Vietnamese like their tea green and strong. Or so Vietnam tea exporter Future Generation leads me to believe. I know virtually nothing of Vietnamâ??s tea drinking habits so I am taking the site at face value.

Vietnam has a patchy tea history. According to the Vietnam Tea Association, tea bushes have been growing in the country for centuries. The French, which colonized Vietnam in the mid 19th0, started growing tea commercially in the early 19th century. They had some success selling Vietnamese black tea to the European market and green tea to the North African one. But the two Vietnam warsâ??first against France, then against the USâ??wreaked havoc with the local plantations. It is only over the last ten years that the Vietnamese tea industry began flourishing. Tea drinking, however, continued throughout the years, and Vietnam consumes about half of the green tea it produces.

Future Generation says that the Vietnamese have a tea ceremony, which, though not as articulate as the Japanese one, is nonetheless an important part of their culture. What struck me about it is that they are only supposed to brew tea using rainwater or dew taken from lotus leaves. On my side of the world, this would make tea drinking very rare indeed. Which is why I used tap water instead, though I let it run a little to make it as fresh as possible. I also read that the Vietnamese always boil water first, then let it cool to about 90C, so I followed suit. I steeped 2.5g of Shan Tran leaves I had got from Soana, in Milan, for three minutes in the cooled water. The resulting liquor was a lovely golden green, with a strong vegetaley scent that had something of the sea in it. It had a good mouthfeel, smooth and fuller bodied than I thought. Slightly astringent, it had a very long vegetaley end. Like a vivid landscape on a Vietnamese silk scroll.