Harris Tea
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The tea smells of plum, cherry , cocoa and faint lemon tones. It is very smooth with a thin body and tastes very fruity. It taste of having eaten black cherries and dark bitter chocolate with a hint of dark malt and leaves a freshening feeling at the top of the mouth. This is really flavourful for a bagged tea.
I have to get up early in the mornings nowadays, so I’ve been making a 4-cup pot of coffee and downing it all to be able to get through the day. I know I’m ruining my morning tea habit and ingesting far too much caffeine to be healthy, but I’m actually kind of happy to be using all the old coffee that’s clogging up my tea stash.
This is the perfect tea for days when I drink too much coffee. It’s well-built and strong, but easy to mix with milk (anywhere from 10-50% milk), so it’s like cutting the caffeine and adding Vitamin D. The best of all worlds! Magnesium from the coffee, and calcium/fat/riboflavin from the tea-milk! I would totally overdose on this tea when I’m under the weather. It’s especially good with a little bit of honey.
So I’m sorry for getting all ethnocentric with this, but there is definitely a difference between American and Indian tastes when it comes to tea. Being half-Indian/half-Texan, it’s hard to describe the immense sadness that overcomes me when I experience the American tea culture. That being said, I know that American-biased tea drinkers won’t like this tea that much. In the end, though, it’s their loss, because this is a strong black tea that has a good depth and mellow flavor. Serving this tea with milk brings out its flavor that much more — and also makes it great for tea time, get-togethers, and as a drink with meals (I recommend cardamom cookies). The nice thing about this tea, too, is that it’s hard to overbrew it. It can be made light or dark depending on steep time, but it doesn’t get quite so tannin-y if you forget about for a while.
I’m intrigued by the brands of tea you’ve been reviewing recently—none familiar to my armpit-of-the-midwest-US shopping venues. Are these available at regular grocery stories where you are?
This one was, and I have a grocery store near me that regularly carries a revolving selection of interesting teas. Most of the others are from stores near me geared to various ethnic communities or from Homesense. The Big Active teas I find at various stores geared to the Polish and Eastern European communities. They have a webstore http://bigactive.pl/ but at the moment the site is only in Polish and I don’t know if they ship retail outside of Poland . It appears that they may have plans to do so because they are setting up an english site and one part of the company is a tea shop that allows you to mix your own blends. I also have about 4 large grocery stores near me that specialize in Japanese, Chinese and Korean goods. One of these also carries tea from Jamaica, Poland and India. I also buy tea at one of the East Indian grocery stores near me.
We have lots of choice here if you have the time to look. One of the perks of living in a very ethnically diverse community!
Cjay Teas is a local tea company, but I have only bought their teas at Whole Foods. They have a wide selection of teas available online. I think that the bulk of their business must be wholesale though because their site is still really disorganized. They ship in North America. http://www.cjaytea.com/
I also have a store near me that specializes in Latin American goods that carries around 5 brands of mate, and a selection of herbal and fruit teas, and good chocolate.
I envy your shopping options!