About Black Tea
All tea comes from the same plant: Camellia sinensis. Black tea, sometimes known as English Breakfast tea or Red tea, is the most commonly consumed tea in the world, although it is the least popular tea in China. The reason is that, in China, where tea originated, the taste is for green tea in particular, and black tea was seen as inferior (using more mature leaves from further down the plant). Therefore, it was the first tea to be exported to a gullible outside world, whilst the Chinese kept their ’superior’ green teas for themselves!
The range in quality is greater in black tea than any other - most is grown and mechanically harvested on a huge scale in places like India, Sri Lanka and Kenya. Many tea farms in China still discard the ’sweepings’ of poorer quality black tea that other countries use as their main product! At Seven Cups we only sell full-leaf teas from places such as the originating tea province of Yunnan, Anhui and the legendary Lapsang farm in the WuYi Mountains.These teas are finally being acknowledged in China as genuinely top quality teas in their own right. They are hand-picked and laboriously hand processed, achieving the exact amount of oxidation (exposure to air at the critical stage in processing, which is also known as fermentation) to produce the unique rich, robust black tea flavor and beautiful amber red color. Black tea is usually taken with milk, sugar or other flavorings (a tradition that was initiated to hide the poor taste!) but we recommend enjoying our teas pure. You’ll never look at black tea in the same way again.
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