ChaTraMue – Thai Tea Mix
If you have a daughter* travelling to Thailand anytime soon, I suggest you ask them to pick up a tin of ChaTraMue’s Thai Tea Mix for the sheer novelty of the experience, if nothing else. (*Other family members, friends, or work colleagues, or even your own actual self, could also work here, I guess.)
I’m certainly pleased my daughter bought me some on her Thailand-based excursion. Not that this tea is good, exactly, but it is interesting and an entirely authentic experience of day-to-day store cupboard purchases in Thailand in much the same way that PG Tips or Angel Delight are here in the UK.
In fact, Thai Tea Mix is rather like a combination of those two things.
It’s a startlingly orange-coloured tea-based drink with a vanilla flavouring so artificial it could have been generated by ChatGPT. It also contains sugar but, thankfully, not so much that it might cause distress to sugar-in-tea avoiders such as myself.
The full list of ingredients comprises Red Tea Powder (Assam), Sugar, Artificial Flavour, and FD&C Yellow No.6(INS 110).
We’ll come to that startling combination of letters and numbers in a moment, but first, let’s talk about the tea part of this concoction.
For a start it’s not a tea powder, per se. Tea powder, to my mind, is something that will dissolve. The tea in ChaTraMue Thai Tea Mix remains fully intact in the teabag and is certainly made of straightforward tea leaves. Albeit leaves that have been smooshed to absolute smithereens.
And what you may be wondering is ‘red’ tea? Well, that’s a jolly good question because, in China, red tea is simply the name for what we call ‘black tea’. (They call dark/Pu-Erh teas ‘black tea’. I think it’s a better system because it increases the number of tea names that are colours. It’s slightly frustrating that of the six tea types, four are named after colours, and two aren’t. We just need to find a colour name for Oolong and then we’re good to go.)
Edit: It turns out that the French call Oolong Thé Bleu, so that covers that then.
This ChaTraMue Thai red tea is, indeed, black, but red tea also seems to refer to Thai tea made with spices and condensed milk, so maybe its name refers to that. In any case, it is tea and not some herbal-based nonsense, so that’s OK.
Now, onto all that FD&C Yellow No.6(INS 110) business. This artificial colouring is known as Sunset Yellow Colouring around these parts and has the E number E110. (The FD&C business is the US name.)
While it is not actually banned in the UK, E110 is certainly frowned upon. It is one of six artificial colours linked with hyperactivity in children in a 2007 study conducted at the University of Southampton. So, it feels a bit illicit to have some smuggled in from overseas.
I have no idea why it’s necessary, mind. Why do you need colouring in tea? Tea provides its own range of natural colours, from the palest yellow to the darkest mahogany. You can use tea as a dye, for goodness’ sake. (And not just for artificially ageing treasure maps.)
Having said all that, I actually rather like this Thai tea mix. It’s weird, but it’s quite a cheerful little number, and I will have no problems polishing off all the tea bags in the tin. I mean, I wouldn’t hop on a plane and travel 6000 miles to get some more, but if I were in the area on other business, I’d probably bung some in my shopping basket.
Today’s featured book is The Grand Palace, written, apparently, by that esteemed author, The Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand.
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