Irish Breakfast Tea

 The thing one can find sometimes, away from England. During my last time in Québec, I found a box of Twinings' Irish Breakfast Tea. Twinings is everywhere here, but I cannot remember any Irish breakfast blend. It's all about English Breakfast (well, of course). As my parents don't have much tea, I bought a box. What I did not drink there, I brought back here, so I had my last teabag of Irish Breakfast tea on Saint-Patrick's Day. To be honest, my palate is not sophisticated enough to taste the difference, but apparently it is stronger than English Breakfast. Anyway, I'm just glad I could drink something Irish for breakfast, on that special day.

A box for afternoon tea

 Because I performed very well at work recently, I won a freebie from my employers. I had the choice of many things, I chose this box from SweetiePost. I barely hesitated. It has everything for the whole family: tea biscuits of all sorts, chocolate, even a flapjack. Oh, and tea of course. And a 15% discount on a future purchase, which I may or may not use. But all the same, I'm set for my next afternoon tea.

About Iced Tea

 We went to see my wife's family this weekend. To my surprise, I saw my sister-in-law drinking... iced tea. The M&S range, which from what I understand is new. I said to my surprise, aslike her sister I know she does not like tea one bit. But she told me she now likes iced tea. Strangely enough, the same happened to my mother, she found a place in Montreal that serve an ice tea she enjoyed, because it is apparently very refreshing. So these conversations got me in the mood for this drink myself, which I haven't had since 2019. Back in 1999, in my very first few weeks in England, when I had started studying here, they were providing free bottles of iced tea for new students during freshers week. I must have drunk gallons of the stuff. I remember it was Twinings. I cannot find them anymore, which is a shame, as I really enjoyed it. Maybe because it was a freebie, but still. In any case, I have decided to drink iced tea again and see if it is as enjoyable as I remembered.

In need of Twinings?

I took this picture in the place where we stayed in York for our holidays there. Ironically there was no Yorkshire Tea. But I guess we'd have plenty of it in the city, so might as well have something else at "home". Anyway, Twinings is a trustworthy brew, maybe not the fanciest but still enjoyable for something that comes in tea bags. So I thought that, given the tea situation at work and my increasing need of tea on a daily basis (I am up to three cuppa a day, sometimes four if I take one in the afternoon), I think that maybe I should stock myself with Twinings.

Earl Grey with a citrus twist?

The tea amateurs and connoisseurs may have noticed it: there is a new blend of Earl Grey from Twinings. It is called Earl Grey Citrus (I think it is this one anyway). It says on the big that it has "a citrus twist". Usually at work, they have a choice of breakfast tea and Earl Grey. Now they switched the Earl Grey to this new edition. I always drink Earl Grey in the morning at work, because of its alleged virtues. One of them in particular: it is meant to give you energy. And I often desperately need an energy boost in the morning. So anyway, I decided to try this special Earl Grey edition and... And I am not convinced. At first I thought I thought I was drinking some lemon flavoured cough medicine, but I got used to it. Still, there is something odd about the citrus taste. Anybody else tried it? If so, what did you think of it?

Irish Breakfast Tea

This will be one of the teas of the day at David's Tea tomorrow, their own take on the Irish breakfast blend. There is no particular reason at all why this will be tomorrow's tea of the day. I shamelessly took this picture from their Facebook page. Back when I was living in Montreal I used to drink Irish breakfast from Twinings. Ironically enough I can't seem to find any here. I wish that I could have it for Saint Paddy's tomorrow morning, to start the day the right way. And with a tea brand from Montreal. Oh well, maybe next year...

The virtues of Earl Grey

There is something I learned during my last time in Aux Vivres in Montreal, on their teas menu (you can see it here, on the second page): Earl Grey tea is meant to be energizing. I usually have it in the morning at work, and it is true that it makes the difference between the zombie feeling I have in the morning to the state of a a normal healthy person I am in later in the day. I wonder if it did not become my morning tea by instinct. I do find myself more alert after I drank it. Here I drink Twinings, which is maybe the most famous brand of tea, especially when it comes to Earl Grey. But I would love to try David's Tea's Earl Grey and some of its variants. Which reminds me that I will need one day to write a proper post about David's Tea. But until then, I encourage workers to ditch coffee and go for Earl Grey.

Earl Grey anecdote

I have mentioned here how important my morning dose of tea is for me to get through a working day. Last week at work, there was no more of Twining's Earl Grey in stock. Instead I had to take PG Tips. I hate PG Tips. I only take it when I need a quick tea fix. So when one of my German colleagues asked me how I was this morning, I answered: "Terrible, there is no more Earl Grey." She replied: "You are thinking like an Englishman." Shock horror. She was true of course. And this deserves to be a great unknown line. I said: "Now my day is taking a turn for the worse". This does deserve to be another great unknown line. The tragic irony is that my day did get worse. Nevertheless, it was a funny moment, if unsettling.

Tea and survival

Yesterday, there was no more Twinings' Earl Grey, which is what I have usually have with my breakfast. I survive starvation and exhaustion at work with a beaver's diet, but I also need tea for survival. I have one cup in the morning, and it is usually enough to keep me alert for the day, especially if I struggled to sleep the night before. There's free tea at work, a choice of either Earl Grey from Twinings or some banal Tetley or PG Tips tea, which tastes like rough mud. It wakes up all right, but it is much less enjoyable. I prefer Twinings in any case and since their Earl Grey is fancier, I just have it. But there was no Earl Grey, so I had to go to the other kind, whatever it was. In my state, a bit asleep light headed with hunger and in need of caffeine, I threw two bags in the mug. My colleague in charge of supplies laughed about it, I apologize saying I was definitely in need of tea to wake me up if I couldn't count to two. She said: "Oh but have more, it's not rationed." Thankfully it is not. I wonder how I could survive a war if tea and sugar were rationed. I certainly wouldn't be able to go to the front! Anyway, I thought what she said was a great unknown line.

The tea and milk controversy

I recently posted this line on my Facebook Wall: "Twinings suggests to drop a dash of milk in their English Breakfast tea. This is barbaric." It generated noless than 23 comments so far, including my own. I think in itsel qualifies it as a great unknown line. I said in the title of the post that it was a controversy, but in fact not really: people in an overwhelming majority agree with me. In fact, everybody did. It shows that many people share the opinion I wrote before on this blog, about two years ago, that milk was primitive. I feel less alone.

Observations on tea

My wife bought me this teapot for my birthday, which you can see on the picture on your right, a nice little modern artifact to keep an old tradition alive and kicking.

The idea of England being a nation of tea drinkers has been a bit of a cliché, and in our modern time an inaccurate one. My wife, for instance, dislikes tea and only drinks coffee. Ian Fleming hated tea, and so did his iconic character. They both considered it mud. Maybe it is because I'm Anglophile and therefore more sensitive to old clichés, but I have been (re)discovering tea in recent years and am drinking more and more of it. I started drinking it during my first trip to the UK, then I stopped for years, until late in teenage when got into it again. I discovered Twinings, more particularly but not exclusively Russian Caravan which I drank in my first years Montreal. It is the variety that I used for my first cup from the teapot.

I am not a connoisseur, in fact I am pretty much of a philistine about tea, like for many other things. I know close to nothing about its history, here or elsewhere, I don't know at all how to infuse it perfectly, I know nothing about all the varieties and their differences, my drinking preferences (more on that below) would certainly be seen as barbarous for any long-time tea drinker. Still, I love it. I find tea far superior to coffee in any way: its taste is smoother, its colour is nicer, it is softer on the stomach, it is a drink that has been developed and refined by ancient civilisations.

Talking about those civilisations, there are other nations of tea lovers, and they are aficionados from much longer: China, Japan, Iran, among others, but one associates tea with England. Maybe because it is the Western nation where the drink became most successful. An unfair association in a way, typical of our Westerner attitude, but it illustrates how England integrated tea as part of its culture, even though it is seemingly so foreign: leaves in hot water, in a country that developed the culture of beer? There are reasons for its popularity here: tea cools you down on a hot summer (as a former housemate once told me), it also keeps you warm on a cold rainy day (and there are many of those here), it tastes lovely with a cake or a biscuit and like wine for a main meal, it enhances the taste of the food, it is as I said before soothing, it is also revigorating, etc. Tea has only virtues.

I don't put milk or sugar in my tea, as I think it gets in the way of the flavour (especially sugar). I have it strong, maybe too much (Marjane Satrapi thinks that too strong tea spoils the flavour). As I said, I am a philistine. I try to have one in the morning when I have time, I usually have one late in the afternoon and when I don't have to wake up early the next morning I have one in the evening, with or without dessert. My mum thinks I am turning into an Englishman. I doubt I could pass as a Chinese or an Iranian. But I think I am just carrying on an old tradition, that might become a fashion one day. I have seen signs of this: a growing number of tea rooms in Montreal, which have aseptised look selling tea while promoting healthy properties. There are also, in some independent cafés, more and more tea varieties. We might see the beginning of a drinking revolution. I would certainly welcome it, being a tea drinker.