Country
USA
The United States grows a negligible amount of tea and it is interesting anyway, because the constraints are so different from everywhere else. Land and labour cost too much for hand-plucking to work at scale, so the country's one large garden harvests by machine and everything else is a very small farm selling direct. Two places have real history behind them, Charleston in South Carolina and the Big Island of Hawaii, and they arrived at opposite answers to the same problem.
What grows here
Machine-harvested black tea from Wadmalaw Island near Charleston, the only American garden operating at a scale a supermarket would notice. Hand-made white, green, oolong and black from small farms on Hawaii, mostly on the Big Island, in lots of a few kilograms. Beyond those, a scatter of young farms: Mississippi and Alabama in the southeast, Oregon and Washington in the northwest plus California, most of them a few hectares at most and most selling everything they make at the farm gate.
The ground
Two workable climates and a lot of experimenting elsewhere. Wadmalaw Island is subtropical, flat, sandy and very wet, with the ocean taking the edge off the winters, which is close enough to a tea climate to work. Hawaii has deep volcanic soil, high rainfall and mountain elevation, the best tea ground the country has and on a scale that will never be large. The rest of the American plantings are tests of whether tea will tolerate a climate it was never selected for, winter cold above all.
The bushes
Mixed and largely unselected. The Charleston plants descend from the Pinehurst planting at Summerville, itself grown out of the government's nineteenth-century experiments, propagated onward rather than bred, and the small farms work with whatever hybrid material they could source, much of it crossing sinensis and assamica. Cold hardiness is the trait American growers actually select for, which is a breeding problem no established origin has had to solve.
Harvest seasons
A short season, roughly spring to early autumn, with real winter dormancy everywhere except Hawaii, where picking runs longer. Dormancy is not a disadvantage in itself, since Japan and China have it too, but combined with young bushes and tiny acreage it means American tea is made in quantities that sell out on release.
How it is made here
The Charleston garden's answer to American labour costs is a harvester adapted from tobacco equipment, which cuts the field evenly and fast and delivers the mixed leaf a machine gives you, processed orthodox in a factory on the site. The small farms take the opposite route: hand-plucked, hand-processed lots made by people who learned the craft on visits to Asia rather than through an inherited tradition. Both are honest answers to the same constraint, and they produce entirely different teas.
What to look for
The real label question is whether a tea was grown in the United States or merely blended and packed there, which describes most American tea brands. Ask for the farm. Expect to pay more than the quality alone justifies, because you are paying for acreage that cannot compete on cost, so buy American tea as an emerging craft rather than as value. Treat 'first' and 'only' claims with care as well, since several farms make one.
How it got here
The federal government tried to establish tea in Georgia and South Carolina from the 1880s, and the experiments failed on cost rather than on climate. The surviving bushes ran wild at Pinehurst near Summerville until Lipton moved them to Wadmalaw Island in 1963 to run a research station, and when Lipton concluded American tea could not pay, two of its people bought the site in 1987. That is the only reason the Charleston garden exists. Hawaii's tea is much newer: planting began in earnest after the sugar industry wound down in the 1990s, with state and university research behind it, as one of several candidate crops for land that had grown cane for a century.