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Whittard of Chelsea was established in 1886. Historians agree that 1886 was Quite A Long Time Ago. The company are justifiably proud of their 135 year history of teamongering which they commemorate with this 1886 Blend black tea. It is, Whittard tell us on their website, “inspired by the type of tea enjoyed in Victorian London when Walter Whittard opened his first shop”.
This tea is a bit of a puzzle, really. It is produced using the Crush Tear Curl (CTC) method which they say “was first developed to speed up the process of oxidisation, strengthening the colour and flavour to mask the brackish London water. Londoners soon acquired a taste for the invigorating new brew”.
Well, not in 1886, they didn’t. The CTC method was pioneered in the 1930s, and first used in earnest in the 1950s. Why bring it up in the 1886 Blend blurb? It’s not mentioned anywhere else on the Whittard website even though a lot of their other teas are probably produced this way. (Most teabags are.)
The other confusing thing about this tea is that it’s made with 100% Indonesian Tea. Why? The UK tea trade in 1886 was all about Indian tea. There was a good reason for that. Prior to the 19th century, all imported tea came from China. And then Britain had what might be termed as “a bit of a falling out with China”.
We wanted their tea and they didn’t want anything that we wanted to trade with them so we flooded their country with opium. China objected to us getting their population hooked on heroin. Britain really, really wanted to carry on being a drug pusher though so we declared war on China (twice!) and killed 20,000 Chinese people. “Ha!” the British Empire presumably thought. “That’ll teach them to ‘Just Say No’.”
Surprisingly, China were even less keen on selling us tea after that. But Britain needed to maintain its regular tea supply because people in the UK were pretty fond of the stuff by now. So the British Empire carried out its long a noble tradition of doing whatever the fuck we wanted, regardless of the political, moral and environmental consequences, and established tea plantations in India, which was already a colony under the full control of Britain. By 1886, millions of pounds of tea was produced in India and exported to Britain. Assam and Darjeeling teas were the tea of choice in the late 19th century.
Which brings me back to my earlier question, why, given the history, have Whittard elected to use in their 1886 Blend, tea from Indonesia, a country with no significant tea trade with the UK at this time?
So after all that nit-picking, what, you may ask, does this tea actually taste like? Well, it’s okay. It’s a bit rough and ready tasting. It’s nowhere near as nice as Whittard’s signature English Breakfast tea. I tried a cup of 1886 Blend and a cup of English Breakfast tea side by side to test this, and yup, English Breakfast blows this one out of the water.
But maybe that’s historically accurate? Maybe tea in 1886 was a bit shit compared to modern-day tea. If a time traveller from Victorian England were transported to the present day, there would be a lot of things for them to be amazed by: space travel; the internet; women’s suffrage, but perhaps they would be most impressed with how delicious, plentiful and reasonably priced tea is in 2021. If you gave them a cup of Sticky Chai or Spiced Jaffa Cake tea, it would probably blow their minds.
Today’s featured book is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson which, appropriately enough, was first published in 1886.
