\n<\/p>\n
W<\/span>ith its large silver pouch, artistic label and delicate leaves, Dalreoch Scottish white tea might be expected to grace elegant cups with saucers, perhaps with a scone served on the side. Instead, it is nestled with an array of numbered polythene packets in a room just off a laboratory at the University of Aberdeen.<\/p>\n This is not an ordinary afternoon tea but evidence in a crime that science helped solve.<\/p>\n For Prof David Burslem, a plant scientist at the university, the silver pouch was highly suspicious. \u201cIt\u2019s a very large packet \u2013 250g \u2013 and tea growing in Scotland was at a very small scale,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Burslem spent more than two decades in academia before finding himself in the role of an expert witness, helping to crack an audacious fraud that took in top hotels, leading politicians, tea growers across Scotland \u2013 and swathes of the media.<\/p>\n At its heart was a tantalising idea: creating tea plantations in Scotland to produce premium brews. And Tam O\u2019Braan \u2013 a tweed-wearing grower from Perthshire \u2013 was the man who wanted to turn the idea into an industry.<\/p>\n O\u2019Braan, 55, burst on to the scene in the mid-2010s with his \u201cWee Tea\u201d plantation in Perthshire. Outlets including the BBC sent teams to interview him and film leaves being picked from his bushes.<\/p>\n The attention encouraged would-be growers to get in touch. O\u2019Braan was happy to help, selling them tea plants he said had been grown in Scotland and cultivated to withstand the harsh conditions, as well as offering growing advice. In media interviews he claimed tea could be \u201cforced\u201d, like rhubarb.<\/p>\n As the tea rush grew, more plantations sprang up as part of O\u2019Braan\u2019s \u201cTea Growers\u2019 Association\u201d, with articles running in local and national press, on the radio and on TV news. In 2015, Scotland\u2019s then first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, attended the US launch of O\u2019Braan\u2019s tea at the five-star Lowell hotel on New York\u2019s Upper East Side, alongside the Scottish actor Alan Cumming.<\/p>\n The same year I met O\u2019Braan at the Dorchester hotel in London for an article on British tea. He was not only supplying tea to the hotel but had also helped to set up tea plants on its roof terrace \u2013 tea, the Dorchester told me at the time, that would also be incorporated into some of the hotel\u2019s offerings.<\/p>\n Yet in the weeks that followed my article, doubts crept in. I realised \u2013 too late \u2013 I could find no evidence of the \u201cSalon de Th\u00e9\u201d award that numerous outlets, including the Times and the Guardian, had reported O\u2019Braan\u2019s plantation had won.<\/p>\n Was it made up? I could not prove it, and the relationship with the hotels and other growers was real enough, offering credibility. The news cycle moved on, as did I. But in Scotland, growers also had nagging concerns.<\/p>\n Richard Ross, a drinks writer, bought about 500 young tea plants from O\u2019Braan, eager to make use of some land in Perthshire. \u201cHe talked a good game; talked a lot about the specifics of what he\u2019d been doing and his own background,\u201d Ross said. \u201cHe seemed like a credible individual, somebody I could do business with.\u201d<\/p>\n Ross planted his tea in the autumn of 2015 and early the next year gave O\u2019Braan permission to show a French news organisation around his plantation while he was away.<\/p>\n <\/span>Richard Ross, a writer and tea grower, said his crop yield \u2018didn\u2019t ring true\u2019.<\/span> Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Three weeks later he found O\u2019Braan on the doorstep proffering an apology and a huge tub filled with three kilograms of a fine, processed tea. During filming for the media, O\u2019Braan said, his team had got carried away and picked all the leaves from Ross\u2019s plants. The tub, he said, was the result.<\/p>\n \u201cI look at the bucket and think: \u2018That\u2019s a lot of tea,\u2019\u201d Ross said. It was February and his plants had yet to have their first sprouting of new leaf.<\/p>\n \u201cI took a small amount so that I could taste some myself and maybe show off to my family that actually I had my first Scottish tea that I\u2019d managed to grow myself,\u201d he said. \u201cBut in the back of my mind I was thinking this just doesn\u2019t ring true.\u201d<\/p>\n Over time, many <\/strong>growers, including Ross, were also finding their plants failed to thrive, a situation Ross found very confusing.<\/p>\n \u201cHere was a man who we saw as this expert in tea. He was sort of acknowledged as such in [the] media and by people who are buying the tea for these big restaurants and hotels. So we thought, clearly if it\u2019s not working for me then it\u2019s something I\u2019m doing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n With concerns growing and O\u2019Braan becoming more elusive and difficult to deal with, the tea growers regrouped as \u201cTea Scotland\u201d in an attempt to distance themselves from O\u2019Braan and protect their reputation.<\/p>\n A couple of years later, Ross found himself in Edinburgh. And having previously heard that the prestigious Balmoral hotel was offering a tea menu featuring an array of single-estate Scottish teas, he decided to visit. But when he saw the tea list, clearly linked to O\u2019Braan, he realised the descriptions referred to plantations owned by members of Tea Scotland \u2013 none of which were yet selling their tea.<\/p>\n Outraged, the tea growers contacted the authorities. Two local authorities also raised concerns after being unable to ascertain where the tea leaves grown by O\u2019Braan were being turned into a finished product.<\/p>\n The case eventually landed on the desk of Stuart Wilson, a former DI who, in a previous life, had solved murders but was now leading the investigation for Food Standards Scotland.<\/p>\n Wilson and his colleagues found Tam O\u2019Braan was just one of the aliases for a man also known as Thomas O\u2019Brien or Thomas Robinson.<\/p>\n <\/span>Stuart Wilson, the lead investigator on the case from Food Standards Scotland.<\/span> Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Wilson\u2019s team found O\u2019Braan had been buying tea from wholesalers in Oxford and London, and that some of the transactions could be linked to dates and quantities of deals between O\u2019Braan and the Balmoral.<\/p>\n Further evidence came from an Italian tea grower who had turned up in Scotland looking for O\u2019Braan with a large unpaid bill for plants. The plants that had struggled to survive in Scotland, it emerged, had come straight from his nursery on the slopes of Lake Maggiore and were being sold by O\u2019Braan at a hugely inflated price.<\/p>\n Tea experts also provided evidence, revealing it would take several years before a plant growing in Scotland would produce leaves suitable for making a brew.<\/p>\n And the more Wilson\u2019s team dug, the more O\u2019Braan\u2019s stories crumbled: contrary to O\u2019Braan\u2019s claims, they could find no evidence he had been to university in Edinburgh, served in the army, worked in bomb disposal, invented the bag for life.<\/p>\n As for those prizes his tea was supposed to have won? \u201cThe bottom line was there was no evidence to substantiate that any of these awards that he\u2019d claimed were accurate,\u201d Wilson said.<\/p>\n Yet it remained important to show that the tea O\u2019Braan was selling was not of Scottish origin. \u201cThere was always the worry in the back of my mind that there was some massive plantation somewhere that we didn\u2019t know about,\u201d Wilson said.<\/p>\n After checking Land Registry records and finding no signs of a further plantation linked to O\u2019Braan, Wilson turned to Burselm.<\/p>\n Working with the Scottish tea growers, Burselm had already begun pilot studies to explore the provenance of different teas. Now he applied the method to samples collected under the eye of Wilson and his team.<\/p>\n At its core, the approach involved analysing tea samples for concentrations of 10 different elements including cadmium, arsenic and nickel.<\/p>\n Crucially, as Burselm noted, the concentrations of these elements are influenced by the underlying geology of the ground on which the plants are grown rather than biological processes or fertilisers. The varying concentrations provide a sort of fingerprint that reflects the plant\u2019s location.<\/p>\n Burselm tested processed tea collected by Food Standards Scotland from a host of known Scottish plantations and samples from those overseas. He also tested \u201cmystery\u201d samples provided by Wilson and colleagues \u2013 later revealed to be teas sold by O\u2019Braan.<\/p>\n The results showed samples from the Scottish plantations had distinct \u201cfingerprints\u201d. \u201cWe were able to show clear differences between tea growers that are separated by a few tens of kilometres here in Scotland,\u201d Burselm said.<\/p>\n But the samples from Scottish plantations were more similar to one other than to those from plantations in other parts of the world. Most of the mystery samples, however, had \u201cfingerprints\u201d that clustered with those of teas grown overseas.<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018Every time I drink tea I wonder where it comes from\u2019 \u2026 David Burslem testing samples of tea in his lab at the University of Aberdeen.<\/span> Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Burselm\u2019s work helped to convict O\u2019Braan. In May this year, he was found guilty on two counts of fraud totalling nearly \u00a3600,000, and a month later he was sentenced to three and a half years in jail.<\/p>\n For Burslem, the experience was a world away from everyday research. \u201cWhen I embarked on [this work], I didn\u2019t imagine it was going to go in this direction,\u201d he said. \u201c[Now] every time I drink tea I wonder where it comes from.\u201d<\/p>\n The conviction did not signal the end of Tea Scotland. While Ross is no longer growing tea, others are going strong.<\/p>\n Islay Henderson is one such grower, with her 7,000 or so tea plants doing well on the west coast of Scotland. \u201cI\u2018ve got about seven different varieties now, maybe more, and I\u2019m trying some cuttings as well from my own hardy plants,\u201d she said, with the plants taking about seven years to produce an optimum yield.<\/p>\n The output is still small in scale: Henderson said this year she had processed about 45kg of fresh leaf grown by members of Tea Scotland, resulting in about 12kg of processed, multi-estate tea. That was about enough for 4,000 pots of the brew, Henderson said. And she has also begun producing small batches of her own single-estate tea.<\/p>\n While Ross insists it is the hard work of growers and the help of the Italian nursery owner that has made Scottish Tea a reality, Henderson admits it was O\u2019Braan who put the idea in her head.<\/p>\n \u201cI think, ironically, we may not have done it with him,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n A Scottish tea mystery is a three-part investigation by Science Weekly, available now wherever you get your podcasts.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" With its large silver pouch, artistic label and delicate leaves, Dalreoch Scottish white tea might be expected to grace elegant cups with saucers, perhaps with a scone served on the side. Instead, it is nestled with an array of numbered polythene packets in a room just off a laboratory at the University of Aberdeen. This<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[18154,5022,1844,5075,1541,4359,5764,3780,5020],"class_list":{"0":"post-31076","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-audacious","9":"tag-brew","10":"tag-case","11":"tag-fraud","12":"tag-man","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-scottish","15":"tag-strange","16":"tag-tea"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/31077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}