WWith its large silver pouch, artistic label and delicate leaves, you can expect Dalreoch Scottish White Tea to grace elegant cups and saucers, perhaps with a scone served on the side. Instead, it is hidden among numbered plastic bags in a room next to a laboratory at the University of Aberdeen.
This is no ordinary afternoon tea, but evidence of a crime that science has helped solve.
For Professor David Burslem, a plant scientist at the university, the silver pouch was highly suspicious. “This is a very large package – 250 g – and tea growing in Scotland was on a very small scale,” he said.
Burslem spent more than two decades in academia before finding himself in the role of expert witness, helping to uncover a brazen fraud that involved leading hotels, leading politicians, tea producers across Scotland – and a range of media outlets.
The project was based on a tempting idea: to create tea plantations in Scotland for the production of premium beer. And Tam O'Bran, a tweed manufacturer from Perthshire, was the man who wanted to turn the idea into an industry.
O'Bran, 55, burst onto the scene in the mid-2010s with his Wee Tea plantation in Perthshire. Media outlets including the BBC sent teams to interview him and film leaves are collected from his bushes.
This attention has prompted potential manufacturers to contact us. O'Bran was happy to help, selling them tea plants, which he said were grown in Scotland and bred to withstand harsh conditions, and also gave growing tips. In media interviews, he argued that tea could be “forced” like rhubarb.
As the tea rush grew, more plantations sprang up under O'Bran's Tea Growers Association, with articles appearing in the local and national press, radio and television news. In 2015, then Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon attended the US launch of O'Bran's tea at the five-star Lowell Hotel on New York's Upper East Side along with Scottish actor Alan Cumming.
That same year I met O'Bran at the Dorchester Hotel in London on article about British tea. Not only did he supply tea to the hotel, but he also helped set up tea plantations on the roof terrace – tea, I was told at the time at the Dorchester, would also be included in some of the hotel's offerings.
However, in the weeks following my article, doubts crept in. I realized – too late – that I could find no evidence of the Salon de Thée award, which numerous publications, including The Times and The Guardian, had reported that the O'Bran plantation had won.
Was this made up? I couldn't prove it, but the relationships with hotels and other manufacturers were quite real and credible. The news cycle continued and so did I. But in Scotland, producers also had some troubling concerns.
Richard Ross, a drinks writer, bought about 500 young tea plants from O'Bran, wanting to use the land in Perthshire. “He talked about playing well, talked a lot about the specifics of what he did and his experience,” Ross said. “He seemed like a trustworthy person I could do business with.”
Ross planted his tea in the fall of 2015 and early the next year allowed O'Bran to show a French news organization his plantation while he was away.
Three weeks later he found O'Bran on his doorstep, apologizing, and a huge bathtub filled with three kilograms of fine processed tea. While filming for the media, O'Bran said his crew got carried away and collected all the leaves from Ross's plants. The result, he says, was a bathtub.
“I look at the bucket and think, ‘That’s a lot of tea,’” Ross said. It was February and his plants had not yet produced the first sprouts of new leaves.
“I took a small amount to try it myself and maybe show my family that I actually have the first Scottish tea that I’ve managed to grow myself,” he said. “But in the back of my mind I thought it just didn’t ring true.”
Over time, many Growers, including Ross, also found that their plants were not doing well, a situation Ross found very confusing.
“He was a man we considered an expert on tea. He was, as it were, recognized as such in [the] the media and the people who buy tea for these large restaurants and hotels. So we thought, clearly, if it’s not working for me, then this is what I’m doing,” he said.
As concerns grew and O'Bran became increasingly elusive and difficult to resolve, the tea producers regrouped as “Tea Scotland” in an attempt to distance himself from O'Bran and protect his reputation.
A couple of years later Ross found himself in Edinburgh. And, having heard in advance that the prestigious Balmoral Hotel offered a tea menu, including a variety of Scottish teas produced on the same estate, he decided to visit it. But when he saw a tea map clearly associated with O'Bran, he realized that the descriptions referred to plantations owned by members of Tea Scotland, none of whom were yet selling their tea.
Outraged tea producers turned to the authorities. Two local authorities also raised concerns after they were unable to find out where tea leaves grown by O'Bran were turned into the finished product.
The case eventually landed on the desk of Stuart Wilson, a former police inspector who had solved murders in a previous life but was now leading the investigation. Food Scottish Standards.
Wilson and his colleagues discovered that Tam O'Bran was just one of the aliases of a man also known as Thomas O'Brien or Thomas Robinson.
Wilson's team discovered that O'Bran bought tea from wholesalers in Oxford and London, and that some of the transactions could be linked to the dates and numbers of transactions between O'Bran and Balmoral.
Further evidence came from an Italian tea grower who turned up in Scotland looking for O'Bran with a large unpaid plant bill. As it turned out, the plants that were struggling to survive in Scotland were taken straight from his nursery on the slopes of Lake Maggiore and were sold by O'Bran at a hugely inflated price.
Tea experts also presented evidence suggesting it would be several years before the plant growing in Scotland would produce leaves suitable for making the drink.
And the more Wilson's team dug, the more O'Bran's stories crumbled: contrary to O'Bran's claims, they could find no evidence that he had attended university in Edinburgh, served in the army, worked in bomb disposal, or invented the living bag.
As for the prizes his tea was supposed to win? “The bottom line is there was no evidence that any of these awards that he claimed were accurate,” Wilson said.
However, it was still important to prove that the tea O'Bran was selling was not of Scottish origin. “I always had this worry in the back of my mind that there was some huge plantation somewhere that we didn’t know about,” Wilson said.
After checking land registry records and finding no sign of further plantations associated with O'Braan, Wilson approached Burslem.
Working with Scottish tea growers, Burslem has already begun pilot studies examining the origins of various teas. Now he has applied this method to samples collected under the supervision of Wilson and his team.
Essentially, this approach involved analyzing tea samples for 10 different elements, including cadmium, arsenic and nickel.
Crucially, Burslem noted, the concentrations of these elements are influenced by the geology of the soil in which the plants are grown, not by biological processes or fertilizers. Different concentrations create a fingerprint of sorts that reflects the location of the plant.
Burslem tested processed tea collected by Food Standards Scotland from a variety of well-known Scottish plantations, as well as samples from overseas. He also tested “mystery” samples provided by Wilson and his colleagues, which were later revealed to be tea sold by O'Bran.
The results showed that samples from Scottish plantations had distinct fingerprints. “We were able to show clear differences between tea producers who are separated by several tens of kilometers here in Scotland,” Burslem said.
But samples from Scottish plantations were more similar to each other than to samples from plantations in other parts of the world. However, most of the mystery samples had fingerprints matching those of tea grown overseas.
Burslem's work helped convict O'Bran. In May of this year he was found guilty of two counts of fraud totaling approximately £600,000, and a month later he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
For Burslem, this experience was completely removed from everyday research. “When I started [this work]“I didn’t realize it would go in this direction,” he said.[Now] Every time I drink tea I wonder where it comes from.”
The verdict did not mark the end of Tea Scotland. Although Ross no longer grows tea, others are picking up steam.
Islay Henderson is one such grower and has around 7,000 tea plants that grow well on the west coast of Scotland. “I have about seven different varieties now, maybe more, and I also try cuttings from my own hardy plants,” she said, with the plants taking about seven years to produce an optimal yield.
Production is still low: Henderson said this year she processed about 45kg of fresh leaves grown by Tea Scotland members, resulting in about 12kg of processed tea from several estates. According to Henderson, this was enough for 4,000 cups of drink. She also began producing her own tea in small batches from one estate.
While Ross insists it was the hard work of the growers and the help of an Italian nursery owner that made Scottish tea a reality, Henderson admits it was O'Bran who put the idea into her head.
“Ironically, I think we might not have made it without him,” she said.
The Mystery of Scottish Tea is a three-part Science Weekly investigation, now available wherever you get your podcasts.
