The Tea Ration

Joined
May 12, 2018
I've been pondering this, since I have just gotten my lovely new (to me) tea pot\boiler up and running, having cleaned the probably decades worth of soot and tar off of it, and made the knob on the lid look a little nicer thanks to some cutting board oil. We know that Civil War soldiers got a ration of tea, in substitution for coffee. According to regulations, for every hundred me there was to be issued 1 pound and 8 ounces of tea daily. I think that works out, on an individual basis, to .24 oz of tea? I assume that's something like a tea bags worth of tea...

Anyways, I know from previous reading that the tea in question would probably be some kind of Green Tea, likely imported from China... does anyone have any information on what tea specifically this might be? Also, I seem to recall that the first ever contract to supply the Army with tea was letted to a company from Cincinnati, Ohio, but cannot find the source or the recall the company's name for the life of me! It would be interesting and useful to try and get a hold of contracts to supply the army with tea, to get a better idea as to what they were purchasing at the time.
 
I've been pondering this, since I have just gotten my lovely new (to me) tea pot\boiler up and running, having cleaned the probably decades worth of soot and tar off of it, and made the knob on the lid look a little nicer thanks to some cutting board oil. We know that Civil War soldiers got a ration of tea, in substitution for coffee. According to regulations, for every hundred me there was to be issued 1 pound and 8 ounces of tea daily. I think that works out, on an individual basis, to .24 oz of tea? I assume that's something like a tea bags worth of tea...

Anyways, I know from previous reading that the tea in question would probably be some kind of Green Tea, likely imported from China... does anyone have any information on what tea specifically this might be? Also, I seem to recall that the first ever contract to supply the Army with tea was letted to a company from Cincinnati, Ohio, but cannot find the source or the recall the company's name for the life of me! It would be interesting and useful to try and get a hold of contracts to supply the army with tea, to get a better idea as to what they were purchasing at the time.
These are interesting:

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/...t=tea&y=0&x=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/...t=tea&y=0&x=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/...t=tea&y=0&x=0&dateFilterType=yearRange&page=1
 
So, if I'm understanding those sources you've found and some quick googling I've done, teas available at the time, that you can still find today, would have been:

Hyson\Young Hyson, which is a green tea;
Pekoe, a black tea;
Lapsang Shouchong, also a black tea;
Wu Yi (aka Bohea), named after it's place of origin, either black or oolong tea
Baozhong (aka Pouchong), an oolong tea;
and Gunpowder Tea, which refers to the style of tea that looks like pellets of gunpowder, rather than a specific tea

Congou tea seems to be simply a descriptor that can be applied to any high grade black tea, amusingly the etymology has the same Chinese derivation as "kung fu", the term gong fu, meaning "skill", in these terms the skillful preparation of the tea leaves. This would have been the most expensive type of tea avalible. "Imperial" tea the corresponding term for high quality tea, as labeled by Western merchants.

In contrast, "Twankey" seems to have been literally the bottom of the barrel, tea that was picked in volume to try and meet market demand. Apparently it came from a region in China now known for producing really high quality tea, so unless you go there yourself and buy the absolute worst tea you can find, you aren't likely to find it anymore.

If my understandings are correct, I think the Pekoe tea or maybe Bohea would have been the low cost types of tea that the government would have been interested in buying stocks of. Please correct me if I am mistaken, ye tea historians. The tea varieties now and then are absolutely bewildering.

The guy who suggested in the article the use of capsaicin wake a sentry by putting it in his eye must surely have been pulling one over that newspaper man! I should expect that the sentry would be awake after that! Equally, I imagine drinking hot and spicy water would indeed relieve one of the sensation of having drunk too much water... one would need whole oceans to stake the resultant thirst! I could see wanting to chew tea though, in small quantities it would at least not be too unbearable and certainly would be cafinating.

I'd hate to drink tea with Prussian Blue in it, or any of the other sickening stuff used by unscrupulous merchants. Thank go for food safety laws nowadays!
 
I think I have found some interesting information regarding Army Tea in a post war source: an manual for Army Cooks ca 1896. According to the manual, the most popular teas were Oolong, Schouchong, Hyson, and Young Hyson. It mentions Japanese teas too, but those wouldn’t have been available in the Civil War. Gunpowder tea was considered too expensive for the Army.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Manual_for_Army_Cooks.html?id=czlCAQAAMAAJ

Am I right to assume that the tea rations would not have changed much between the 1860s & 1890s? The rations seem to be almost identical between the two time periods...
 
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