Products
Black & Pu-Erh Teas
Black tea - something we Brits drink an enormous amount of: strong, weak, with milk, sugar, honey, you name it we do it! We really dislike it when people tell us how we ought to drink something, so our take on milk, sugar, syrups etc. is this: if you like it, why not?! Personally I rather enjoy Punsch Kandis (German cane-sugar lumps in rum) in my Assam - so I'm as much a 'heretic' as anyone else!
China
Keemun
A top tea with fine flavour and natural sweetness. Our Keemun is of medium strength and has a naturally slightly smoky flavour, excellent with or without milk.
Yunnan
A tea with typical Yunnan character – earthy, fruity and sweet.
One of our 'real opinions' panel-members immediately likened this tea to "the experience of eating roasted chestnuts outside Sloane Square station on a cold winter's evening wrapped up in a duffle coat..." Tell us what you think!
India
Darjeeling
An honoured tea from one of the best known estates with a fine muscatel flavour.
The autumnal picking yeilds a stronger, rounder flavour than the delicate First Flush, but with more spicy, tobacco-ey overtones than the Second Flush. The classic Darjeeling qualities still remain though and this is great value for an excellent afternoon tea.
Organic 2nd Flush Darjeeling FTGFOP1 AMBOOTIA
£3.69 per 100g
Fairly tea-ish, yet still absolutely classic in its Darjeeling flavour - ideal for those wanting a tea which is both rounded and aromatic. Excellent taken without milk, yet also pleasant with a drop or two, if that is your preference.
Chosen from a selection of samples by our Cambridge customers on an idle Tuesday morning, this is a seriously good (and good-value too) First Flush tea with light grassy flavour and minimal bitterness on the palate: a refreshingly lively Darjeeling from an established estate.
Assam
Top Assam tea with golden tips. Malty, elegant taste.
Anything with this many letters after its name must be worth a go! Seriously though, this tea from the Mangalam estate is a true exemplar of an Assam, with a perfectly rounded flavour and a malty elegant taste. It takes milk if desired, but being light with a high proportion of tips, it by no means requires it – we recommend brewing it a little stronger if adding milk. Simply brilliant!
A great value, robustly flavoured, every-day drinking, quality broken leaf Assam. As a customer described it: "a dependable workhorse, of good character and which never lets you down."
Organic Assam TGBOP SEWPUR
£2.69 per 100g
A decidedly solid broken-leaf Assam tea, with an excellent balance of flavour, malty & somewhat treacle-ish in nature, but having a rounded and pleasantly tannic aftertaste.
And of course, it's Organic too, which is great!
The Nilgiris
The Nilgiris are known amongst other things for their fairly strong, wiry teas, produced at economical prices, and this is no exception: great value. Organically produced and from a trusted estate, this is an honest and forthright tea, balanced with lightness from its full-leaf grade.
Sikkim
The former Kingdom of Sikkim joined India in 1975 and its tea has grown in notoriety since then. There is only one garden offering tea to the world markets in the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim, and we’ve got hold of a top grade! Cracking stuff.
An absolutely delightful light black tea, fruity and with a high proportion of tips. AAlive like a gently babbling stream and perfect without milk for a lingering aftertaste, this sits comfortably alongside the best second flush Darjeelings. It's still one of the favourites for afternoon refreshment.
Ceylon (Sri Lanka)
Ceylon teas traditionally form the basis of English Breakfast Blends and as such they are well suited the British palate. The region boasts a wide variety of tea flavours and styles, which poses us with a problem - which ones do you take? Well, in the end we went for an organic, light tea from the Blackwood estate, and also decaf. option.
Organic Ceylon OP BLACKWOOD
£3.59 per 100g
A mildly aromatic Ceylon with a sweet, leafy flavour. Good with a dash of milk - an excellent Organic choice.
A delightful Ceylon tea with the caffeine cleverly taken out - often one can lose flavour with the decaffeination processes, but this Ceylon still punches within its weight.
Java
Better known for its coffees than for its teas, the latter is harvested all year round on the Javan plantations. Being generally low in tannic acids and posessing an aromatic and sweet flavour our Java Malabar is an exemplar.
A tea from the Island of Java with a copper cup colour, fresh & fruity in taste.
This tea is a surprise to many upon first smelling and tasting, but it is well worth a go - particularly at this price - having a warming sweetness to it. Best with milk we think.
Pu-Erh ⁄ Aged Tea
Dark, earthy matured PuErh is best described by our paying customers (both of these are positive reviews as the customers in question still purchase it!):
·"Earthy, dark and mysteriously organic-tasting; like being dragged backwards through a loamy forest."
·"It's like eating Marmite from a spoon in a tobacco factory... in a good way though!"
Pu-erh is an extraordinary tea world in itself which the West (and indeed China's elite) is only beginning to understand with the opening up of the Chinese markets. Traditionally Pu-erh is sold in round discus-like bricks called "beeng" or hemispheres called "tuo". The tea ferments in the brick, over time attaining a unique complexity of flavour ranging from the light through to the loamy. It is possible to create matured PuErh which retains many properties of the green versions and is rather sweeter - even better, it's ready to drink so you don't have to wait ten years for it to mature!
PuErh has recently become very difficult to obtain at a sensible price owing to the massive surge in popularity thanks to both Western and Chinese celebrities. This Superior matured loose-leaf PuErh is of excellent quality and has a classic earthiness, a very slight citrus edge on the palate and a sweet nose. It will rebrew many times.
In short supply so buy now!
These are seriously tasty bricks of excitement!
Wrapped up in paper, inside an ever-so-authentic Chinese box, it's like opening a Christmas present every time you have a cup of tea! Chip off a gram or two and brew over and over again (we got 8 brews out of it before we began to taste more water than tea!), as it releases it's yellow pink liquor and perfectly balanced sweet earth flavours.
A joy for the PuErh lover!