We’ve reviewed our online sales and are excited to share your top five favourite loose-leaf teas over the last year—some familiar favourites, or there may a few new ones for you to taste-test!
1. Rwanda Tea – thrilled to see this wonderfully balanced tea at the top, as it’s one of the best values and best quality small leaf teas that we buy. Grown at high altitudes, between 1800 and 2800 metres, the nutrients from the volcanic soils give a wonderful flavour profile that sets it apart from Kenyan or Tanzanian counterparts.
2. Gourmet Classic Tea – is our top-quality signature blend which, incidentally features Rwanda tea heavily in the blend, along with June and July production Assam teas, and a hint of fine quality Ceylon tea. We’ve been selling this style of blend since the late 1980s and its popularity shows no sign of waning.
3. Assam Broken Orange Pekoe – the term Broken Orange Pekoe refers to a grade of broken leaf tea—ideal for strong, quick infusions. Produced using the CTC process (invented in India in 1936), which gives a beautiful rounded almost ‘shotty’ leaf. Assam teas are renowned for their pungency and strength and we buy our Assam BOPs in June or July to ensure we source the finest quality.
4. Earl Grey – not surprised to see this tea in the top 5 – although we’re quite conservative with our tea drinking habits in the UK, Earl Grey tea (which was not invented by Earl Grey, it’s actually a Chinese recipe) is the best-selling speciality tea in the England.Our Earl Grey has a fine quality China base, and we use natural Bergamot oil, whereas the majority of blends nowadays use synthetic or even freeze-dried Bergamot.
5. Keemun Tea – very pleased to see this excellent tea in the top 5 as it’s my personal favourite and I drink it most days. Keemun is a relatively ‘new’ Chinese black tea, being first produced in the 1875. It can readily be drunk without milk and satisfies ones palette for drinking tea. It has a gentle hint of smoke (however, it is not a smoked tea) with delightful floral and biscuity notes, and is produced in Anhui, using methods of tea manufacture that were first developed in Fujian in the 1600s.
Has your favourite made the top 5? Stay tuned next month when we’ll be sharing your top five favourite coffees…
