A strange brew: the case of the man behind an audacious Scottish tea fraud | Scotland

WWith its large silver pouch, artistic label and delicate leaves, one might expect Dalreoch Scottish White Tea to grace elegant cups and saucers, perhaps with a scone served alongside. Instead, it’s nestled among a set of numbered polythene packets in a room right next to a laboratory at the University of Aberdeen.

This is no ordinary tea, but evidence of a crime that science helped solve.

For Professor David Burslem, a plant specialist at the university, the silver pouch was very suspicious. “It’s a very large packet – 250g – and tea growing in Scotland was very small scale,” he explained.

Burslem spent more than two decades in academia before finding himself in the role of an expert witness, helping to foil a brazen fraud that involved major hotels, high-profile politicians, tea growers from across Scotland – and much of the media.

At the heart of this idea was a tantalizing idea: creating tea plantations in Scotland to produce premium beers. And Tam O’Braan – a tweed-clad producer from Perthshire – was the man who wanted to turn this idea into an industry.

O’Braan, 55, burst onto the scene in the mid-2010s with his ‘Wee Tea’ plantation in Perthshire. Media outlets, including the BBC, sent crews to interview him and film leaves picked from his bushes.

This attention encouraged potential producers to contact us. O’Braan was happy to help them, selling them tea plants which he said had been grown in Scotland and bred to withstand the harsh conditions, and offering cultivation advice. In media interviews, he claimed that tea could be “forced”, like rhubarb.

As the rush for tea intensified, more and more plantations sprung up under O’Braan’s “Tea Growers’ Association”, with articles appearing in the local and national press, on the radio and on television news. In 2015, Nicola Sturgeon, then Scottish First Minister, attended the US launch of O’Braan’s tea at the five-star Lowell Hotel on New York’s Upper East Side, alongside Scottish actor Alan Cumming.

That same year, I met O’Braan at the Dorchester Hotel in London for an article on British tea. Not only did he supply tea to the hotel, but he also helped plant tea plants on the roof terrace – tea, the Dorchester told me at the time, that would also be incorporated into some of the hotel’s offerings.

However, in the weeks following my article, doubts crept in. I realized – too late – that I couldn’t find any evidence of the ‘Tea Room’ award that many media outlets, including the Times and the Guardian, had reported O’Braan’s plantation had won.

Was it invented? I couldn’t prove it and the relationship with the hotels and other producers was real and credible enough. The news cycle has evolved, and so have I. But in Scotland, producers also had nagging concerns.

Richard Ross, a drinks writer, purchased around 500 young tea plants from O’Braan, keen to exploit some land in Perthshire. “He talked a good game; he talked a lot about the details of what he had done and his own journey,” Ross said. “He seemed like a credible person, someone I could do business with.”

Ross planted his tea in the fall of 2015 and, early the following year, gave O’Braan permission to give a French news organization a tour of his plantation while he was away.

Three weeks later he found O’Braan at the door, offering him an apology and a huge bathtub filled with three kilos of fancy, processed tea. While filming for the media, O’Braan said, his crew got carried away and plucked all the leaves from Ross’s plants. The bathtub, he said, was the result.

“I look at the bucket and think, ‘That’s a lot of tea,’” Ross said. It was February and his plants had not yet had their first shoot of new leaves.

“I took a small amount so I could taste some for myself and maybe show my family that I actually had my first Scottish tea that I had successfully grown myself,” he said. “But deep down I thought it just didn’t ring true.”

Over time, many Growers, including Ross, were also finding that their plants were not thriving, a situation Ross found very confusing.

“Here’s a man who we considered to be this tea expert. He was sort of recognized as such in [the] media and by the people who buy tea for these big restaurants and hotels. So we thought: clearly, if it doesn’t work for me, it’s something I do,” he said.

As concerns grew and O’Braan became increasingly elusive and difficult to manage, tea producers banded together under the name “Tea Scotland” in an attempt to distance themselves from O’Braan and protect their reputation.

A few years later Ross found himself in Edinburgh. And after hearing that the prestigious Balmoral Hotel had a tea menu including a range of Scottish teas from a single estate, he decided to head there. But when he saw the tea listing, clearly linked to O’Braan, he realized that the descriptions referred to plantations owned by Tea Scotland members – none of whom were yet selling their tea.

Outraged, tea producers contacted the authorities. Two local authorities also raised concerns after being unable to determine where the tea leaves grown by O’Braan were being processed into the finished product.

The case eventually landed on the desk of Stuart Wilson, a former inspector who in a previous life had solved murders but was now leading the investigation for Food Standards Scotland.

Wilson and his colleagues discovered that Tam O’Braan was just one of the aliases of a man also known as Thomas O’Brien or Thomas Robinson.

Wilson’s team discovered that O’Braan purchased tea from wholesalers in Oxford and London, and that some of the transactions could be linked to the dates and quantities of the transactions between O’Braan and Balmoral.

Further evidence came from an Italian tea grower who had turned up in Scotland looking for O’Braan with a large unpaid bill for the plants. It turned out that the plants which had struggled to survive in Scotland had come directly from his nursery on the slopes of Lake Maggiore and were being sold by O’Braan at a hugely inflated price.

Tea experts also provided evidence, revealing that it would take several years before a plant growing in Scotland would produce leaves suitable for making an infusion.

And the more Wilson’s team dug, the more O’Braan’s stories fell apart: Contrary to O’Braan’s claims, they found no evidence that he had attended Edinburgh University, served in the army, worked in bomb disposal, or invented the bag for life.

As for the prizes his tea was supposed to win? “Ultimately, there was no evidence to support the accuracy of the rewards he claimed were accurate,” Wilson said.

However, it remained important to show that the tea O’Braan sold was not of Scottish origin. “I always had the worry in the back of my mind that there was a huge plantation somewhere that we didn’t know existed,” Wilson said.

After checking land records and finding no sign of another plantation connected to O’Braan, Wilson turned his attention to Burselm.

Working with Scottish tea producers, Burselm had already launched pilot studies to explore the provenance of different teas. He is now applying the method to samples collected in front of Wilson and his team.

Basically, the approach involved analyzing tea samples to determine the concentrations of 10 different elements, including cadmium, arsenic and nickel.

As Burselm noted, the concentrations of these elements are crucially influenced by the underlying geology of the soil on which the plants are grown rather than by biological processes or fertilizers. The different concentrations provide a sort of fingerprint that reflects the location of the plant.

Burselm tested processed tea collected by Food Standards Scotland from a host of known Scottish plantations and samples from those overseas. He also tested “mystery” samples provided by Wilson and his colleagues – which later turned out to be teas sold by O’Braan.

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 a few dozen kilometers here in Scotland,” Burselm said.

But the samples from Scottish plantations were more similar to each other than those from plantations in other parts of the world. However, most of the mystery samples had “fingerprints” clustered with those of teas grown abroad.

Burselm’s work helped convict O’Braan. In May this year he was convicted of two counts of fraud totaling almost £600,000, and a month later he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison.

For Burslem, the experience was the polar opposite of everyday research. “When I started [this work]I didn’t imagine it would go in this direction,” he said.[Now] every time I drink tea, I wonder where it comes from.

This conviction did not mark the end of Tea Scotland. While Ross no longer grows tea, others are growing.

Islay Henderson is one such producer, with around 7,000 tea plants growing well on the west coast of Scotland. “I have about seven different varieties now, maybe more, and I’m also trying some cuttings from my own hardy plants,” she said, with the plants taking about seven years to produce peak yield.

Production is still small-scale: Henderson said that this year she processed around 45kg of fresh leaves grown by Tea Scotland members, resulting in around 12kg of processed tea across several estates. That was about enough for 4,000 jars of beer, Henderson said. And she also started producing small batches of her own tea.

While Ross insists it was the hard work of the growers and the help of the Italian nursery owner that made Scottish Tea a reality, Henderson admits it was O’Braan who put the idea in his head.

“I think, ironically, maybe we didn’t do it with him,” she said.

A Scottish Tea Mystery is a three-part investigation from Science Weekly, available now wherever you get your podcasts.