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Types of Tea

Tea Bags: to use or not…

In 1904 Thomas Sullivan, an American tea trader, started to pack the samples of his tea into silk pouches, which his clients by mistake began to put straight into the pot with boiled water without unpacking them. According to another version he did it in 1908. Still another version says that there was no ‘mistake of the clients’, and the brewing by dipping the pouches into water was premeditated. Finally, the fourth version claims that tea bags were invented at the frontlines of World War I (in 1914) by the brave British soldiers, who suffered from the lack of the habitual drink. They poured tea into some kind of socks (the term ‘tea sock’ is still in use) and brewed it in kettles. As is usual with history, the truth is very difficult to find out — and is not necessary indeed. Let us think that the tea bag was invented in 1904 — and then in 2004 it turned 100 years old.

Colors of Tea

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…”

Bergamot Tea- Flavored, Fresh, Organic Herbal Black 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.

Darjeeling and Assam

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.

Pure Black Teas

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.

Darjeelings

In the article about different types of black tea, I said some words about Darjeelings — teas grown in the north of India at Himalayan hillsides. This time I want to get back to this topic. Just some words and even some lines are not enough and even outrageously few to describe these gorgeous teas.

Pure Chinese Black Teas

There is somewhat confusion about pure Chinese black teas. First of all, the Chinese themselves almost do not drink them at all (giving preference to green tea), so, they produce black tea almost exclusively for export. Partly due to this ‘internal lack of attention’ many kinds of Chinese black teas exist under two names at one and the same time — one being Chinese and the other — English. In this article I shall use European names mostly — let the Chinese and accuracy-lovers forgive me.

Tea from Ceylon and Keniya

In one of the previous articles I said that there is a very simple way to state the value of pure black tea — the colder the climate where it grows is, the higher the quality of the tea is. According to this rule, ’southern’ Ceylon and Kenyan teas do not have any chance comparable to ‘northern’ Chinese and Indian teas. However, as you probably understand, simple rules and simple principles work only with simple things — but tea is far from being a simple thing.

Black Tea Blends - Russian Caravan

Most of teas available nowadays are blends. Some of them are just an attempt to palm off worthless tea mixing it with some small amount of decent tea. However, there are different blends…

Black Tea Blends. Breakfasts and all

Besides Russian Caravan Tea, there is another tea blend, whose taste does not depend much on the producer — Breakfast Tea (strong, invigorative tea, with saturated taste, and simple, bright flavor). All other tea blends — even if by chance they have the same name — are different from company to company…

The first song of spring A nightingale singing, hanging On a tree upside down.

Kikak.