After tea became trendy, a great number of tea experts and material on tea have appeared; it is accustomed to start the telling of kinds of teas with the words “There is a pretty great confusion in the classification of teas…”

Speaking about flavored black teas I will touch upon only more or less traditional kinds — and completely exclude a huge amount of drinks with incredibly strong flavor. These drinks (abundantly presented by Bodum, Forsman, Nadin and other trade marks) can hardly be called tea — tea leaves are used there more like a basis which holds smells well, than like the source of its own taste and flavor. Experts call such drinks ‘colognes’ or ‘compotes’. By the way, the fact that I will not speak about ‘compotes’ does not mean that they are distasteful or low-quality. It’s just that this article is about tea.

In the previous article, I praised first flush black estate teas and casually mentioned that they are very difficult to find in our (even specialized) shops. This ‘reserved character’ of estate teas, however, does not give cause for frustration. First, they are true elite drinks (which does not go together with public accessibility). Second, on shop displays (even in supermarkets) one can find rather decent teas. One only needs to know what to seek.

Conventionally, black tea may be divided into two large groups: pure teas and blends. Blends are composed of different teas, which could have been plucked in different parts of the world, for example, very often Kenyan tea is blended with Ceylon tea. Pure tea is tea plucked in one country, one region, one single estate, or at one and the same time. Thus, such invariant purity makes the term ‘pure tea’ conditional. Now I shall explain why.