Tag Archives: Black Tea

What is Earl Grey Tea Really?

Earl Grey – The Fruit of the Bergamot Tree

Bergamot is a citrus fruit about the size of an orange that is not eaten by humans, but grown for the oil produced in the rind of the fruit. If you were to try it, it is supposedly less sour than a lemon but more sour than a grapefruit. Prior to becoming the key ingredient in the world’s most famous flavored tea, it was the base to perfumes. Historical records show that bergamot appeared in the first perfumes in the 1700’s made by Farina (LaCapra, 2013). Earl Grey tea itself only appeared on the scene in the mid-1800’s.

Earl Grey comes from Reggio Calabria, located in the tip of the boot of Italy.

Reggio Calabria, Growing Region for Bergamot

The bergamot tree has been found in varying regions around the world, but only seems to produce enough oil to be commercially viable in the province of Calabria Reggio in southern Italy. Eighty percent of the essential oil of bergamot produced annually comes from this small region in the tip of Italy’s boot. Much like tea, the intensity, flavor and smell of bergamot oil is affected by its growing location with many growers claiming the limestone and other sediments in the Reggio soil are responsible for a less bitter taste to this bergamot (Arrigo, 2011).

To extract the oil, the fruit is picked and then run through a machine that scrapes the rind off the fruit while in a cold water bath. The water and rind mixture then flows into a centrifuge that then separates the oil from the rest of the mixture. Despite an annual production capacity of approximately one hundred tons, there are over three thousand tons of bergamot oil claimed to be in products or sold on its own in the global marketplace.

Various Flavors of Earl Grey Tea

The essential oil is often adulterated with lesser quality oils, like bitter orange, to stretch the product further. Thanks to modern science, synthetic or artificial bergamot oil is also easily produced. Without a gas chromatograph to prove the differences in properties, it is virtually impossible for the end user to identify natural vs artificial bergamot unless tasting different samples side-by-side. To protect the reputation of its bergamot crop, the Italian government has placed regulations and testing requirements on bergamot to ensure that what is going to marketplace has not been adulterated (Arrigo, 2011).

So when one Earl Grey doesn’t taste like another, don’t be surprised as it is highly likely the bergamot being used is either artificial or thinned with other oils given that demand for the oil far out-strips supply. The other item to look at is the tea base. It is believed that the original base to Earl Grey may have been Keemun given the types of Chinese blacks brought into England at the time. However, many of the teas in the tea bags here in the US are coming out of India, Kenya and Argentina. So that Earl Grey in the grocery store is probably not true to the origins of the tea in the first place. Like tea, bergamot oil tends to change with exposure to light and air. So it is best to buy smaller quantities and drink regularly so the flavor does not fade.

There are more variations to Earl Grey appearing on the marketplace. While it is tempting to discount them, you may find you like many of the blends that are becoming available, like lavender and rose petal. The have added variety to my daily cup of tea. What is your favorite Earl Grey?

Works Cited

Arrigo, A. (2011). BERGAMOT – A RESILIENT CITRUS . IFEAT International Conference (pp. 93-102). Barcelona: IFEAT.

LaCapra, W. (2013, November 11). Farina House – Eau De Cologne. Retrieved from Fragrence Muesum – Farina House: www.farina.org

Beyond the Teabag – 5 Things To Upgrade Your Tea Experience

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For so many Americans, our only exposure to tea is from teabags, the tea served at Chinese restaurants, or those few selections offered at one of the nationwide chains. Are you aware that there are 6 major types of tea and hundreds of options when you consider growing conditions, manufacturing methods, and local variations? Unlike other beverages there is something for everyone, however too much choice can often be overwhelming. Here are a few of our thoughts to simplify your early experience with loose leaf tea and tisanes:

Start simple with a black, oolong, green or blended tea. If you prefer no caffeine then consider an herbal or rooibos.
Loose leaf tea is easy to make: Start with a good infuser or use a good paper filter. Avoid the stereotypical tea ball and go with something large to allow room for the tea to move around while steeping.
If making black, oolong, or pu’erh, use boiling water and steep 1 tsp per 8 oz mug, no longer than 5 minutes. If you are like us, you use a large mug or travel tumbler, so make sure you know roughly how much water is in your mug of choice and adjust the amount of tea accordingly.
When steeping green, yellow, and white tea, allow boiling water to cool 3-4 minutes before adding tea. Never use boiling water with these. Use 1 tsp per 8 oz of water for green tea or 1 Tbsp per 8 oz for white tea or yellow tea. Don’t steep any longer than 3-5 minutes.
Steep 1 tsp per 8 oz of water for pure herbals (those containing no tea at all), rooibos, and honey bush for 7-10 minutes with boiling water.

More Ways to Upgrade Your Tea Experience

If the top five list above doesn’t quite satisfy your need, here are a few other things to be aware of.

Re-using an infuser after simply knocking out the prior tea leaves yields a mixture of the old and new leaves.

The result of adding boiling water to an emptied, but not really clean, fine mesh infuser.

Green tea really does not need to be bitter. The key is to make sure you do NOT use boiling water. With green tea you really want 170-185 degrees Fahrenheit and you don’t want to steep longer than 5 minutes. Steeping at a lower temperature is often better.
If you use a fine mesh infuser, be sure to at least rinse it with boiling water before adding a new tea. If you are like us, you are very busy and it’s so tempting to just knock out the last tea leaves and refill. Without rinsing with boiling water you end up with lots of contamination from the last tea you brewed.
It pays to pre-heat your mug when steeping black, oolong, and pu’erh teas. Adding boiling water to a mug, especially a ceramic mug, will almost instantly drop the temperature below 200 degrees. If you add boiling water to your mug first, discard, and refill a second time for steeping you will keep the temperature higher for a longer period of time adding to the intensity.

Start Simple Then Experiment

Most teas do come with recommended times and loose tea per 8 oz serving size. These more specific suggestions are certainly a better starting point than the general guidance above. However, if you are new to loose leaf tea there really is no need to make it overly complicated. Find something you like, use a good infuser or single use tea filter, and follow the general time and temperature guidance above. As you drink tea more often you might try to start varying the amount of tea you use, as well as temperature and time to see how the taste varies, perhaps finding a combination more to your specific taste.

Yixing Teapot by Flickr SOLO-ASSA, CC BY-SA 2.0

Making tea can, of course, be a lot more involved if you want it to be. We didn’t talk about specialty teapots, gaiwan sets, or the myriad other accessories and techniques for steeping. Nor did we talk about making your own blends or baking tea on your own. These are all topics for another day if and when the curiosity arises.

Know someone who could benefit from this post? Please share and help others experience loose leaf tea. And be sure to like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter for more information on tea, its history, and culture.

Tea Infused Yogurt

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I have been making my own yogurt for over a year now, and tea infused yogurt would combine two of my favorite foods.. In trying to find yogurt that is not loaded with sugar or artificial sweetener, I did what many people do these days and googled how to make yogurt at home. I was pleased to discover how few ingredients it required and, since I already had a dehydrator big enough to hold 8 oz glass jars, I was pretty much ready to go if I could just find yogurt starter at a grocery store.

Yogurt starter is basically the bacteria necessary to make yogurt, in packets very similar to the yeast used to make bread. Some recipes suggested that you could use yogurt from the grocery store instead of the yogurt starter however, as I was trying not to eat the yogurt in the grocery store, I decided to pass on this option. Finding the yogurt starter was simple here in the suburbs of Washington, DC where I found yogurt starter in the baking aisle next to tapioca and various extracts.

So why tea flavored yogurt? Over the year as I have gotten more comfortable with scalding milk, getting it up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit without boiling, I have gotten braver in adding alternatives to the milk to try to flavor the yogurt. I decided while reading a recipe for tea flavored ice cream that I should be able to flavor yogurt with tea was amazed to find that it worked!

Now, before I show you the recipe I should say I do not add sugar to my yogurt. I rely on the lactose in the milk to sweeten the yogurt, which makes for a tarter yogurt than most Americans are used to. I really like it, but my son absolutely dislikes it and David doesn’t eat yogurt, so I’m subjected to my own creations. I have added a note at the end, if you want sweetener, on what and how much to add.

While I haven’t done this recipe with herbals or green teas, I imagine it could work with them also. Just be prepared for your yogurt to take on some unconventional colors – like green or pink. This recipe calls for your favorite black tea, which in my case is Earl Grey. Just be aware of how it tastes in the cup because that taste will amplify in the yogurt, especially if it is citrus in flavor.

Getting started, you need a few pieces of equipment, a good liquid thermometer, dehydrator and fine mesh sieve. You can usually find a thermometer in the kitchen equipment section of your grocery store next to the can openers. If you have butter fingers like I do, spend the extra money for the waterproof one so when you drop it in the milk it will survive (learned this one the hard way). As for the dehydrator, there are many options out there, so find one you like that can run at 115 degrees Fahrenheit and is deep enough to hold glass jars. Ball makes 4 and 8 oz jars, so measure before you buy. I use 8 oz since I already had them in the house from making jelly and my dehydrator was big enough to hold them if I removed the racks. As for the sieve, the finer the mesh you can find the better, as the dust from the tea leaves will get through if the holes are too big. You might like it or you might find it a bit gritty in your yogurt (it looks almost like vanilla bean seeds at the bottom of the yogurt cup when it is done cooking). I resorted to a kitchen supply store to find one that was fine enough and I still get some tea dust remaining in the yogurt.

Whole Milk and Earl Grey Tea

Recipe

4 cups Whole Milk*
2 tbs Favorite Black Tea (mine is Earl Grey)
1 packet Yogourmet yogurt starter

Scalded Whole Milk and Earl Grey Tea

Put the 4 cups of milk in a sauce pan with the tea leaves, you will need to stir to get the leaves incorporated. Bring the milk up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit without letting it boil. Expect it to turn caramel color as the tea brews in the milk. As soon as it hits 180 degrees take the pan off the burner and allow the milk to cool back down to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. If you are adventurous you could strain out the tea as soon as you pull the pan off the burner. I prefer to wait as I have no need to get burned by hot liquid if it happens to splash while pouring it through the strainer.

Straining Off Earl Grey Tea

Pour the milk through the strainer into a vessel that makes it easy to pour the milk into the jars (I have a 4 cup Pyrex measuring cup with a spout that makes this super easy).

Put the yogurt starter into a small bowl that you can whisk in and ladle in a couple of scoops of the milk once it hits 115 degrees (I have found this happens almost immediately after pouring the milk through the sieve). Whisk until the starter has dissolved then add back into the rest of the mill and stir.

Distribute the milk between your glass jars and then put those jars for a minimum of 4 hours in your dehydrator at 115 degrees Fahrenheit. Check if thick enough by turning the jars upside down at the 4 hour mark. I have had it take as long as 6 hours in a few cases. Transfer the jars to the refrigerator and start to enjoy the yogurt the next morning. Be prepared for losing about ½ cup of the milk to being absorbed by the tea leaves.

Just a word of caution about Earl Grey and other citrus flavored teas – Citrus and milk creates buttermilk, which is very tangy. Even if the citrus is nothing more than an extract, my experience has been that the yogurt is rather tangy. So I will admit, sometimes sugar is necessary to help tone this down. I add mine after the fact by pouring a little agave nectar (no more than a teaspoon per serving) over the top before eating, but that is only after I have tasted the yogurt first.

For those who really need sugar in your yogurt – go with ¼ to 1/3 cup of a liquid form of sugar – like agave nectar, honey or maple syrup. While these 3 may turn your white milk slightly cream colored, you do not have to battle trying to dissolve granulated sugar in your milk while trying to make sure your milk does not boil.

*Forget 2% or skim milk as they make runny yogurt that requires corn starch to thicken – too much work in my book

I hope you enjoy this recipe. What do you like to cook with tea?

– Hillary at Dominion Tea

American Tea History

Early American Tea Experience

American Tea consumption is tied tightly to the early ship building in the colonies. Massachusetts and Pennsylvania were both major ship building colonies, where craftsman took advantage of the abundance of local resources, craftsman, and cheap labor to build more and faster clipper ships than the British. Many of these clipper ships were put into use by the American merchants to trade directly with other countries, bypassing the British government. Smuggling was extremely common in the American colonies and tea was high on the list of illegal goods.

American Tea drinkers are less familiar with asian teapots and accessories.

Small Yixing Teapot

The colonists adopted many of the British customs like tea drinking both at home and in public coffeehouses (Yes, coffeehouses did exist 300 years before Starbucks). It should be noted that much of the tea consumed in the colonies and Britain was green tea_{(Smith & Kraig, 2013)}. The social demand for tea, and the additional taxes levied on tea from the British East India Company made smuggled tea a very common commodity in the colonies, most coming from the Dutch East India Company. The loss of revenue by the British East India Company did not go unnoticed and in 1767 the tea tax was levied. This tax became one of many levied on the colonists in the ten years leading to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution. As Joseph M. Walsh noted in 1892, “The birth of the greatest nation of all time due to a three-penny tax on tea!” _{(Walsh, 1892)}

After the revolution, American merchants used their clipper ships to go direct to China for trade, bringing tea and other goods legally into the United States without British involvement. These merchants became the first of the American millionaires, with tea being a dominant contributor to their wealth. This wealth was later used to give loans to the fledgling American government to purchase arms for the War of 1812 other ventures necessary to stabilize and expand the country.

American Industry and Tea

Tea consumption thrived in the United States through the 1800’s with farmers experimenting with growing tea plants in the country. The US Department of Agriculture even published a study about using tea as a commercial crop in 1897. There is still a commercial tea plantation in South Carolina, new tea farms in Hawaii, and the US League of Tea Growers working to increase the growth of tea in America.

It was in the early 1900’s that America made perhaps its largest contribution to modern tea culture, first through the large scale introduction of iced tea and then through the invention of the tea bag. While iced tea has been documented in American cookbooks dating back to 1870’s, it was at the World’s Fair in 1904 that iced tea was introduced in a big way to the public. With the warmer US climates, iced tea still remains the most consumed tea in the US. The second was the accidental invention of the tea bag by an American, Thomas Sullivan, who sent small samples of his tea in silk bags to his clients in 1908. Those clients went on to ask Thomas to send their tea in bags going forward and since silk was expensive he created his bags out of paper.

American Tea drinkers love beautiful European inspired teapots.

Antique Teapot

American Tea Consumption and World Wars

American tea consumption saw significant declines around World War I (1914-1919) and then again around World War II (1939-1945) because of significant disruption in trade with China and Japan.. Trade with China did not resume after WWII until 1971. As green tea was produced predominantly in China and Japan, this left black tea from India to satisfy the US market. Current tea consumption in the United States is 85% iced tea and still overwhelmingly black.

As loose leaf tea becomes easier for the US consumer to get and consumer awareness of options increases, the growth in the specialty loose leaf market will mirror that of coffee and wine bringing a large variety of tea to market. I am looking forward to having more options in the high quality tea market, are you?

– Hillary

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Works Cited

Smith, A., & Kraig, B. (2013). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, Volume 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Walsh, J. M. (1892). Tea – Its History and Mystery. Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates & Co.

Oolong, White and Yellow: Understanding the Broader Types of Tea

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Unlike most other beverages one simply can’t ask for tea and know what to expect, making tea both a bit more common but also captivating for those looking to expand their palate. There are six main types of tea, however within those types are thousands of varieties. It is truly amazing that camellia sinensis, combined with terroir, a dash of human intervention and some creativity yields a liquor with so many different flavors.

: Tea Oxidation Chart

Oxidation starts in tea leaves as soon as they are plucked from the plant, just like how an apple starts to turn brown as soon as it is cut. The oxidation helps to create the flavor in the tea. Tea leaves are allowed to wither in the sun to both dehydrate the leaves and allow oxidation to continue. The point in the manufacturing process at which oxidation is stopped, via application of heat, largely dictates the classification of the finished product.

White Tea

White tea is made primarily from the bud of the tea plant (downy buds) but may include the first two leaves on the branch. The name comes from the white hairs that are present on the outside of the buds. Typically this type of tea is allowed to whither outside in the sun to dry before being heated to stop oxidation. White tea is not rolled or panned and is lightly handled. Often, white tea is made from the first buds of the growing season, called the first flush.

Green Tea

Green tea is a type of tea where oxidation is stopped very early in the manufacturing process. The oxidation is stopped either through steaming, as is common practice in Japan, or through heating over a fire or in a stove. By stopping the oxidation early, the leaves remain green. Typically this is less than 10% oxidation.

Yellow Tea

Yellow teas are a lightly oxidized version of tea where, after withering, the leaves are lightly steamed allowing for enzymatic oxidation, the chemical process where flavonoids breakdown resulting in the browning of the leaves and the development of the flavor. This is a rather labor intensive process that requires special training, which limits the production capacity for this type of tea. Also, this tea comes in and out of favor with the Chinese public, the primary country producing yellow tea, so getting this in the US is often challenging if Chinese consumers are not demanding it.

Dry leaf, wet leaf and liquor of Big Red Robe Supreme Oolong tea.

Oolong Tea

Providing some of the greatest variety in style, taste, and appearance, oolong teas are partially oxidized, anywhere from 10-80%, before being heated to stop oxidation. Oolong, also known as wulong or black dragon teas, feature twisted tea leaves that are said to resemble the shape of a dragon. They have their origin in the Fujian province of China though are now produced in other countries, notably Taiwan. These teas are hand twisted or rolled after oxidation and were traditionally the Emperor’s tea. These teas are the Bordeaux of the tea world, amazingly complex in taste, highly prized, and can be quite expensive when compared to other teas. However, for the true tea enthusiasts there is nothing like them.

Black Tea

Known as red tea by the Chinese for the color of the brewed liquor, black tea is the most common type of tea consumed in the United States as it is typically the base for iced tea. Black tea is a more fully oxidized version of the tea leaves, ranging anywhere from 50-100% oxidized. Some of the teas best known in the west are black tea based blends including English Breakfast and Earl Grey.

Pu-erh (Dark Teas)

The only type of teas that are actually fermented are pu-erh. This is green tea that has fermented after completing the manufacturing process. This is truly a unique tea that reflects the history of where it was founded. Pu-erh was historically made in the Yunnan province of China and traded with Tibet and Mongolia for horses. To make the trip, the tea was compressed into narrow circular disks which traveled as long as six months before being traded. Due to the organisms that grew in the trees in the Yunnan province the tea would naturally ferment. Aged pu-erh is rare, highly sought after, and often comes at a high price. To satisfy demand and sell a more profitable product two Chinese tea manufacturers got together in the 1960’s and created an accelerated fermenting process, which is not looked upon favorably by traditionalists, but allows for wider circulation of this tea.

Exploration Beyond the Six Main Types of Tea

Each of these large types of tea have many more subcategories that are worthy of their own investigation and offer more options than I can list. Learning about all of them makes exploring tea a fun life long journey.

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