English Breakfast Leaf Tea

Round and mellow if you let the boiling water cool slightly before steeping.

Here’s another Taylors tea that I picked up this weekend at the World Market store. To be honest, I purchased them because all of the Taylors selections were only $9.99 each for 4.4 ounces of tea. I can’t resist a good tea sale.

I tried out the Taylors Tea Room blend yesterday and I’m starting to see a pattern. The leaves are very finely ground. The packaging says the leaves are hand rolled in the traditional British way. I wonder if they are hand rolled and machine ground.

As I was saying, this tea had many of the same unbrewed characteristics as yesterday’s blend: metal container, short brown ground-up-looking leaves, and rich tea aroma.

I brewed the leaves at 212 degrees for five minutes. Taylors’ brewing instructions also seem to be standard for their teas.

The steeped color was a dark amber. The odor was faint with tea attributes only.

The flavor contained (again, like their Tea Room variety) only semi-robust tea characteristics. There was nothing more or less. This blend is said to contain two types of orange pekoe so maybe I shouldn’t have expected anything more exciting. I would have been willing to lower my expectations if this blend hadn’t also contained a bite of astringency.

So, to sum up my Taylors English Breakfast Leaf Tea experience:

o Ho-hum tea taste
o More than a hint of astringency
o Not horrible but booooriiiiing

Dry. I don’t really understand how a tea can leave your mouth feeling dry but this one is good at doing that. The taste overall isn’t anything special. But then again as you all know, I’m not especially fond of English Breakfast Tea. But I will still keep drinking it in hopes of one day finding one that I don’t think is bland.

today, i brewed this leaf blend as well as a bagged EB blend from another company. this tea is not for me. this blend was not very malty, seemed to have very weak caffeine content and was also much lighter in color. it might be ok for an evening cup though. it did taste nice with milk and sugar.
i will use up what i have and perhaps try it iced to make it go faster, but it just is not enough to get me going in the morning.

I enjoy the process of making tea as much as I enjoy the beverage.

i bought this english breakfast in the small supermarket spending ages to choose one perfect for milk tea, actually there was not so various choices, in monoprix, paris,
i heard that the yorkshire tea of Taylors of Harrogate is quite strong and nice, so thought it’ll be not that disappointing, and then, i tried with homemade pancake with golden syrup,
poured milk a bit, and brown sugar. The tea was not that strong to maintain its flavor with milk, i don’t know what most british feels about this one, but i think it’s much better to taste in straight way if you prepare strong, full, black tea flavor
anyway, it doesn’t work for me as a morning awakener.

Meh. This tea is okay, but there’s really nothing that grabs me about it. Kind of a flat taste with a bit of astringency that desperately craves milk. It’ll do for now, but I probably won’t pick it up again. Sad! :(

Mmm. Tea.