2008
A Nice Cup of Tea
Put ten Irish people in a room and ask each of them what constitutes a nice cup of tea and you are likely to get ten different answers. Strong or weak, black or with milk, milk first or last, with sugar or without, tea bags or loose leaf - there are almost infinite permutations and everyone has their own opinion on which is nicest.
I’ll come clean here: I don’t drink tea much. I’m primarily a coffee drinker, but I live with a genuine connoisseur of tea, who has very definite opinions about how and with what his cuppa should be made.
Tea bags for a start never cross our door. Tea bags are an absolute godsend to purveyors of tea, who now have a means of profiting from what were once referred to as “floor sweepings”, the broken dusty remains following the mechanical processing of fresh tea leaves.
That’s not to say that all tea bags are of poor quality, but many of them are. These are teas of the exact same brand, which is not a cheap one, but it’s still easy to see that the loose leaf version is not the same as the bagged one.
The smaller leaves in tea bags release their tannins rapidly, which can be an advantage because people want their tea FAST, but results in a more harsh and less subtle brew than would be the case with the the corresponding loose leaf tea. Smaller leaves have also lost most of their essential oils, which are what gives a tea it’s character, and poor quality teas contain a high proportion of stem or old leaf which never had much to offer anyway.
The point of this preamble is that there is at the moment loose leaf tea of real quality and distinction available in Lidl at a price that beats even the poorest quality teabags.
This sort of single origin tea is a different animal from blended tea, more subtle and distinctive in flavour and with piles of character.
These teas are less processed, you can see the leaves and they are all leaves, no stem. The term golden has meaning in tea circles, and is an indication of quality, not just colour.
There is no information on the packs about the provenance of the teas, other than their country of origin, but their appearance and taste makes me suspect that they are if not single estate teas then ones made by tea collectives of smaller farmers in the same region. They certainly have all the characteristics of teas of that type that we have bought in the past.
But how do they taste?
The Nepalese one is very much like Darjeeling, pale gold in colour and subtle in flavour, with a slight natural sweetness and very low tannin. Even those who normally take milk should at least try this one on it’s own. The Kenyan one is more robust, more like Assam, and has a slightly malty taste. It is a darker golden colour in the cup and takes milk well.
It’s not uncommon to pay upwards of €5 for small packs of gourmet tea, but these cost just €1.29. A spoonful of leaves will make a medium size pot of tea, or about three cups, and I reckon you’d make make about 25 pots of tea from a bag. So that’s less than 2c to enjoy a cup of something different, interesting and a little bit special.
There are not many of these left in my local Lidl and they are not a regular line - so go get your’s now.