taken over from Tam as chairman of the Association of Scottish Tea Growers, which renamed itself Tea Scotland. As you might imagine... It's a pretty small world and so everyone knows or knows of everyone else.
I had a look at the list which was sitting on a lectern at the entrance to the tea room, beautifully bound over multiple pages, all divided into different sections of the different styles of tea. And each of the teas with this nice, sort of attractive, quite flowery name and a little description of 100 words or so about the geographical location and some of the specifics of the area where it had been grown. And, you know, some of the wording, it clearly was very specific to some of the people I knew. You know, I knew where all the Scottish tea plantations were, but I also knew that those tea plantations hadn't actually produced any tea yet because their plants were so young. So I took some pictures of the light list on my phone, circulated it to the other growers, and understandably the owners of those plantations got quite kind of irate about this.
they were pretty sure they knew who was behind the list. Tam O'Brien. The maverick who'd persuaded them to start their plantations, sold them their tea plants and charmed the media into giving glowing coverage to this exciting new industry. But over the previous year or so, he'd become prickly and elusive, avoiding their calls and emails. He'd left an Italian grower with a massive unpaid bill, and now it seemed he'd been secretly selling their Scottish tea to Scotland's most famous hotel. Except the growers knew, whatever tea this was, it wasn't theirs. So they began to wonder, if this tea was a lie, what about all the tea Tam was selling to other shops and hotels?
Where does the episode pick up and what is the Balmoral tea list controversy?
The idea that he was maybe doing something that was a little bit unethical transformed into us feeling that this was something that was really deception and fraud. So at that point, we sent an email to Food Standards Scotland and their criminal investigation division.
After firing off an email to report what they'd discovered at the Balmoral, the tea growers decided to do some further sleuthing of their own. They wanted to prove that the tea they'd seen on that list didn't come from their plantations. And that led them, and eventually me, to a small office in an unassuming building a short drive from the centre of the granite city, Aberdeen.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–4:30
2
Where does the episode pick up and what is the Balmoral tea list controversy?
4:30–11:22
3
Why did Richard Ross and other Scottish growers suspect the Balmoral’s ‘Scottish’ teas were fake?
11:22–19:18
4
How did growers discover discrepancies in Tam O’Brien’s claimed Scottish tea plantations?
19:18–23:12
Speakers
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