Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode two – the list

Summary

Science Weekly – A Scottish Tea Mystery, Episode Two: "The List"

Date: July 22, 2026
Host: Nicola Davis (The Guardian)
Guests: Richard Ross, Ellie Bewie, David Burslam, Stuart Wilson
Runtime (main content): 01:26–24:33

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Episode Overview

In the second installment of the mini-series "A Scottish Tea Mystery," Nicola Davis delves deeper into the intrigue surrounding claims of authentic Scottish tea. When an "all-Scottish" tea menu appears at Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel, it raises suspicions among tea growers who realize the listed teas couldn't possibly originate from their still-young Scottish plantations. The episode follows their quest for the truth, introducing scientific sleuthing, fraud allegations, and a cast of colorful personalities as they untangle a web of dubious authenticity in Scotland's budding tea industry.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Balmoral's Suspicious Tea List

[01:48–05:20]

• Richard Ross notices that the prestigious Balmoral Hotel is featuring an “all-Scottish” tea menu, even though none of Scotland’s fledgling plantations have produced tea yet.

• Ross circulates photos of the menu among other growers, provoking outrage as they realize their names and estates are referenced in ways that seem intentionally misleading.

  "I knew where all the Scottish tea plantations were, but I also knew that those tea plantations hadn't actually produced any tea yet because their plants were so young."
  —Richard Ross [03:25]

• The growers suspect Tam o’ Bran, the charismatic but increasingly elusive promoter of Scottish tea and supplier of tea plants, is behind these dubious claims.

2. Scientific Authentication: Tea's "Geological Fingerprint"

[05:47–14:03]

• The growers contact Professor David Burslam, an expert in plant sciences at the University of Aberdeen, to find a scientific method for authenticating tea’s geographical origin.

• Burslam outlines that tea plants, like other hyperaccumulators, absorb trace elements from the soil that are unique to their geographic area, creating a kind of “elemental fingerprint.”

• He collects tea samples from Scottish estates and compares them with imported teas using mass spectrometry.

  "It's the chemical composition of soils which gives the geographical stamp of origin."
  —David Burslam [08:07]

  "The Scottish grown teas clustered separately in a statistical ordination sense to the overseas samples."
  —David Burslam [09:40]

• Samples of Tam’s supposed “Scottish” teas are tested through this method both by the tea growers (unofficially) and later by Food Standards Scotland (official capacity).

3. A Web of Deceptions: The Trail of the Plants

[14:58–16:49]

• Richard Ross investigates Paolo Zecchari, an Italian nurseryman initially providing plants to Tam. Contrary to what Tam claimed, the plants were sourced from abroad, not acclimatized or bred in Scotland for the climate.

  "Really all the plants that we had been supplied had come not from a propagation in a greenhouse in Perthshire, but almost direct from the shores of Lake Maggiore."
  —Richard Ross [15:12]

• The plants later come from Turkey, where the climate is more similar to Scotland’s, explaining variation in how well Scottish plantations fared.

4. Official Investigation: Food Standards Scotland Steps In

[17:05–22:26]

• Stuart Wilson, investigator with Food Standards Scotland, takes up the case, tracing Tam’s sales to top hotels and tracking down the provenance of both plants and finished tea products.

• Wilson finds Tam selling tea plants for vastly inflated prices (bought at £2.50 per plant, sold at £12.50), and learns that unique non-disclosure agreements were signed between the Balmoral Hotel and Tam—very unusual for such transactions.

  "Now, he was buying the plants for £2.50 per plant. But we now know from the invoices... Tam O' Brien was selling them for £12.50 per plant to the growers."
  —Stuart Wilson [20:14]

• The Balmoral still has samples of Tam’s tea, which are handed over for further scientific testing.

5. Scientific Conclusions—Tea Not From Scotland

[21:17–23:01]

• Official samples are again tested by Professor Burslam, now directly for Food Standards Scotland.

• The “elemental fingerprints” show Tam's teas match overseas profiles, not Scottish-grown plants.

  "The unknown samples... clustered within the group of overseas teas, and not among the Scottish grown, authentically Scottish grown teas."
  —David Burslam [22:09]

• The evidence is compelling and troubling, pointing to deliberate fraud.

  "There appeared to be some evidence in support of the idea this was a fraud. So like everyone, I was shocked by that."
  —David Burslam [22:26]

6. The Bigger Mystery: Who is Tam?

[23:19–24:11]

• As evidence mounts, questions remain about Tam o’ Bran’s identity and credibility—his claims range from being a multi-millionaire to inventing the 'bag for life' and working in bomb disposal, each more incredible than the last.

  "The more you heard the story, the more you realized that the different stories never quite added up."
  —Richard Ross [24:00]

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The Sleuthing Starts:
  "They actually did things like go in and book the Scottish Tea Experience at the Balmoral and then they surreptitiously collected [tea samples]."
  —David Burslam [11:07]

• The Power of Science:
  "It's like a geographical fingerprint."
  —Nicola Davis [08:19]

• On the Shady Business Practice:
  "It's a good return, goodness me, a great return."
  —Ellie Bewie [20:24]

---

Key Timestamps

• [01:45] Introduction to the Balmoral Hotel and its “all-Scottish” tea menu
• [03:25] Richard Ross's discovery and the backlash among growers
• [06:21] Introduction to Prof. David Burslam’s plant science expertise
• [08:19] Explaining the science of soil composition as tea’s “fingerprint”
• [09:40] Scottish tea’s unique elemental profile established
• [14:58] The real origin of “Scottish” tea plants, Paolo’s role
• [17:05] Meeting Stuart Wilson, official investigation begins
• [19:02] Identifying the paper trail for both plant sales and hotel tea supplies
• [21:17] Second round of laboratory testing for protein legitimacy
• [22:09] Test results: Tam’s tea clusters with overseas, not Scottish, teas
• [23:19] Tam’s conflicting claims and elusive identity

---

Tone and Style

The episode blends a sense of detective intrigue with rigorous science reporting. The speakers are candid, at times wry, and show genuine astonishment at each twist in the saga—particularly the scientific sleuthing and mounting evidence of deception.

---

Conclusion

This episode vividly unpacks how Scotland’s nascent tea industry became mired in scandal, from misleading marketing at Edinburgh’s most famous hotel to a scientific investigation that exposes fraudulent claims. The episode leaves listeners eager for the next chapter, as the enigma of Tam o’ Bran's true identity—and motivations—remain unsolved.

---

For anyone interested in agricultural fraud, science sleuthing, or the birth pangs of a new food industry, this episode provides a fascinating blend of investigative journalism and scientific detective work.

Transcript

[Nicola Davis]

This is the Guardian.

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[Madeline Finley]

Hi, it's Madeline here. The Science Weekly team is on a break, so for the next few weeks you'll be hearing a selection of our favourite episodes from the past year. Today is the second episode from our investigative series A Scottish Tea Mystery. If you haven't heard episode one yet, scroll back to yesterday in your podcast feed. Enjoy.

[Nicola Davis]

Hi, I'm Nicola Davis, a science correspondent here at the Guardian and this is the second episode of a special Science Weekly mini series, A Scottish Tea Mystery. The List.

[Ellie Bewie]

If you've ever visited Scotland's capital, Edinburgh,

[Nicola Davis]

you you will have seen the Balmoral Hotel. It is a vast, imposing building that sits right above the train station in the heart of the city. A great clock tower marks the Edinburgh skyline, overlooking the busy shoppers making their way up and down Princes Street. Today, tourists will often visit the Balmoral to see the room where J.K. rowling finished writing the Harry Potter series. One day, a few years after drinks journalist Richard Ross had started up his own tea plantation. He found himself in the city and decided to pop into the Balmoral. He got wind of something fishy.

[Richard Ross]

The Balmoral Hotel, perhaps one of the most obviously prestigious hotels in Edinburgh, was selling an all Scottish list of teas in their tea room.

[Nicola Davis]

Having your tea in the Balmoral would

[Ellie Bewie]

be a big deal.

[Nicola Davis]

It's iconic, like Claridge's in London or the Plaza in New York. Afternoon tea is served in the very grand Palm Court restaurant at tables set with pristine white tablecloths and fine china under a large central dome. By this point, Richard had taken over from Tam as chairman of the association of Scottish Tea Growers, which renamed itself Tea Scotland. As you might imagine, it's a pretty small world and so everyone knows or knows of everyone else.

[Richard Ross]

I had a look at the list which was sitting on a lectern at the entrance to the tea room, beautifully bound over multiple pages, all divided into different sections, the different styles of tea and each of the teas with this nice sort of attractive, quite flowery name and a little description of 100 words or so about the geographical location, some of the specifics of the area where it had been grown and, you know, some of the wording, it clearly was very specific to some of the people I knew. You know, I knew where all the Scottish tea plantations were, but I also knew that those tea plantations hadn't actually produced any tea yet because their plants were so young. So I took some pictures of the list on my phone, circulated it to the other growers, and understandably, the owners of those plantations got quite kind of irate about this.

[Nicola Davis]

They were pretty sure they knew who

[Ellie Bewie]

was behind the list.

[Nicola Davis]

Tam o', Bran, the maverick who'd persuaded them to start their plantations, sold them their tea plants and charmed the media into giving glowing coverage to this exciting new industry. But over the previous year or so, he'd become prickly and elusive, avoiding their calls and emails. He'd left an Italian grower with a massive unpaid bill and now it seemed he'd been secretly selling their Scottish tea to Scotland's most famous hotel. Except the growers knew whatever tea this was, it wasn't theirs. So they began to wonder if this tea was a lie. What about all the tea Tam was selling to other shops and hotels?

[Richard Ross]

The idea that he was maybe doing something that was a little bit unethical transformed into us feeling that this was something that was really deception and fraud. So at that point, we sent an email to Food Standard Scotland and their Criminal Investigation Division.

[Nicola Davis]

After firing off an email to report what they discovered at the Balmoral, the tea growers decided to do some further

[Ellie Bewie]

sleuthing of their own. They wanted to prove that the tea

[Nicola Davis]

they'd seen on that list didn't come from their plantations. And that led them, and eventually me, to a small office in an unassuming building a short drive from the centre of the granite city, Aberdeen, which is where I met David Bursum, professor of Plant Sciences at the university.

[Ellie Bewie]

Hi, David.

[Madeline Finley]

Hi.

[Ellie Bewie]

Softly spoken and friendly, although clearly as sharp as a tackle, David led me

[Nicola Davis]

into one of the lecture rooms beside his lab to chat.

[David Bursum]

My background is in plant science research and I work primarily on woody plants, so shrubs and trees, and I'm very interested in the way that those plants interact with soils and microorganisms.

[Nicola Davis]

He's also interested in plants that hyper accumulate elements from the soil, especially Aluminium. And it just so happens that that's

[Ellie Bewie]

exactly what tea does.

[Nicola Davis]

I asked David to take me back to when he came across an advert on an online message board connecting academics to commercial operators.

[David Bursum]

I responded to a request that came from a group of Scottish tea growers who were interested in developing a method for authenticating the geographical origin of their tea. At the time, I didn't know why they were interested in that, but I took it as an opportunity to develop some work on tea, which I had been hoping to do for some time.

[Nicola Davis]

He got stuck into the literature. The tea growers needed something that was only sensitive to the growing environment, not the species itself. After all, there isn't such a thing as a native Scottish tea plant.

[David Bursum]

We did consider looking at DNA, but the issue with DNA, of course, is that it's dependent on. On the origin of the material. We needed a method that was sensitive to the growing environment, the conditions where the tea plants were actually growing, and that is independent of their genetic origin.

[Ellie Bewie]

So something that reflected their surroundings, what they were taking up in the soil. That was what you were looking for?

[David Bursum]

Yes, especially the underlying geology, which gives rise to variation in the chemical composition of soils. And it's the chemical composition of soils which gives the geographical stamp of origin.

[Nicola Davis]

The idea works like this. The chemical composition of soil is dependent on where in the world it is. That's because what's in the soil is influenced by the type of rocks that lie beneath. Elements in soil from somewhere in China might be at very different concentrations to what you'd find in a sample of soil from somewhere in Ethiopia. And the tea plants passively suck all these elements up from the soils in tiny amounts, which can then be detected in the tea leaves. It's like a geographical fingerprint.

[David Bursum]

We ignore elements like nitrogen and phosphorus, which are typically added by growers in fertilizers. We're interested in micronutrients and elements, sometimes called trace elements, which are present in most soils and which are taken up passively by the plants. So it's things like molybdenum, lead, arsenic, selenium, cadmium, nickel, things that are present in very tiny concentrations in plants and which we can pick up using precision instruments.

[Nicola Davis]

So, with his method in hand, the next thing David needed to do was create a kind of reference data set.

[David Bursum]

The first thing I did was collect samples of tea from each of the estates within the network of growers that had approached me. And we found very quickly that there were variation between those growers themselves. So we could identify individual estates within Scotland Based on the chemical signatures within their tea. The next step was to determine whether as a group, the Scottish grown teas were different from overseas teas in general. So this required me to work with an importer who gave me about 100 samples of imported tea of known location. And the Scottish grown teas clustered separately in a statistical ordination sense to the overseas samples.

[Nicola Davis]

Once David had developed the method and created his two reference data sets, it was time for the Scottish tea growers to come clean about what they really wanted. Testing tea supposedly grown or sold by Tam o'. Bran.

[David Bursum]

So they gave me samples which they had themselves bought, which was labeled as if it was Scottish grown. But they, at the time, and they were clear about this with me, they were concerned it wasn't grown in Scotland.

[Nicola Davis]

Not only had they bought Tam's tea

[Ellie Bewie]

from the shops, the group had embarked on a little subterfuge to gain some of the samples.

[David Bursum]

They actually did things like go in and book the Scottish Tea Experience at the Balmoral and then they surreptitiously collected that.

[Nicola Davis]

At this point in our meeting, David turned to a big cardboard box that had been sitting next to us, stuffed full of plastic packages.

[David Bursum]

Yeah, it's probably true that some of these samples are a bit smaller than they were when they first arrived. And there's plenty left if you would like to have a cup of tea.

[Nicola Davis]

Refusing David's kind offer, despite the rarity

[Ellie Bewie]

and price of some of the teas

[Nicola Davis]

he was now unpacking, I asked him to show me an example of what he was sent by the tea growers.

[David Bursum]

So taking for example, this package of tea that's got on the label Dalrig Scottish White Tea, which was produced, I think in 2016 and part of the original set of samples that the tea growers of Scotland acquired. So it is one of the products that highlighted their concern because it's a very large packet. 250 grams.

[Ellie Bewie]

And this, this was grown by Tam O'.

[Shannon Maldonado]

Brien.

[Ellie Bewie]

That was the, that was, that was

[David Bursum]

the marketing of it. Yes. So we have to prepare that for analysis. So the first step is to grind it into a fine powder. And I have some examples of that here too. And you can see it has to be very, very finely ground in order to be prepared for the next stage.

[Ellie Bewie]

Yes, it looks more like sort of cinnamon or something. It's that fine, isn't it? It's very, very fine powder indeed.

[David Bursum]

They all look very similar, except they have slightly different colors. Once they're, once they're powdered, the next

[Nicola Davis]

stages happened in a Laboratory down the corridor from where we were sitting. So David and I donned our white coats and headed in.

[Ellie Bewie]

Oh, look, lab coats.

[Shannon Maldonado]

Excellent.

[Ellie Bewie]

So this takes me back.

[Nicola Davis]

On the lab bench were tubes of clear liquids into which the powdered tea had been transformed using hot acids and hydrogen peroxide. It's called the digest.

[David Bursum]

So this is what the digest looks like. And you would be forgiven for thinking that was just a vial of water.

[Ellie Bewie]

It does look completely clear.

[Stuart Wilson]

Yeah.

[David Bursum]

So they then go into this container in batches, as you can see, and then there's a robotic system that sucks up a very small sample from each one, feeds it into the ICP Ms. That actually does the analysis, which is

[Ellie Bewie]

this machine, very large looking, sort of looks like one of those really old fashioned photocopier size, you know. And that's your mass spectrometry machine where you can, by using math, you, you can work out the concentration of different elements within your solution.

[David Bursum]

Yes. It contains the mass separation and the detection and then we get outputs in the form of spreadsheets.

[Nicola Davis]

And so with the tea sold by Tamo Bran turned into colorless liquids and fed into the mass spectrometer, David ran the experiment. Which database would this tea match? The cluster in Scotland or the International group?

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[Nicola Davis]

While the tea growers had been doing their sleuthing with David, Richard Ross was getting to know Paolo Zecchari, the Italian nursery man who'd been supplying the tea plants TAM claimed to be propagating from to produce hardier Scottish plants.

[Richard Ross]

So I had a long sort of email correspondence with him where we found out little by little these nuggets of information about the fact that really all the plants that we had been supplied had come not from a propagation in a greenhouse in Perthshire, but almost direct from the shores of Lake Maggiore.

[Nicola Davis]

The growers had believed that they were buying plants with a better chance of survival in Scotland than your average tea plant, that at least one generation had been grown in Scottish soil and especially selected by TAM to be more viable.

[Richard Ross]

We were quite shocked. But on the other hand, we were almost relieved because it started to allow us to unravel some of the stories behind the plants that we got. So by being in contact with Paolo, he was able to say, oh, well, if you bought it in 2015, then I know those plants were ones that probably came from my own plantation and then the later ones. Once he'd established that there was clearly a market for tea plants in these cooler climates in Britain, he started to go out and look for better plant material that would be even better suited to the colder conditions of Scotland. And he'd gone to Turkey and had sourced some seeds from Turkey. The Turkish tea growing area can be really cold in the winter. You can get snow, a lot of low fog and high rainfall.

[Nicola Davis]

Bit more like Scotland.

[Richard Ross]

Much more like Scotland.

[Ellie Bewie]

And so that explained why some of your colleagues had thriving plantations and others. It's not so much.

[Richard Ross]

Exactly.

[Nicola Davis]

And it wasn't only the tea growers who were beginning to discover more about what TAM had been up to.

[Stuart Wilson]

Okay, so my name is Stuart Wilson. I am an investigator within the Scottish Food Crime and Incidence Unit who are part of Food Standards Scotland. And our responsibility is to make sure that we investigate any allegations of criminality within the food sector.

[Nicola Davis]

On a beautifully sunny day this autumn, I met up with Stuart in his offices in Aberdeen, in a building not too far from David's laboratory. He was strikingly tall, with a wry sense of humour. Before joining Food Standard Scotland, Stuart had been in the police, a detective inspector working on murder cases, a crime scene manager, even a firearms officer. But at the start of 2019, he turned his investigative prowess to tea. Coincidentally, around the same time Richard got

[Ellie Bewie]

his nasty surprise at the Balmoral, alarm

[Nicola Davis]

bells were ringing among authorities about Tam o Brand's Wee t plantation.

[Stuart Wilson]

There was questions raised over some of the media articles which had been published in 2014, 2015.

[Ellie Bewie]

Some of those articles, including mine, noted

[Nicola Davis]

Tam was producing tea that was being sold to hotels and shops. But he hadn't registered himself as a food business with the local council. When they dropped by to find out what was going on. Tam claimed all the processing and drying needed to turn the leaves into the final product you and I would drink was actually being done by a company in Fife.

[Stuart Wilson]

The position from the company in Fife was that they only dealt with the Finnish tea leave themselves, which left the question as to how the tea leave was actually then turned into a finished tea. So they also contacted Food Standards Scotland and Essentially married up both pieces of the intelligence together to start the investigation proper.

[Nicola Davis]

Stewart began by going around all the hotels and companies that had purchased tea from Tamil.

[Stuart Wilson]

We knew from the media articles that tea was being sold in some hotels, the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, the Dorchester in London, Fortnum and Mason in London, Marriage Frey in Paris and two or three others. So let's go to them and identify what they bought or what they thought they bought and how much they'd paid for these tea types. So there was a couple of them where there maybe been a non disclosure agreement was signed between the BT plantation and hotel.

[Ellie Bewie]

Let me just say here it is very unusual for a hotel buying tea to sign an NDA.

[Stuart Wilson]

The next aspect then was to look at the tea growers and recover evidence of their transactions which would provide supporting evidence to the fact that the tea plants they were buying were a claim to be 100% Scottish. Now, that came to a head when we were contacted by a chap from Italy who told us that he was engaged with Tam o' Bran over many months and years from around about the 2014, 2015 time. And he had sold him, you know, upwards of about 40 or 50,000 plants.

[Ellie Bewie]

Yes, that's Paolo.

[Stuart Wilson]

Now, he was buying the plants for £2.50 per plant. But we now know from the invoices from the growers that Tam O' Brien was selling them for £12.50 per plant to the growers.

[Ellie Bewie]

It's a good return, Goodness me, a great return.

[Stuart Wilson]

And made him lots of money.

[Nicola Davis]

If that was the tea plants, what about the final product, the tea being poured into delicate cups in fancy hotels around the uk? Luckily, the Balmoral still had samples of the tea leaves that had been sold to them by Tam.

[Stuart Wilson]

The next aspect was to identify, right, so we've got the tea leaves here. What can we do with these leaves in terms of proving the provenance or authenticity of the tea?

[Nicola Davis]

Being Scottish and who did Stewart end up reaching out to? Well, the person who had recently become

[Ellie Bewie]

an expert in geographical authentication of tea, Professor David Burslam.

[Nicola Davis]

This time David used officially collected samples from Stewart and the Food Standard Scotland team.

[David Bursum]

They supplied me with samples from the same set of Scottish estates and a few others as well, where their geographical origin was, was known and was recorded by them. And they supplied me with a set of samples which they didn't tell me a great deal about for very good reasons. It wasn't explicit where those unknown samples came from. I was asked to analyze those samples to make a judgment on whether they were distinct chemically from the Scottish grown samples and whether there was any evidence that they were more similar to the overseas library of reference samples that I had already.

[Nicola Davis]

So once again, David ran the experiment and compared the elemental fingerprint of the mystery samples to the ones from the Scottish growers and the international teas.

[David Bursum]

In most cases, the unknown samples that were supplied by Food Standard Scotland clustered within the group of overseas teas, are not among the Scottish grown, authentically Scottish grown teas.

[Ellie Bewie]

What were you thinking when you saw the results, when you saw the mystery sample results?

[David Bursum]

First of all, I was concerned there appeared to be some evidence in support of the idea this was a fraud. So like everyone, I, I was shocked by that. So I made sure that all our lab processes were double checked before I agreed that this was relevant to the case.

[Nicola Davis]

David might have been shocked that it

[Ellie Bewie]

suggested fraud, but he may not have been surprised because it was exactly this result he'd already presented to the tea growers using the unofficial samples they'd provided.

[David Bursum]

I well remember the evening where I was with them and presented that and well, we were all very concerned. It clearly supported their concerns that the tea had not been grown in Scotland and and justified their complaint to the Food Standard Scotland.

[Nicola Davis]

Evidence was piling up against Tam. He'd bought 50,000 plants from Paolo, leaving him in the lurch for the last batch. He'd sold them onto growers for a greatly inflated price, all while telling them he'd cultivated the plants in Scotland. And the experiments had proved the tea products he was selling are Scottish grown also didn't come from Scottish soils. So where had it come from? And if the whole thing been based on lies, who was Tam really?

[Stuart Wilson]

There were claims that he was a multi millionaire. There were claims that it invented the bag for life.

[Ellie Bewie]

There was one, I think, where he said he had worked in bomb disposal.

[Richard Ross]

Yes, and this was the same with how he described his past as well. The more you heard the story story more, you realize that the different stories never quite added up.

[Nicola Davis]

That's tomorrow. A Scottish tea mystery was reported and presented by me, Nicola Davis. It was produced by Madeline Finley, the sound design was by Joel Cox and the executive producer was Ellie Bewie.

[Stuart Wilson]

This is the Guardian.

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[David Bursum]

It was amazing.

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