Country
Brazil
Brazil's tea is a Japanese story told in Portuguese. The plant arrived twice: first as a colonial experiment in Rio's botanical garden, then decisively in the 1920s with Japanese immigrants who planted it in the Ribeira valley southwest of São Paulo. Registro became the centre of a black tea export industry that ran for half a century and then largely vanished. The caffeinated leaf Brazil is better known for, mate, is not tea at all, and the country drinks far more coffee than either.
What grows here
Very little, in two places. Around Registro in the Vale do Ribeira a handful of families still work what is left of the old industry, making black, green and oolong tea at small scale. Inland at São Miguel Arcanjo the Japanese house Yamamotoyama grows Yabukita and makes steamed Japanese-style green tea, most of it exported to the United States, and that operation is now much the larger of the two. Everything else sold as chá in Brazil is mate or a herbal infusion.
The ground
The Vale do Ribeira is Atlantic Forest country on the São Paulo coast: hot, humid, generously rained on and low, which suits assamica and gave the bulky, fast-growing leaf the export trade wanted. The land is low rolling hills, part of why the industry mechanised. It is also the least developed corner of São Paulo state, where a Japanese immigrant colony was settled early in the twentieth century, and where the tea economy mattered locally out of all proportion to its size.
The bushes
Assamica, brought in by an immigrant who had worked in the Japanese tea industry. Torazo Okamoto started at Registro in 1922 with a China-type plant taken from an old tea plantation in the city of São Paulo, then went looking for something that would make black tea in volume: on the way home from a trip to Japan he stopped in Ceylon and carried Indian-type plants back with him. The Registro plantings descend from that. São Miguel Arcanjo is the exact reverse, Japanese Yabukita brought in later with Japanese method behind it to make a Japanese green tea.
What to look for
Start with what is not tea. Mate is a holly, Ilex paraguariensis, and chimarrão and tereré are its drinks, so most of a Brazilian chá shelf holds infusions with no camellia in them at all. For the real thing, ask for the family and the place. What survives at Registro is a handful of producers known by family name rather than by brand, and what leaves São Miguel Arcanjo is a Japanese-style green from one company, so there is no generic Brazilian tea to buy: every lot has a name attached.
How it got here
The Portuguese crown sent Chinese tea seed and Chinese workers to Rio de Janeiro in the colonial period and the botanical garden there became the first tea nursery. The effort spread to São Paulo and Minas Gerais, then faded, and with the abolition of slavery in 1888 production effectively stopped. It restarted with Japanese immigration. From Okamoto's plantings at Registro in 1922 the Ribeira valley built a black tea export industry that at its height ran dozens of factories and shipped to Europe and North America. It came apart in the 1990s under economic crisis and the loss of subsidy, and one working factory at Registro plus a couple of family farms is what remains.