West Java fights to develop tea industry

Yuli Tri Suwarni, The Jakarta Post/Bandung

Dicky Aditya, 31, a consultant for a construction company, said he only drank a maximum of two cups of tea a day. But don't ask him about how many cups of coffee.

"Uncountable. I'm a smoker and people say that if you want to reduce the level of nicotine in your blood, then you have to drink more caffeine," he said jokingly.

There was another reason why Dicky loved coffee, mostly of the instant kind, more than tea. He said that, unlike tea, coffee came in many different flavors. It could be sweet; with milk, cinnamon or chocolate, or Italian-style; like a cappuccino or latte. Tea was pretty much just tea, he said. Although when asked he could list black tea, green tea and jasmine tea as some of the varieties.

Dicky, however, thinks differently now. After strolling around the West Java Tea Festival held at Bandung's Supermall, he has discovered that tea, especially the bagged kind, has almost as many tastes as their are buds on the tongue.

He says he is amazed by the almost endless variety of flavors -- ginger, vanilla, blackcurrant, strawberry, raspberry, blackberry, coconut, garlic and mint -- to name a few.

And Dicky said he had found out something else important about tea that had made it preferable to coffee; unlike the black-bean pick-me-up, tea was better for you.

"Teas can be much more healthy than coffee -- at best, teas do not adversely affect your heart or blood pressure," Dicky said.

The festival held from Friday to Sunday (today) is the province's second.

With hundreds of different teas on show, it gave the public a chance to try out both the traditional and the new tastes of tea -- loose-leaf and bagged -- as well as to find out how companies produced tea commercially. A seminar held at the nearby Hotel Horizon and organized by the West Java provincial government enlightened people further on the production process.

Here, the two fundamental categories of classic tea were explained. Experts told the audience tea was green if it did not go through a special fermentation and drying process that characterized black tea.

One self-confessed tea lover, West Java Governor Danny Setiawan said several Indonesian companies had managed to innovate tea production in the country, creating additional tastes, to widen the market for the drink.

However, Danny said more promotion to encourage tea drinking was needed. He pledged the West Java government's continued help to create a "love tea" campaign in the province, part of which included the festival.

"Tea is a prominent commodity in West Java. We have 110,000 hectares of tea fields in the province and are able to produce 114,000 tons of tea that contributes to a total of US$48 million in foreign exchange earnings a year," Danny said.

Danny expressed regret that the large amount of tea products created by producers were not mirrored by an equally large tea consumption in the province.

Despite being the major tea growing area, West Java's tea consumption is only slighter higher than the national average -- at 310 grams per capita a year. The per capita nationwide average is 280 grams.

With total annual tea production at 170,000 tons, Indonesia is ranked fifth-largest tea producer in the world. The biggest tea producer is India, which produces 800,000 tons a year. And Indians drink far more of the brew, the national average reaching an annual 660 grams per capita.

Indonesian Tea Association secretary Atik Darmadi said that tea companies had to work hard to encourage people to enjoy tea, as there were still many new products that had not yet caught on in the market.

Indonesia was exporting about 100,000 tons of tea annually while only 45,000 tons was absorbed by the local market. That left an annual surplus of 25,000 tons, he said.