Tea
Blending your own tea
Breakfast blends, chai and scented teas are all constructed, and constructing your own is straightforward and cheap.
Most tea sold in the West is blended — English breakfast, Earl Grey, chai, and essentially every supermarket tea.
Blending is a craft with a purpose, and doing it yourself is easy and produces better results than most commercial blends.
Why blend
Consistency. Single-origin tea varies by harvest. A blend can be adjusted as components change so the product tastes the same.
Balance. One tea brings body, another brings brightness, another brings aroma.
Purpose. A tea that works with milk needs body and briskness that a delicate single origin lacks.
Cost. A small quantity of expensive tea can lift a larger quantity of ordinary tea.
The classic blends and what is in them
English breakfast. Typically Assam for malty body, Ceylon for brightness, and sometimes Kenyan for strength and colour or Keemun for depth.
Built for milk. Brisk, strong, and it should stand up rather than disappear.
Irish breakfast. Generally heavier on Assam, stronger and maltier.
Earl Grey. Black tea scented with bergamot oil.
Quality varies enormously with the base tea and with whether real bergamot oil or a synthetic flavouring is used. A good Earl Grey on a Ceylon or Chinese black base is a different thing from a supermarket teabag.
Lady Grey adds citrus peels and cornflower. Russian Caravan is a smoky blend, traditionally with a lapsang component.
Masala chai. Strong black tea, usually Assam, with spices — cardamom, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, black pepper, sometimes fennel, star anise or nutmeg.
Traditionally brewed with milk and sugar, boiled together rather than steeped.
Making your own chai
The most rewarding home blend.
Base. A strong Assam or a CTC black tea, which is designed for exactly this.
Spices. Whole, not ground, and lightly crushed just before use. Ground spices go stale and produce a muddy result.
A reasonable starting proportion for four cups: four cardamom pods, a two-centimetre piece of fresh ginger sliced, a small cinnamon stick, three cloves, four black peppercorns.
Adjust to taste. Ginger and cardamom are the backbone; everything else is a variation.
The method. Simmer the crushed spices in water for five minutes to extract them. Add the tea and simmer two or three minutes. Add milk and sugar and bring back to a simmer. Strain.
Boiling the tea is intentional and produces the strength the drink requires.
Making a spice concentrate in advance — a strong spice decoction kept in the refrigerator — makes daily chai quick.
Scenting with flowers and fruit
Jasmine tea is traditionally made by layering fresh jasmine blossoms with green tea overnight, removing them, and repeating over several nights.
The tea absorbs the aroma; the flowers are discarded. Better jasmine tea uses more rounds and no added oils.
You can do a simplified version at home with fresh jasmine, if you have access to it and can confirm the species is safe.
Dried fruit and peel. Dried orange or lemon peel, dried berries, dried apple, rose petals, lavender, chamomile, mint.
Use sparingly. Botanicals are potent and it is easy to overwhelm the tea, which is exactly what commercial fruit teas do.
A useful ratio is around one part additions to nine or ten parts tea, adjusted upward for mild ingredients.
Vanilla, using a split pod stored with the tea, which infuses gently over weeks.
Citrus zest, dried thoroughly first. Undried zest introduces moisture and spoils the tea.
Practical method
Start with a good base tea and add sparingly.
Blend small quantities — twenty or thirty grams — until you have a proportion you like, then scale up.
Weigh everything and write it down, so a good blend can be repeated.
Let a blend rest a few days before judging. Aromas migrate and integrate.
Store in an airtight opaque container away from odours.
Blending green and oolong
Less common and worth trying.
Genmaicha — green tea with roasted rice — is the classic example and is easy to replicate. Toast short-grain brown rice in a dry pan until it darkens and some grains pop, cool, and blend roughly one to one with sencha or bancha.
Mint with green tea, in the Moroccan style, uses generous fresh mint with gunpowder green and substantial sugar.
Lightly roasted oolong with a little dried osmanthus is a traditional Chinese combination and is excellent.
What not to do
Do not blend to hide poor tea. Additions mask flaws temporarily and the base still tastes bad underneath.
Do not use essential oils intended for aromatherapy, which are frequently not food grade.
Do not over-add. The most common home blending error by a wide margin.
And do not blend expensive delicate tea. A gyokuro or a fine Dan Cong should be drunk as it is; blending is for robust base teas that benefit from company.
