.
Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea?
How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.
Sidney Smith, quoted by Hesketh Pearson in The Smith of Smiths (1934).
I’ve been a tea drinker as long as I can remember. English style for most of my life until a few years back, quite strong with milk. But I’ve had it with and without in many places – with and without sugar, or lemon, or mint. I had brown tea, green tea, black tea. I have it in thick large white Royal Air Force issue mugs, in thin tea glasses nestling in silver holders in Iran, tiny little Japanese cups and fine china cups and saucers. But wherever I have drunk it, I have always thought of England as the “home” of tea, even though not a leaf grows there. Clearly it wasn’t, isn’t, and it would seem centuries before it came to London it was popular in many forms in China, Japan, Tibet, India and elsewhere. But the English needed it… took to it… made it their own a few hundred years since.
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Tea had come as a deliverer to a land that called for deliverance; a land of beef and ale, of heavy eating and abundant drunkenness; of grey skies and harsh winds; of strong-nerved stout–purposed, slow-thinking men and women. Above all, a land of sheltered homes and warm firesides – firesides that were waiting waiting, for the bubbling kettle and the fragrant breath of tea.
Agnes Repplier, To Think ofTea! (1932).
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I’ve always preferred tea made from tea leaves. So many of the teabags you buy contain little more than dust and produce a bitter, brown brew that I dislike intensely. Last week I was taken along the road to conversion from leaf to bag at a tea tasting led by Ralf Janecki, senior tea taster and managing director of Althaus, Bremen-based tea producers (pictured).
Mr Janecki is an interesting chap. All his working life has been spent in tea, including 20 years with a tea firm in Britain before returning to Germany and, becoming prime mover in this relatively new company.
Althaus make tea-bags. But, mercifully filled not with dust, but genuine tea leaves, of many provenances and styles. Their wide range of teabags is now coming to Cyprus through the agency of Antoniou & Panayiotou General Trading Ltd., and their target is up-market hotels and restaurants. Having endured the dusty stuff in many a hotel bedroom or restaurant, I think they will succeed.
Did I get all the way down the road to conversion? Not totally. I think I shall still make my early morning pots of leaf Orange Pekoe and afternoon Gunpowder Green, but I have to say these are the best teabags I have come across. And they are handy because all you need is a kettle, water, a cup and off you go.
Space permits more detail here – I shall expand on the tasting and the philosophy behind the product on the Cyprus Gourmet website www.cyprus-gourmet.com. Meanwhile, anyone interesting in stocking or buying Althaus tea should contact Antonis Antoniou on 2582 3258.
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For here now, in the space of a few hours I was a dull and a
miserable, a clever and a happy mortal, and all without the
intervention of any external cause, except a dish of green tea,
which indeed is a most kind remedy in cases of this kind. Often
I have found relief from it. I am so fond of green tea I could
write a whole dissertation on its virtues. It comforts and
enlivens without the risks attendant on spirituous liquors.
Gentle herb! Let the florid grape yield to thee. Thy soft
influence is a more safe inspirer of social joy.
James Boswell, journal entry, 13 February, 1763.
