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Photo credit: Monsoon Tea Company
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Photo credit: Monsoon Tea Company
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Hmiang and Camellia Sinensis Assamica
Bio: Kenneth Rimdahl began working with tea in 1993 when he opened the Tea Shop’s first store in Madrid, Spain. After traveling to northern Thailand to source ceramic teapots and accessories, he discovered abandoned tea trees growing wild in the mountains around Chiang Mai. Seeing ancient tea trees surviving on their own and thriving in the surrounding biodiversity of the forests inspired him to create a forest-friendly tea company that works in harmony with the land. Ken’s efforts to increase biodiversity and reforest northern Thailand have earned him a nomination for a 2024 People, Environment, Achievement (P.E.A.) Award. The 2024 P.E.A. Awards ceremony takes place in London on June 25th.
Long before tea was a beverage, it was food and medicine. Camellia sinensis var. assamica trees are native to the humid forests and mountains of southeast Asia, a region that sweeps across northern India, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, and southern China. The indigenous people who traveled the region originally used the larger leaves from c. sinensis var. assamica as food because of its rich nutrients and medicinal qualities.
Eventually, the leaves were bundled and fermented to preserve and transport them more easily. Packed with antioxidants and antimicrobial properties, the fermented tea leaves became a vital part of the nomadic people’s existence, and they began planting assamica trees wherever they migrated.
The practice of eating fermented tea leaves still exists in Myanmar, where it is called laphet and hmiang in northern Thailand. However, the demand for hmiang in Thailand is slowly dwindling as younger generations no longer eat it. Farmers who used to earn a living making hmiang are forced to clear their land and surrounding forests to plant cash crops such as cassava, corn, or pineapple.
Fortunately, there is a silver lining. Camellia sinensis assamica leaves also make exceptional teas. For decades, old-growth assamica trees have been prized in Yunnan, China, for making the most coveted and expensive aged Pu-erhs. Connoisseurs worldwide are starting to appreciate the unique flavors and bold energy of these wild and ancient trees.
With the help of businesses like Monsoon Tea Company, hmiang is also starting to make a comeback as Michelin-starred chefs and restaurants all over southeast Asia celebrate its bright, acidic tang and many health benefits.
Kenneth Rimdahl: When I first saw the tea forests in northern Thailand about 22 years ago, I couldn’t believe it. They were tea trees, but they were growing in the forest in a completely different way than I had seen in China and India. And I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I went back to Spain and continued working for Tea Shop, but also began thinking about starting a forest-friendly tea company in Thailand, which is what I did about 11 years ago.
STiR: Were the trees you first saw originally used to make tea?
Kenneth Rimdahl: No. They were originally planted to make hmiang. There are many hmiang plantations in northern Thailand because before, everyone ate it, so everyone could make money from it. However, it’s a lousy business today because only some people in the mountains over 60 still eat it. There are so many areas where they no longer produce hmiang because they can’t sell it, so they clear all the tea trees and surrounding forest to put in mono-crop plantations of corn or pineapple.
I wanted to create a forest-friendly tea company that makes tea from the former hmiang plantations. Our company philosophy is to sell as much tea as possible to buy more tea from the farmers. But I only buy from them if they maintain the biodiversity around their tea plants or add biodiversity. This allows the farmers to earn money again and keep the biodiversity as they did in the past with hmiang. In this way, they become the protectors of the forest because that is where they get their income. That is the philosophy behind Monsoon Tea Company.
STiR: Who are your biggest buyers? Do you sell more domestically in Thailand or Europe?
Kenneth Rimdahl: Our biggest buyers are in Thailand. Now, we have eight shops domestically: five in Chiang Mai and three in Bangkok. We work a lot with hotels, cafes, and Michelin-starred restaurants all over Thailand and since 2023 we have had a showroom in Stockholm, Sweden earning more customers around Europe and soon we plan to open a showroom in The U.S as well.
I’m looking to sell as much tea as possible so I can buy more from the farmers so they can keep the forest and biodiversity. That is the point of my company. Then, we can make tea at every level, from high-end loose-leaf tea and tea bags to blends. But we can’t just create teas; we must make teas people like to buy. Volume is everything we need to protect biodiversity.
Tourism and education are also important to us. Before [Covid-19], we took people up the mountains to show them the tea trees and discuss sustainability and the importance of biodiversity in the area. Now, we are starting that again. We will have four tour options for the next high season and are opening a new River House location in Chiang Mai to offer more educational experiences so that will start to grow again.
STiR: You mentioned that you only buy from farmers who maintain or add to their biodiversity. How do you check for that and ensure they abide by your guidelines?
Kenneth Rimdahl: Until now, it’s only been my close connection with the farmers, ensuring that they maintain and promote biodiversity. One very important thing we’re doing now is partnering with the Asia Institute of Technology’s AI department to develop my idea about an app that tracks and rates biodiversity.
Before, I could only tell what areas were forest-friendly by physically going to the land and looking at it with my own eyes. From what I could see, this looks like it has a lot of biodiversity, but I always wanted to take measurements to be more exact. So, I’ve created the Rimdahl Scale to accurately measure biodiversity in tea plantations and tea forests.
This has been in development since before [Covid-19], and now we’re devising ways to measure every area we work in. We will rate the tea with a trustability system through a smartphone app that the pickers, farmers, and processors must use. Then, in every area we source tea from, we have a measurement system that uses the latest AI technology and microphones to listen to the surrounding animal, bird, and insect activity.
The AI reads what bird or insect is making that sound, how loud it is, and the amount of birds or insects in the area. We will also do soil tests. For example, we can see fungus and microbial properties. We’re looking into the best way to read the flora. It’s easy to check the upper trees, but there are different ways to document the under vegetation, so we’re developing that. We also have a biodiversity specialist helping us determine the best procedures. In general, we will measure the high trees and the lower undergrowth, insects, and soil, and then every living thing by sound.
In the future, every tea we sell will have a number from one to five, rating how much biodiversity it grows with. One is a typical tea plantation, and five is the most biodiverse forest-friendly area. We’re also considering charging a higher price for higher levels of biodiversity. That way, the customer knows how much biodiversity grows around every tea. The farmers will also understand that they’ll earn more money as they increase biodiversity around the tea.
But for me, it’s not important that forest-friendly is a thing of “yes or no.” It’s a process. We just have to increase biodiversity in every place where we produce tea. This way, we can work with the farmers to make more money as they increase biodiversity and stop mono-cropping. You offer more incentives to create more biodiversity. We’re not just protecting the forest; we’re actually adding biodiversity back to the land and reforesting the area.
STiR: Regarding the EU deforestation regulations – would this app also help growers and suppliers prove that their coffee or cacao does not come from deforested land?
Kenneth Rimdahl: We are prepared for that because now we can prove it. Before, I could say this is forest-friendly but with this new system, we can prove what we are doing. In general, it’s the same technology that can also be used for rubber, coffee, or cacao. We work with tea, so we’ll start with that, but we will absolutely make the app adaptable to other markets as well.
We’ve been working with Left Hand Roasters to help increase and measure biodiversity in coffee. One important thing to note, especially with all the talk about shade-grown coffee and biodiversity, is that I’ve seen many places where they say they have shade-grown coffee, and I go there and see some trees shading the coffee. But they put the coffee plants so tightly together that if you look under them, there’s nothing. It’s like a rubber plantation. It’s completely dead soil. So don’t get fooled by some trees. If you go to some plantations that say they do good for biodiversity, don’t just look at the trees. Look under and on the ground because the most important part of biodiversity is actually how many insects there are and how much life there is in the soil.
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Photo credit: Monsoon Tea Company
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STiR: I know most cultivated tea is Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, but most of your trees are Camellia sinensis var. assamica. Why is that?
Kenneth Rimdahl: To understand that, we have to go back to the history of tea again. Long before there were countries and borders, tea grew wild in the forests and mountains of this region. Tea originated from an area stretching across northern India and the Himalayas through northern Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and southern China. Tea doesn’t come from one country. It does not come from China because China didn’t exist when the tea plant first started growing.
The people who originally populated those regions were nomads. They were looking for plants they could eat. They began eating the tea leaves and making a kind of soup with them. But they also realized they had to find a way to transport the tea leaves because the wild trees didn’t grow everywhere. And so then they started to ferment it, and that was called hmiang in Thailand and laphet in Burma. I can also tell you that a very similar word to laphet and hmiang even existed as a Chinese word long before the word cha. It’s much older than tea. This was the original way of using the tea. To eat it.
The reason why Camellia assamica is called assamica is because of the British. When Carl Von Linné named the tea plant, he only knew about the Chinese and Japanese tea plants he’d seen in Amsterdam in drawings. He got the name Camellia sinensis based on that. Then, when the British colonized India, they were up in Nagaland and found tea growing wild in the forest, like in Thailand or Laos. It was a tea plant but different than sinensis sinensis, and that’s why it got the name Camellia sinensis var. assamica. The Europeans found it for the first time in Assam, but it’s the same plant growing wild in Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and southern China.
So, C. sinensis assamica is actually native to Thailand and the surrounding region, but this is not an important tea plant; it’s just a plant that has been growing here all this time. Assamica was used for making hmiang, not necessarily for drinking tea. That’s why we work with assamica at Monsoon Tea Company because this is the tea that actually comes from here. We can see Camellia sinensis sinensis as a domesticated version of the wild tea plant made for growing in tea plantations, like a wolf vs. a dog.
When you have Assam tea, that’s different. When the British got their assamica tea plants, they mixed and merged them with the sinensis sinensis from China. For the tea plantations in Assam today, it’s not the same assamica that grows in the forest here in Thailand. There are different variations, of course. The Tale of Tea is the first academic scientific book that talks about the origin and history of the plant itself.
STiR: Many farmers you work with are from different Northern Hill Tribes. How diverse is northern Thailand?
Kenneth Rimdahl: Biodiversity is not the only thing that matters to us at Monsoon Tea Company. Diversity, in general, is a part of our company philosophy and who we are. Northern Thailand is a big, diverse cultural zone. Here, we have some farmers who are Muslims from Yunnan with Yunanese parents who came here a long time ago. We work with the Karen and Lanna people and groups from northern China. Many of the hill tribes originally came from China or Laos.
The indigenous Northern Thai people did not originally make tea. They made hmiang. The Chinese and other Hill Tribes that came here, fleeing Mao, found the hmiang trees and started producing tea instead. However, the Lanna people from northern Thailand did not do that. They continued making hmiang until very recently. So there are many different kinds of people here, and we have a lot of diversity in our tea production.
STiR: Monsoon Tea Company is not just trailblazing. You’re laying the foundations for a framework that people can follow all over the world. Reforesting a region and providing steady income for underserved communities shows that tea can be the solution, not just the problem.
Kenneth Rimdahl: I hope that more producers in our food chain can start to work in this way. We don’t have to destroy the land to make food. Of course, we cannot have all the tea in the world grow this way because it’s a lot more expensive. So, we also have to consider that normal tea plantations are necessary because tea is the second most consumed beverage in the world, and we need them to produce tea efficiently. I’m just trying to make a little niche area of the tea world work. So, I’m not saying that normal tea plantations are bad because they’re also important. But if we can stop producing tea in such a damaging way and start producing it more in a less damaging way, then I’ll be very happy.