The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [45]
BRITISH BLACK TEA BLENDS
1. English Breakfast
2. Earl Grey
Tea makers have been blending teas for centuries, mixing them with other teas or with flavored additives like rose petals, cinnamon, and jasmine blossoms to amplify their flavors. The British expanded this practice in the nineteenth century, when the Lipton, Twinings, and other tea companies created blends of Chinese and Indian teas for everyday drinkers. We’ll try two of them now. In spite of their popularity, most flavored teas are to pure teas what wine coolers are to fine wines. The added flavors mask the nuance in the leaves. When you drink a pure tea, wonderful things happen in your mouth as the flavors alter and evolve. With additives, the flavor is more often constant and unchanging.
That constancy holds tremendous appeal, for both the tea drinker and the manufacturer. Flavored teas are cheaper and easier to produce: Since the added flavors make up most of the taste, they require lesser grades of tea. It’s much easier to control the quality of the additives than it is to control the tea. You can control pure tea as well as you can control Mother Nature. As with the best wines and their vintages, some years are better than others.
Pure tea is an adventure; to help inspire you to keep exploring, we will now investigate two blends that I hope you’ll treat as a launch pad into the less familiar pure teas that go into them.
ENGLISH BREAKFAST
English Breakfast was designed as a simple tea for the average middle-class citizen to start the day, and for about the first hundred years of its existence, the tea was brewed by British tea makers from Chinese black teas. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as the new British tea barons started to make their own tea in India, a huge marketing effort was launched to get the English to switch to the new South Asian tea flavors. It took a while, but in time the English accepted the brisker, stronger flavors of the Indian teas, and now they reject the milder versions made with Chinese blacks.
My father learned the tea business from an old English tea man named Stanley Mason. Mason got his start in the tea trade when Britannia still ruled the waves and made an English Breakfast with Chinese black tea. We’ve continued to have success with Mason’s mixture ever since my father started his own tea operation in 1970. It was only when my father and I started exporting Mason’s blend to hotels back in England that we hit a snag. In Great Britain, our tea was considered too weak. It also had a slightly smoky flavor that our British clients found unpleasant. I explored the inner workings of strong English teas. What made that spoon stand up? After several trials, I created a more “English” English Breakfast with more robust British Legacy Teas. Since then, I have never heard a complaint, and in fact this blended tea helped the Dorchester Hotel win the United Kingdom Tea Council’s award for “London’s Top Tea.”
Whatever the version, an English Breakfast blend can serve as a wonderful launching point for a voyage through tea. If you like a traditional English Breakfast made of Chinese black teas, try some of the other China blacks: Keemun Hao Ya A or the lighter version, Keemun Mao Feng. From there, sample some Yunnan black teas. If you like Yunnans, you might also try puerhs, the aged teas made from them. Another path might lead toward the darker oolongs such as Da Hong Pao or Bai Hao. Those two might lead to the lighter oolongs: Ti Guan Yin and Ali Shan. From there, jump into China’s fabulous green teas.
If you prefer a brisker, more “English” English Breakfast, taste some Assams and Ceylons before sampling Darjeelings. You may prefer darker, Second Flush Darjeelings; if so, try Bai Hao, which has a similar dark stone fruit flavor. If you like the greener