Several weeks ago, my daughter was drinking some tea that she'd made using a tea packet she had gotten while at that expensive hotel in Virginia. I'm not much of a tea drinker; when I do, I like Assam, as a rule, brewed strong. Not corrosively strong, which I gather is possible, but strong. (There must be a way to quantify that!) She, though, prefers 'English Breakfast Tea', and, as it turns out, she really liked the brand of EBT they had, which was 'Taylors of Harrogate'.
In passing -- I didn't like the tea we had at that nice hotel in London -- way too weak and milky for me; we started referring to tea brewed strong as 'American tea', which is probably why the waiter muttered stuff about the Boston Tea Party under his breath after a while. Frankly, I really thought that having tea in London would be a Really Big Deal -- tea in London! Wow!-- so I was surprised to find out that they have mass-market on-the-go products, too. Like the story I'd heard about ordering hot chocolate in Switzerland, I guess.
Anyway -- being an UnitedStatesian used to the chicanery of marketers, I expected that ToH was actually made by General Foods or some such, prettified and flavored to appeal to the pretensions of 'murricans, much as Haagen Daaz is no more Scandinavian-produced than I am. But it turns out that ToH is the real deal, created and packaged in England. (I don't know if its actually grown in England, or if its more a matter of 'grown in a place that used to be part of the Empire'). But wherever it comes from, its apparently good stuff. So, where to get it?
I looked at the Stash Tea site, where we buy tea from when we do get it (I admit it; what I like in tea would draw the scorn of the people at ToH -- Flavored tea? Barbarians!), but Stash didn't carry it; then I looked at First Colony Coffee and Tea, which is our dealer for Ghiradelli coffees, ditto. So if we want to get it, we'll need to either find another mass marketer, or go to the source. Or one of the sources: doing a search for "Taylors of Harrogate" turns up a fair number of entries. Or not at all: this is apparently fairly expensive stuff.
Hey, kiddo, want some Liptons?
2 comments:
That's why I didn't let expensive teas glaze my children's palates, because they are so NOT picky about what brands/flavours they get.
I prefer Lipton teas, and love the flavoured kinds, but my most favourite is just plain old Earl Grey or Chai.
And yes, one would think the most ideal place for tea would be London. So they drink their teas on the weak side, you say. Eww!
She doesn't drink much tea, so its not a big deal. And I could use this as another of those parental leverage points: "You know, kiddo, once you're on your own, if you want to be able to continue to drink high-quality tea, you'll need to have a good-paying job, which means doing well in school...". I don't like to preach, but if the opportunity arises to Make A Point, I usually do. Within reason.
As for the tea habits in BigBenTown -- well, that was in the Landmark Hotel, near Marylebone station in northwest London. I'm not sure it'd be fair to extrapolate that to all of the hotels there. After what I saw people happily eating there, not to mention seeing some of the displays about World War II, I think they're a pretty tough crew, and I'd hate to irritate them.
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