Have you ever wondered why sometimes one English Breakfast tea can taste so different to another? It often surprises people to learn that this popular tea is not a single tea with a single source, but a blend with no fixed recipe. The story of how English Breakfast became the worlds most popular blend comes down to the quality and then popularity of that first blend to be called English Breakfast.
In 1843 a recently arrived apothecary from Hull walked into a New York import agent's office on Chatham Street with $150 and asked for credit. He had no friends in the city and no one to vouch for him, only a plan: to sell tea. nHis name was Richard Davies, and the tea he settled on after some experimenting was a blend of Chinese leaf: a Congou base, some flowering Pekoe, and a little Pouchong, a lightly oxidised oolong, all shipped through the port of Canton.
Orders soon began to arrive from beyond New York and all across the country, until English Breakfast was selling faster than Davies could keep up with. Its success bred the obvious question of what was in it. People who assumed the tea came from England wrote to their English friends and relatives asking for supply, and were told that no Englishman had ever heard of it. A rival import agent took a more practical route: he persuaded one of Davies's customers to buy five kilograms and shipped the sample to tea makers in China who then took the blend apart and reproduced it. They managed it well enough that chests of English Breakfast were soon making the voyage from China to the United States on their own account, and before long every tea house had a version of its own.
The blend changed not long after. In 1856 the Second Opium War brought a trade embargo with China, and Chinese tea, the Congou at the heart of Davies's recipe included, became hard to get. Demand had not gone anywhere, so English and American merchants filled the gap with the cheaper leaf then arriving in volume from British India, and English Breakfast was remade as a blend of Assam and Ceylon.
As the tea from India and Sri Lanka became cheaper and easier to ship than Chinese tea, it displaced the original ingredients, until the more expensive Chinese leaf dropped out of all but premium blends. The India-Sri Lanka-Kenya origins are what you'll most commonly find on shelves today labelled as 'English Breakfast', a far cry from the blend originally sold by Davies.
Our signature breakfast tea - Atlas Breakfast - is a unique take on the breakfast blend with black tea sourced from India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Australia. Other black teas that we love for breakfast include the bold and malty Assam Dejoo, the bright and brisk Kenilworth and our own home grown Daintree.
