The Toronto Tea Festival is celebrating its fifth edition this weekend. It’s underway, today and tomorrow in downtown Toronto.
Bill Kamula,vice-chairman of the Tea Guild of Canada, and an instructor for Tea Sommeliers at George Brown College, is one of the people behind the event.
A chef, and largely self-taught when it come to tea, he says the speciality has grown. Indeed it was a student at the college who argued in favour of maintaining the Tea Sommelier designation.
“You can approach the study of tea from many avenues”
Kamula says it all began when Tao Wu, owner of the Tao Tea Leaf shop in Toronto, approached members of the Tea Guild of Canada, and tea sommeliers with the idea of creating a Tea Festival.
Listen“I don’t think anybody foresaw that it was going to grow the way it has, and have the life it has developed,” Kamula says. He got involved wanting to share his love of the beverage and the cultures that have embraced tea, with the larger community.
When I suggest that Canada is a country of coffee-drinkers as evidenced by our love and support of the Tim Hortons chain of coffee and donut shops, he quickly reminds me that tea has a longer history in Canada, as tea was one of the first things the Hudson Bay company brought in when it started trading in the 17th century.
Kamula acknowledges that the Canadian coffee market has matured, but he says this is what’s happening now with tea.
“We’ve seen in the last couple of decades a steady growth and an interest in tea, and all things about tea, so we’re now seeing the kind of development of tea consumption culture that we saw with coffee a couple of decades back.”
The festival includes a fashion exhibit. Kamula explains that aside from what might be worn during a more traditional Chinese or Japanese tea ceremony. the embrace of tea in the Victorian era changed fashion.
The habit of women to enjoy tea in their boudoir, left them free to enjoy it comfortably, not fully dressed in the whale-bone corsets that were de-rigour at the time. This led to the creation of loose-fitting ‘tea dresses’.
“You can approach the study of tea from many avenues” Kamula says, and during the festival their will be speakers on various aspects of tea, from the health aspects to growing it. Perhaps most importantly, there will be tastings.
There will also be performances of Chinese, Japanese and Korean tea ceremonies, as well as displays of these tea pots and all the accoutrements.
And when it comes to the Lunar New Year, it just so happens this was a happy coincidence, that people are enjoying what the Chinese discovered 2700 years B.C.E. as the new year begins.
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