Tag 'Learn About Tea'

Our tea of the month is Kan-Junga – a fresh and reviving black tea grown in one of most spectacular tea growing regions.

Tea is often viewed as a mundane daily ritual for the billions of us who drink it every day, but the truth is that our daily cup is only made possible through countless hours of skilled craftsmanship. From the planting of the seed to packaging of the final product, there are many complex steps that must be executed perfectly to create a delicious cup of tea.

Blending is one of these steps that we will exploring in this article. Blending is the art of mixing different teas from various sources to create a cup of tea that is greater than the sum of its parts.

A tea blender must have an encyclopaedic knowledge of taste and deep understanding of how the tea was grown and processed. They use this wealth of knowledge to divine the optimum balance of flavour, colour and body of the cup. A blender will taste thousands of teas every season, and will be able to determine the level of quality, as well as the desirable attributes of a tea with a single sip.

Each season, a blend must be taste tested with previous batches to ensure the flavour remains the same, or even better. This ensures that the customer will always receive the same great flavour from their favourite tea.

Newby Teas was created to show the world how good tea can be. This starts with sourcing the best tea from the top tea gardens in the best producing areas. Once we have the best teas of the season, our master blenders work on creating the perfect cup. There are two main benefits for blending:

Consistency

Tea is a natural product that is highly changeable depending on countless complex factors, varying from the soil to the sunlight. Tea from the same garden will taste different from year to year due to the changes in climactic conditions.

Sourcing tea from just one garden would put us at the mercy of the natural changes in the tea. What was a delicious tea one year, might taste completely different the next.

In addition to taste, the availability of tea from a single garden is also subject to drastic change. Changes in rainfall, temperature and sunlight can drastically effect a farmer’s yield. This means that sourcing tea from just one garden could mean sudden lack of availability, or a sharp spike in price, and in both instances this would mean a bad experience for the customer.

Taste

By blending teas from different gardens we can create the perfect flavour. Our master blenders are able to identify desirable attributes of different teas and determine their compatibility with others. This means that ultimately we have more control over the resulting taste, meaning we can create the perfect cup.

At Newby, we always want our teas to reflect the joys of their specific terroir. Many tea producing regions of the world have special characteristics that are unique. For example, a good Darjeeling should have a brisk freshness and the famous muscatel aroma that is so recognisable of the terroir. A single garden within Darjeeling is likely to have its own individual characteristics, and might not necessarily fall within what is expected from a Darjeeling. By blending, we can take the best from multiple gardens and blend them to create what we believe is the perfect Darjeeling, with the perfect balance of briskness and muscatel aroma.

In this article we barely scratched the surface of the complex world of blending. The more we learn about the production of good quality tea, the more we see the skill and passion that goes into making it. That’s why at Newby we are devoted to what we call ‘the craft of fine tea’.

To try some of our favourite blends we recommend our Darjeeling, a famous black tea that is known as ‘the champagne of tea’, or the classic English Breakfast, which is a smooth but robust blend of Assam, Ceylon and Kenyan tea – perfect for a morning brew.