The Oldest Tea Farm in America
Words by Jennifer Kornegay
Photos by Stephen Savage
Between sips of warm tea, Donnie Barrett, owner of The Fairhope Tea Plantation in Fairhope, Alabama, dips into his tea farm’s history and explains how he makes the dark liquid steaming in his delicate china cup. He started his tea farm in 1979, making his the oldest in the United States and earning him the nickname “the grandfather of tea.” Through the years, Barrett’s farm and tea-making business have grown, yet he has no wish for it to get any bigger than it is now. “I don’t want to be a commercial operation; I’m an artisan tea maker. Quality matters, and I achieve quality by making my tea in small batches,” he says. “And, I get lots of compliments on my tea.”
He repeats others’ praise with pride, noting the regulars who come back, claiming they won’t settle for anything else. A single taste of Barrett’s preferred brew, a mix of his green and black tea varieties, makes it easy to see why. The drink is smooth and flavorful, strong but not over-powering. “Black tea has robustness, but to make black tea, you burn up the tea leaf’s natural sugars and starches,” he says. “Green tea keeps those sugars and starches, but you lose the robustness. But when you blend them, mm-wah,” he says, ending his summation with the chef’s kiss gesture.
Sharing from his well of tea knowledge and watching others enjoy his tea satisfies him too; it’s why he added tea tourism to the farm’s offerings. Today, approximately 1,000 visitors a year drive down the oak-shaded dirt driveway to the plantation, where Barrett greets them and walks them behind the house to meet his plants.
Lines of squared-off bushes stand out like the hedgerows of a formal garden against the field’s close-cropped grass. The closeness of the plants allows their roots to meet; their placement allows for full sun exposure; and their boxy shape comes courtesy of Barrett’s pruning shears. “The light, their proximity to each other, and my pruning actually all stress the plants out; they don’t like it, but it forces the plants to throw up a good crop of tea,” he says. Once harvest season starts in March, Barrett will hand-pick that “good crop of tea.” He’ll use the leaves to make a small batch of tea and then repeat his “pick and process” steps every two weeks until November, when harvest ends.
After examining the tea plants, tour guests head to Barrett’s shady patio to dig into a lesson on the biochemistry that defines the tea-making process. “Learning that green and black tea come from the same plant surprises some,” he says, “but the varieties are the result of different processes.” Green tea requires fewer steps; the goal is stopping the oxidation reduction reaction. But to get black tea, the oxidation reduction reaction is key. “That’s what turns the leaves dark and produces black tea’s richer flavor,” Barrett says.
A tea party, complete with samples and sips, refreshes guests before they say goodbye. Many leave with Fairhope Tea Plantation tea (either in teabags or loose-leaf form), ensuring they can enjoy Barrett’s tea at home. And buying direct from the source is the only way to get it. He only sells from his home, and each year, sells approximately 300 pounds.
While Barrett now has plenty of customers, it all began with a few plants that survived a burn pile decades ago when “big tea” behemoth Lipton Tea Company walked away from some secretive tea-farming experiments in Fairhope. In the mid-1970s, the company planted tea in fields at The Auburn University Research and Extension Center in the city (as well as other spots up and down the Eastern seaboard and on the Gulf coast of Texas). A little over two years after the company’s research began, it went to every site it had planted and bulldozed all the plants, doused them in diesel fuel and set them ablaze. “Nobody knew what they were doing or why they stopped,” Barrett says. “There’s been chatter about it for 40 years with people trying to figure it out.”
Quality matters, and I achieve quality by making my tea in small batches.
The mystery was and is intriguing, but Lipton’s loss was Barrett’s gain when his dad, a research scientist who ran the Auburn center, called his son. “He said to me, ‘Let’s get you up some,’ referring to the uprooted plants. So, we did.” Armed with experience from working at an area nursery, Barrett took three plants, cut them into 100 little pieces, planted them on the land around his parents’ house, and they grew. At that time, tea-farming was a hobby. He spent years as a museum director in Fairhope but kept planting and processing tea.
In the 1990s, his hobby blossomed beyond the space at his parents’ house, so he bought the farm’s current site and uses the original plot as a tea-plant nursery. Between his start and moving to more land, Barrett made two trips to China to glean what he could about the art and science of making tea. The first, in 1984, exposed him to the country’s tea factories, where an industrialized process turned out massive amounts of tea. “What I learned there was how to make commercial grade tea, but then I realized there is better tea out there, and that’s what I wanted to make,” he says.
On his second journey to China, he found what he was looking for. “I would shop small street vendors, taste their tea and ask them, where did you get that?” he says. He’d then search out the maker and watch them do their work. He even got an impromptu class at a Buddhist monastery. “I was just visiting, and they were making tea, so I asked if I could join in and they let me,” he says. “I learned a lot from them.”
Barrett came home understanding that while the tea-making process is straightforward—requiring the management of chemical reactions—it is nuanced. It also leaves space for variations on the main theme, which takes Barrett back to his childhood growing up at the ag research station his father oversaw. “I experiment all the time with my process,” he says.
Once harvested, tea leaves’ moisture content must be lowered, so Barrett has tried drying them by steaming, baking, and pan frying. He’s used the sun and electric blankets; he’s currently “cold-withering,” using his home’s air conditioning instead of heat. He’s fiddled around to determine the ideal temperature for controlling those all-important chemical reactions. “Every time you buy tea from me, it will be a bit different,” Barrett says. “But it will always be great.”
The specifics of Fairhope Tea Plantation’s location also render its products distinct. Like wine, tea plants possess terroir, unique characteristics influenced by the soil and other environmental aspects, including the air’s moisture content and the amount and direction of wind and sunlight. “Even slight differences in conditions can make a difference in taste,” Barrett says.
When Barrett retired in 2017, he dove into tea fulltime, yet it’s still more passion and pastime than a profit-generating project; he’s never depended on tea for his livelihood. With no worries about competition, he’s happy to see others enter his industry, selling up to 5,000 plants annually to fellow tea farmers and tea-producers all over the South and as far away as Idaho. “Most tea makers in the U.S. got their plants from me,” he says.
As he drinks the last of his tea, Barrett divulges how he takes his: plain and hot, un-embellished and never iced. But he stresses his likes shouldn’t drive anyone else’s preferences. “I don’t judge how others choose to drink my tea,” Barrett says. “A little sugar, even a splash of milk doesn’t offend me. I’m just happy people like it.”
