Georgian Tea

Sorry, I'm confused. Are you saying that Chernobyl itself had an effect on the tea industry? Georgia isn't that close to Chernobyl, is it? I seem to remember hearing about the plume blowing north.

Best of luck, and please keep us posted!

/Lew

Hi,

The breaking of USSR was not a quick process. Chernobyl was a start point. Chernobyl could not affect to the Georgia tea directly...

Yours sincerely, Alexey K. Russia

Yes, it had an effect on both Georgia and Turkey. I was in Turkey that fateful day, building a tea factory in a fairly isolated Black Sea coast area and we heard nothing of the problem until a couple of days later. By then the cloud had backed across the area and rain had dumped radioactive dust onto our tea and onto us! Samples I took back to UK in all innocence were quite hot! EU limit for radioactivity in tea is 500 Bequerels per kg, our tea was 40,000 plus Bq/kg!! Samples had to be disposed of in our laboratory as "low grade radioactive waste". We were screened for Caesium isotope uptake into our thyroid glands. Over the years Turkish tea quite quickly resumed its normal background level, and I am happy to find that Georgian tea has done the same - now sampling at 350 Bq/kg. Most world tea is at around this level particularly if grown on young volcanic soils, as much tea is.

A footnote to this is that I have found a company in Georgia producing a nicely packed and very palatable iodised tea for export to Russia and the Ukraine. In iodine deficient affected areas the added iodine in the tea displaces the radioactive caesium in the thyroid glands and therefore reduces cancer risk, particularly important in growing children. I remember iodised salt being available in UK (some deficiency in limestone areas) but apparently iodine is more stable if applied to tea than to salt.

Nigel at Teacraft